Year’s End

Year’s End
by Ted Kooser

Now the seasons are closing their files
on each of us, the heavy drawers
full of certificates rolling back
into the tree trunks, a few old papers
flocking away. Someone we loved
has fallen from our thoughts,
making a little, glittering splash
like a bicycle pushed by a breeze.
Otherwise, not much has happened;
we fell in love again, finding
that one red feather on the wind. 

"Year's End" by Ted Kooser, from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.

antepenultimate

antepenultimate \an-tee-pi-NUHL-tuh-mit\, adjective:

1. Third from the end.
2. Of or pertaining to an antepenult. 

noun:
1. An antepenult.

I was my parent's antepenultimate child.
-- dls, the blog of dlsesh1

The vengeful eagles of the open sequence [and] the birds of augury watched outside the library and the emblematic kinsmen who shake 'the wings of their exultant and terrible youth' in the antepenultimate entry in Stephen's diary.
-- James Joyce, introduction by Hugh Kenner, Ulysses

But all day that is how it is, from the first tick to the last tack, or rather from the third to the antepenultimate, allowing for the time it needs, the tamtam within, to drum you back into the dream and drum you back out again.
-- Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier

Waiting on the Corners

Waiting on the Corners
by Donald Hall

Glass, air, ice, light,
and winter cold.
They stand on all the corners,
waiting alone, or in
groups that talk like the air
moving branches. It
is Christmas, and a red dummy
laughs in the window
of a store. Although
the trolleys come,
no one boards them,
but everyone moves
up and down, stamping his feet,
so unemployed.
They are talking, each of them,
but it is sticks and stones
that hear them,
their plans,
exultations,
and memories of the old time.
The words fly out, over
the roads and onto
the big, idle farms, on the hills,
forests, and rivers
of America, to mix into silence
of glass, air, ice, light,
and winter cold. 

"Waiting on the Corners" by Donald Hall, from Old and New Poems. © Ticknor & Fields, 1990

Autumn Ivy

Even as it envelops me
it is not mine, this autumn: 
that wind blowing through 
   the pines,
I regret how it makes them fall
-- the leaves, the scarlet leaves
   of ivy.

Autumn Ivy
Ogata kenzan, japanese, 1663-1743
Hanging scroll, ink color, and gold on paper
8 1/4 x 10 7/8 in., after 1732
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

douce

douce \doos\, adjective:

Sedate; modest; quiet.

“So should I have been, in my interview with Sir Thomas— how shall I put it— more douce?”
-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Port Glasgow is to the east of Greenock, Gourock to the west. The latter town combines a douce middle-class residential area and a Ken MacLeod.
-- Edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection

Douce comes from the French word of the same spelling meaning "sweet." It became widely used in English after it was used in the Chanson of Roland, a epic poem written about Charlemagne.

Gifts that keep on giving

Gifts that keep on giving
by Marge Piercy

You know when you unwrap them:
fruitcake is notorious. There were only
51 of them baked in 1917 by the
personal chef of Rasputin. The mad monk
ate one. That was what finally killed him

But there are many more bouncers:
bowls green and purple spotted like lepers.
Vases of inept majolica in the shape
of wheezing frogs or overweight lilies.
Sweaters sized for Notre Dame's hunchback.

Hourglasses of no use humans
can devise. Gloves to fit three-toed sloths.
Mufflers of screaming plaid acrylic.
Necklaces and pins that transform
any outfit to a thrift shop reject.

Boxes of candy so stale and sticky
the bonbons pull teeth faster than
your dentist. Weird sauces bought
at warehouse sales no one will ever
taste unless suicidal or blind.

Immortal as vampires, these gifts
circulate from birthdays to Christmas,
from weddings to anniversaries.
Even if you send them to the dump,
they resurface, bobbing up on the third

day like the corpses they call floaters.
After all living have turned to dust
and ashes, in the ruins of cities
alien archeologists will judge our
civilization by these monstrous relics. 

"Gifts that keep on giving" by Marge Piercy, from The Hunger Moon. © Knopf, 2012

mununkind

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
                          A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

E. E. Cummings

lagan

lagan \LAG-uhn\, noun:

Anything sunk in the sea, but attached to a buoy or the like so that it may be recovered.

