Don't Look Back

Don't Look Back
by Kay Ryan


This is not
a problem
for the neckless.
Fish cannot
recklessly
swivel their heads
to check
on their fry;
no one expects
this. They are
torpedoes of 
disinterest,
compact capsules
that rely 
on the odds
for survival,

unfollowed by
the exact and modest
number or goslings
the S-necked
goose is—
who if she
looks back
acknowledges losses
and if she does not
also loses.


"Don't Look Back" by Kay Ryan, from Say Uncle. © Grove Press, 2000. 


From the Writer's Almanac

Furiously saying goodbye

I had thought the tumors...


by Grace Paley
from Fidelity. © Etruscan Press, 2008.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.


I had thought the tumors
on my spine would kill me but
the tumors on my head seem to be
extraordinary competitive this week.


For the past twenty or thirty years
I have eaten the freshest most
organic and colorful fruits and
vegetables I did not drink I
did drink one small glass of red
wine with dinner nearly every day
as suggested by The New York Times
I should have taken longer walks but
obviously I have done something wrong

I don't mean morally or ethically or
geographically I did not live near
a nuclear graveyard or under a coal
stack nor did I allow my children
to do so I lived in a city no worse
than any other great and famous city I
lived one story above a street that led
cabs and ambulances to the local hospital
that didn't seem so bad and was
often convenient


In any event I am
already old and therefore a little ashamed
to have written this poem full
of complaints against mortality which
biological fact I have been constructed for
to hand on to my children and grand—
children as I received it from my
dear mother and father and beloved
grandmother who all
ah if I remember it
were in great pain at leaving
and were furiously saying goodbye


From the Writer's Almanac

Pettifog

pettifog - argue over petty things; 
bicker, brabble, squabble, niggle, quibble

Origin: 1605