But hear what your Grace does not know. In the sea there are three kinds of things: those at the bottom, lagan; those which float, flotsam; those which the sea throws up on the shore, jetsam.

-- Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

"Wreck" shall include jetsam, flotsam, lagan, and derelict found in or on the shores of the sea or any tidal water.

-- Harry Newsom, The Law of Salvage, Towage, and Pilotage

Lagan is not as well known as its contextual brethren, flotsam and jetsam. The word comes from the Old Norse word lǫgn which meant "a net laid in the sea."

Michiko Dead

Michiko Dead
by Jack Gilbert

He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm which is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.

Days of Growing Darkness

Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness
by Mary Oliver

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don't say
it's easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?

So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed. 

"Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness" by Mary Oliver, from A Thousand Mornings. © The Penguin Press, 2012

adiaphorous

Word of the Day 

adiaphorous \ad-ee-AF-er-uhs\, adjective: 

Doing neither good nor harm, as a medicine. 

Sun and Mr. Allworthy are united, but with a difference: the sun, in all his majesty and splendor is, in the words of Boyle, "adiaphorous" unthinking matter, whereas Mr. Allworthy is a moral agent . . . 

-- Jina Politi, The Novel and Its Presuppositions 

. . .which participates of neither extreme, as for example, all those things which, as being neither good nor evil in themselves, we call adiaphorous, or indifferent. 

-- William Watson Goodwin, Plutarch's Morals 

Adiaphorous is derived from the Greek, adiaphoros, meaning 'indifferent.' 

Mulligrubs

mulligrubs \MUHL-i-gruhbz\, noun:

Ill temper; colic; grumpiness.

"That's a comfortable place to be." The barber chuckled. "You're a philosopher, sir, a philosopher." "I am, but I'm a blue one. I have the blue mulligrubs."
-- Brian Lynch, The Winter of Sorrow

Right Rosa Solis, as ever washed mulligrubs out of a moody brain!
-- Sir Walter Scott, The Waverley Novels

It is easy enough to say that a pessimist is a person afflicted with an incurable case of mulligrubs — one whom nothing in all earth or heaven or hades pleases; one who usually deserves nothing, yet grumbles if he gets it.
-- William Cowper Brann, "Beauty and the Beast," Brann: The Iconoclast

This fanciful formation was developed in 1599 as a synonym for 'a fit of the blues' and an alteration of megrims.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”            

― James Madison, The Federalist Papers

Mumpsimus

mump·si·mus  [muhmp-suh-muh s] noun, plural mump·si·mus·es for 2. 
1. adherence to or persistence in an erroneous use of language, memorization, practice, belief, etc., out of habit or obstinacy ( opposed to sumpsimus ). 
2. a person who persists in a mistaken expression or practice ( opposed to sumpsimus ). 

Origin: 1520–30;  from a story, which perhaps originated with Erasmus, of an illiterate priest who said mumpsimus  rather than sūmpsimus  (1st plural perfect indicative of Latin sūmere  to pick up; see consume) while reciting the liturgy, and refused to change the word when corrected 

The Past

What is past -- the past -- does not, nor will it, detach itself and remain where it was (or where it might have been intended to have remained) but it must bring itself forward, and smilingly, or otherwise, present itself as an old friend.

Joseph Newington Carter 1835-71

Poem of the One world

Poem of the One world
by Mary Oliver

This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to

where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself. 

"Poem of the One world" by Mary Oliver, from A Thousand Mornings. © The Penguin Press, 2012

From "Song Of The Turkey Buzzard"
by Lew Welch

Hear my last Will & Testament:

                          Among my friends there shall always be 
                          one with proper instructions
                          for my continuance.

                                      Let no one grieve.
                                      l shall have used it all up 
                                      used up every bit of it.

                                      What an extravagance! 
                                      What a relief!

                          On a marked rock, following his orders, 
                          place my meat.

                                      All care must be taken not to
                                      frighten the natives of this 
                                      barbarous land, who
                                      will not let us die, even, 
                                      as we wish.

                          With proper ceremony disembowel what I 
                          no longer need, that it might more quickly 
                          rot and tempt

                          my new form

Vertical

Vertical
by Linda Pastan

Perhaps the purpose
of leaves is to conceal
the verticality
of trees
which we notice
in December
as if for the first time:
row after row
of dark forms
yearning upwards.
And since we will be
horizontal ourselves
for so long,
let us now honor
the gods
of the vertical:
stalks of wheat
which to the ant
must seem as high
as these trees do to us,
silos and
telephone poles,
stalagmites
and skyscrapers.
But most of all
these winter oaks,
these soft-fleshed poplars,
this birch

whose bark is like
roughened skin
against which I lean
my chilled head,
not ready
to lie down.

"Vertical" by Linda Pastan, from Traveling Light. © Norton, 2010. 

How clear, how lovely bright

How clear, how lovely bright,
How beautiful to sight
  Those beams of morning play;
How heaven laughs out with glee
Where, like a bird set free,
Up from the eastern sea
  Soars the delightful day.

Today I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
  Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
  I never kept before.

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
  Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
  Falls the remorseful day.

A.E. Housman

Genius

Genius
by George Bilgere

It was nice being a genius
worth nearly half-a-million dollars
for the two or three minutes it took me
to walk back to my house from the mailbox
with the letter from the Foundation
trembling in my hand. Frankly,

for the first minute
I was somewhat surprised at being a genius.
I'd only published a few small things at that point.
I didn't even have a book.
I was just a part-time lecturer
at a small mid-western college.

But early into the second minute
I had fully embraced the fact of my genius.

I mean, these people know what they're doing, right?
Who am I to tell the Foundation its business?
And I was already practicing the kind of modest,
Hey, it's no big deal tone of voice I'd be using
on the phone for the rest of the day
as I called all my friends, and especially
my enemies, to treat them to the good news.

But when I opened the letter
and saw it was merely a request
for me to recommend someone else to be a genius,
I lost interest and made myself a ham sandwich. 

Conch

Conch
by E.B. White

Hold a baby to your ear
As you would a shell:
Sounds of centuries you hear
New centuries foretell.

Who can break a babies code?
And which is the older --
The listener or his small load?
The held or the holder?

The Fox
by Faith Shearin

It was an ordinary morning: November, thin light,
and we paused over our pancakes to watch
something red move outside. Our house is on

an untamed patch of land and, across the lagoon,
another house surrounded by trees. On the banks
of their shore, facing us: a fox. We thought

he might be a dog at first for he trotted and sniffed
like a dog but when he turned to us
we knew he was nobody's pet. His face was arranged

like a child's face — playful, dainty — and his eyes
were liquid and wild. He stood for awhile, looking out,
as if he could see us in our pajamas, then found

a patch of sand beneath a tree and turned himself
into a circle of fur: his head tucked into his tail.
It was awful to watch him sleep: exposed,

tiny, his eyes closed. How can any animal
be safe enough to rest? But while I washed
our dishes he woke again, yawned, and ran

away to the places only foxes know. My God
I was tired of being a person. Even now his tail
gestures to me across the disapproving lagoon. 

"The Fox" by Faith Shearin, from Moving the Piano. © Stephen F. Austin, 2011.

Sojourns in the Parallel World

Sojourns in the Parallel World
by Denise Levertov

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension—though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it 'Nature: only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be 'Nature' too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering

of fire to coal—then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we've been, when we're caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
—but we have changed, a little. 

"Sojourns in the Parallel World" by Denise Levertov from Sands of the Well. © New Directions Books, 1994. 

Managing moods

Managing our moods is a skill many of us never learned or never learned well. Our mood management attempts often involve spoiling or indulging ourselves. But there are far better ways to improve our state of mind. For example, recent research shows that doing something for someone else is far more effective than indulging ourselves.  "If you feel you need help, then go help someone." 

Become the scientist and look for better ways to boost your moods. For example, the Pleasant Events Schedule is a list of 320 different activities that people enjoy and is one place to begin your search. You can sort through the list and pick five or ten that might boost your mood. Try them. Test them out until you find a few that reliably work for you. Just make sure they boost your mood without introducing or reinforcing unwanted habits. 

From Crucial Skills.

Druid Vow of Friendship

Druid Vow of Friendship

I honor your path.
I drink from your well. 
I bring an unprotected heart to our meeting place. 
I hold no cherished outcome. 
I will not negotiate by withholding. 
I am not subject to disappointment.

Stones

A Request
by Ursula Le Guin

Should my tongue be tied by stroke
listen to me as if I spoke

and said to you, "My dear, my friend,
stay here a while and take my hand;

my voice is hindered by this clot,
but silence says what I cannot,

and you can answer as you please
such undemanding words as these.

Or let our conversation be
a mute and patient amity,

sitting, all the words bygone,
like a stone beside a stone.

It takes a while to learn to talk
the long language of the rock." 

"A Request" by Ursula K. Le Guin, from Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems 1960-2010. © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

How to write good...

How to write good...

1) Avoid Alliteration. Always.
2) Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3) Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.)
4) Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
5) One should never generalize.
6) Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
7) Be more or less specific.
8) Sentence fragments? Eliminate.
9) Exaggeraction is a billion times worse than understatement.
10) Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
11) Who needs rhetorical questions?

Love in the Country

Love in the Country
by William Stafford

We live like this: no one but
some of the owls awake, and of them
only near ones really awake.

In the rain yesterday, puddles
on the walk to the barn sounded their
quick little drinks.

The edge of the haymow, all
soaked in moonlight,
dreams out there like silver music.

Are there farms like this where
no one likes to live?
And the sky going everywhere?

While the earth breaks the soft horizon
eastward, we study how to deserve
what has already been given us. 

"Love in the Country" by William Stafford, from Stories that Could Be True. © Harper & Row, 1977. 

Poets

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
~Eli Khamarov

For Sale

For Sale 

Sixty hectares of empty sky 
No coyotes hiding behind cirrus clouds 
No black angus bulls disguised as cumulonimbus 
(there's real thunder out there -- and lightning 
great for Ides of March celebration) 
It's range land of the heavens 

perhaps better for viewing than ranching 
that herd coming is nothing but clouds 
View is almost perfect 
Remaining trees on mountains 
won't block your view 
Will not consider subdividing 
Property has been in the hands of man 
for centuries 
Needs cleanup 
Make offer 

--Carlos Reyes, Portland 
From "Pomegranate, Sister of the Heart"

I want your hands on my eyes

Sonnet 89

When I die, I want your hands on my eyes: 
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands 
to pass their freshness over me once more: 
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep. 
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you 
to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together, 
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.

I want what I love to continue to live, 
and you whom I love and sang above everything else 
to continue to flourish, full-flowered:

so that you can reach everything my love directs you to, 
so that my shadow can travel along in your hair, 
so that everything can learn the reason for my song. 

Pablo Neruda

Jonathan Franzen

My family lived in La Grange, IL the town adjacent to the east of Western Springs where this author grew up.  He was born the same year as our oldest son.

From the Writer's Almanac

It's the birthday [8/17/1959] of Jonathan Franzen (books by this author), born in Western Springs, Illinois (1959). He's the author of the acclaimed novels Freedom (2010) and The Corrections (2001), and has also written a memoir and two essay collections. His latest book is one of those essay collections; it's called Farther Away (2012).

Jonathan Franzen said: "I come from a kind of old-fashioned Midwest, and I live in a technocorporate, postironic, cool, late-late-late Eastern world. The two worlds hardly ever talk to each other, but they're completely, constantly talking to one another inside me. [...] I have my parents talking to me in my head and then other parts of myself talking back. I think this is potentially an interesting conversation."

Truth

What is the nature of the border 
between truth and lies? 
It is permeable and blurred 
because it is planted thick 
with rumour, confabulation, 
misunderstandings and twisted tales. 
Truth can break the gates down, 
truth can howl in the streets; 
unless truth is pleasing, 
personable and easy to like, 
she is condemned to stay 
whimpering at the back door.

from Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

A Drone Scans the Wreckage

A Drone Scans the Wreckage

Smoke gets in my eyes,

My fifteen eyes.

Glass insulation smolders.

Pink tongues get stuck on it.

Charred cotton candy.

Did I do that?

Palm tree shorn of its head.

Cathedral ceilings, opened up

To the stars, to the stark.

What did they worship in there?

The overhead fans?

The bolsters? The naked bedspread?

I spy.

They cried O God to the pillows.

Now ripped and fluttering,

Angel feathers.

These hover, slower than me.

See raw finger paint. Red.

Wet still crawling.

Must have missed something.

Better home in again.

Do some stuttering.

Attapat. Attatat. Attastasis. Attaboom.

Accurate this time. Rah.

Anything saved equals failure.

Was I bad?

Teardrops fall and fall.

The rain shower’s broken.

      --Margaret Atwood

The New Yorker

August 13 & 20, 2012

Lifting
by Ouyang Yu


For years
I have been dreaming
of turning
writing into a sport
in the Olympic Games
that is called, tentatively
Wordlifting
in which I'd give
my simplest performance
by lifting
the lightest and the liveliest
word: Love
till it flies
lifting me, weightless
into a sky
of loving
eyes

The Summer Day

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?


"The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver, from The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays. © Beacon Press, 2008.

Tree Marriage

Tree Marriage
by William Meredith

In Chota Nagpur and Bengal
the betrothed are tied with threads to
mango trees, they marry the trees
as well as one another, and
the two trees marry each other.
Could we do that some time with oaks
or beeches? This gossamer we
hold each other with, this web
of love and habit is not enough.
In mistrust of heavier ties,
I would like tree-siblings for us,
standing together somewhere, two
trees married with us, lightly, their
fingers barely touching in sleep,
our threads invisible but holding. 

"Tree Marriage" by William Meredith, from Effort at Speech. © Northwestern University Press, 1997.

Pig

Pig
by Henri Cole

Poor patient pig -- trying to keep his balance,
that's all, upright on a flatbed ahead of me,
somewhere between Pennsylvania and Ohio,
enjoying the wind, maybe, agains the tufts of hair
on the tops of his ears, like a Stoic at the foot 
of the gallows, or, with my eyes heavy and glazed
from caffeine and driving, like a soul disembarking, 
its flesh probably bacon now tipping into split

pea soup, or, more painful to me, like a man
in his middle years struggling to remain 
vital and honest while we're all just floating
around accidental-like on a breeze.
What funny thoughts slide into the head,
alone on the interstate with no place to be.


From Touch: Poems by Henri Cole Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011

Stay near to me

Hinterhof
by James Fenton

Stay near to me and I'll stay near to you —
As near as you are dear to me will do,
    Near as the rainbow to the rain,
    The west wind to the windowpane,
As fire to the hearth, as dawn to dew.


Stay true to me and I'll stay true to you —
As true as you are new to me will do,
    New as the rainbow in the spray,
    Utterly new in every way,
New in the way that what you say is true.

Stay near to me, stay true to me. I'll stay
As near, as true to you as heart could pray.
    Heart never hoped that one might be
    Half of the things you are to me —
The dawn, the fire, the rainbow and the day 


"Hinterhof" by James Fenton, from Yellow Tulips: Poems 1986-2011. © Faber & Faber, 2011

Ein Gleiches

Nachtlied II 

Ein Gleiches

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh'
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest Du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest Du auch.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This Morning I Wanted Four Legs

This Morning I Wanted Four Legs


Nothing on two legs weighs much,
or can.
An elephant, a donkey, even a cookstove--
those legs, a person could stand on.
Two legs pitch you forward.
Two legs tire.
They look for another two lets to be with, 
to move one set forward to music 
while letting the other move back.
They want to carve into a tree trunk:
2gether 4ever.
Nothing on two legs can bark,
can whinny or chuff.
Tonight, though, everything’s different.
Tonight I want wheels.

     ----- Jane Hirshfield


The New Yorker, July 2, 2012

On the Road, between Toledo & Cincinnati, Late June

On the Road, between Toledo & Cincinnati, Late June
by Sebastian Matthews


Somewhere dead center in the day's drive
through this relentlessly flat state, the sky
darkens and fills up deepend blue,
and the word 'rain' comes to your lips
twenty seconds before the first waterballoon
droplets hit; and before you can think
or turn and say 'storm' here it comes
spilling out of its box like a load of grain.

The woman in the passenger seat
of a raggedly elegant convertible, top down,
laughs merrily, purse held over her head.
Motorcycles cluster under the awnings
of bridges, five, six, a whole family of Harleys:
Middle Americans for a brief spell
hobos, gathering around the fire
of manageable happenstance. We'll all
make it through. No twister coming to life
out of the yellowing swirl. No pile-up crash
in our cards. The rain subsiding, wipers
knocked back to intermittent, you drive on
through the burgeoning heat: crows
congregating in the backyards of trees,
fireworks stockpiling in the beds of pickups,
young girls towed behind speedboats
in inner tubes, shouting to each other
as they pass over the rotting corpse
of a deer that, a year-rounder told,
finally fell after a long winter
through the melting ice and settled
uneasily on the lake bottom. 


"On the Road, between Toledo & Cincinnati, Late June" by Sebastian Matthews, from We Generous. © Red Hen Press, 2007


From The Writer's Almanac

Oil & Steel

Oil & Steel
by Henri Cole


My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
which he preferred to Modern Fiction.
One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,
except the one that guarded his corpse
found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.
"Dead is dead," he would say, an antipreacher.
I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet
And some motor oil—my inheritance.

Once I saw him weep in a courtroom—
neglected, needing nursing—this man who never showed
me much affection but gave me a knack
for solitude, which has been mostly useful.

I exist

 A man said to the universe:
 "Sir I exist!"
 "However," replied the universe,
 "The fact has not created in me
 A sense of obligation."


-- Stephen Crane

Clock

Clock
by Linda Pastan


Sometimes it really upsets me—
the way the clock's hands keep moving,


even when I'm just sitting here
not doing anything at all,


not even thinking about anything
except, right now, about that clock


and how it can't keep its hands still.
Even in the dark I picture it, and all


its brother and sister clocks and watches,
even sundials, all those compulsive timepieces

whose only purpose seems to be
to hurry me out of this world. 


"Clock" by Linda Pastan from Traveling Light. © Norton, 2010.

Let us go then you and I

HELLO, I’M LARRY, AND I’LL BE YOUR POET THIS EVENING
Posted by John Kenney

A short drive from the ferry, Steve Wynn has a complex with two hotels, where the Louis Vuitton outlet is said to generate more sales per square foot than any other Louis Vuitton outlet worldwide. Walking past a tank of luminescent jellyfish, which require a specially designed curtain to sleep at night, the casino official who was showing me the place told me that the Chinese clientele demand a heightened level of luxury, because “Everyone is a president or a chairman.” We stopped into the complex’s newest Michelin-starred restaurant, which has an in-house poet who writes a personal verse for every V.I.P.

—New Yorker story by Evan Osnos about Macau, China, the gambling capital of the world


 To Read more click Here. 


Let us go then, you and I,
Misters Lee and Wee-Fong of Beijing & Shanghai Container Shipping International operating out of Nassau, The Bahamas.
Let us go while you are able.

You look like a patient etherized upon a table.
And indeed there will be time.
But not tonight, as the kitchen is closed and the last waiters wait only for you.
There is no more Johnnie Walker Blue.
Do I dare have the bouncer pull you from your chair?
Oh look, bald spot in the middle of your hair.
And indeed there will be time.
But not here.
In the room the women come and go, talking of Prada and Foxconn.

A Question About Birds

A Question About Birds
Billy Collins


I am going to sit on a rock near some water
or on a slope of grass
under a high ceiling of white clouds,


and I am going to stop talking
so I can wander around in that spot
the way John James Audubon might have wandered


through a forest of speckled sunlight,
stopping now and then to lean
against an elm, mop his brow,

and listen to the songs of birds.
Did he wonder, as I often do,
how they regard the songs of other species?


Would it be like listening to the Chinese
merchants at an outdoor market?
Or do all the birds perfectly understand one another?


Or is that nervous chittering
I often hear from the upper branches
the sound of some tireless little translator?


From Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems by Billy Collins

Wel gay watz þis gome gered in grene.

May 15, 2012
THE THORN WORD
Posted by Mary Norris

A rare excitement ran through the The New Yorker’s copy department last week when it was discovered that a line of Middle English poetry quoted in a piece by Peter Hessler about standing in police lineups had a thorn in it. Usually a thorn, like a splinter, is something you want to remove, with tweezers, or maybe a sterilized needle, but this thorn was something we wanted desperately to insert.

Thorn is an obsolete letter from the Anglo-Saxon alphabet representing the sound we now write as “th”: it looks like the letter “p” with the vertical stroke extending above as well as below the protuberance. In fact, a thorn looks pretty much like a thorn, as in one of those prickly things on the stem of a rose. You will not find it on your keyboard unless you are J. R. R. Tolkien. I hadn’t seen one since graduate school—which was exactly the context in which Peter Hessler was using it, in a throwaway reference to “Gawain and the Green Knight.”

It started with the fact-checker, who looked up the source of the quote and showed it to the editor: Wel gay watz þis gome gered in grene. The editor came to me and asked, “Can we do this?” I didn’t see why not. It is just the kind of perfectionism our shop specializes in. We have used characters from the Greek alphabet, some of which require not one but two accents, and the Cyrillic alphabet. Two weeks ago, we put a simplified Chinese character into a piece by Evan Osnos (its shape was crucial to illustrate a point, and the fact-checker on the piece, fortunately, spoke Mandarin). For a while, we tried faithfully to reproduce the backward “R” in Toys “R” Us, but it went rogue and ran loose on the page every time we turned our back.

I approached the head of the makeup department with a crude drawing of a thorn. He rummaged around and found something—it looked like a capital “P”—which he imported into the piece. But his thorn was in roman and upper-case, and it fell in the middle of a line that was set in italics. It looked like an ill-fitting crown in an otherwise even row of teeth.

I left it alone overnight, and in the morning, with renewed strength, I showed it to my boss. She is a true wizard. With one hand hovering over the italics, she used the other to scroll through a chart showing hundreds of glyphs, all in italics, and instantly picked out the thorn. We dropped it into place, I smothered my doubts about whether the line should actually have been in roman all along (does Middle English qualify as a foreign language?), and took the piece back to makeup.

Later, a proofreader came to me with a query on the piece, and I was certain that it would be about the strange character on page 26. By this time, I had eyeballed the Middle English so many times that I felt I could translate it loosely myself: “Well gay was this guy garbed in green.” But my co-worker had been reading for content, which is to be commended—the piece was about police lineups, not medieval studies—and his question was a facetious one about whether or not I ought to recuse myself from working on such a piece. (I don’t know where he got the idea that I had been picked out of a police lineup—I hardly told anyone about that incident involving the bottle of extra-virgin olive oil and the Greek restaurant. I tried to pay for it! And they said they wouldn’t prosecute.) I attempted to distract him by drawing his attention to our carefully crafted thorn. “Looks like a ‘p,’ ” he said.

In Praise of My Bed

In Praise of My Bed
by Meredith Holmes


At last I can be with you!
The grinding hours
since I left your side!
The labor of being fully human,
working my opposable thumb,
talking, and walking upright.
Now I have unclasped
unzipped, stepped out of.
Husked, soft, a be-er only,
I do nothing, but point
my bare feet into your
clean smoothness
feel your quiet strength
the whole length of my body.
I close my eyes, hear myself
moan, so grateful to be held this way.

by Meredith Holmes, from Shubad's Crown (Pond Road Press)

Making a Bed

Making a Bed
by Howard Moss


I know how to make a bed
While still lying in it, and
Slip out of an imaginary hole
As if I were squeezed out of a tube:
Tug, smooth—the bed is made.
And if resurrections are this easy,
Why then I believe in all of them:
Lazarus rising from his tomb,
Elijah at the vertical—

Though death, I think, has more than clever
Household hints in mind and wants
The bed made, once, and for good. 


"Making a Bed" by Howard Moss, from New Selected Poems. © Athenaeum, 1985.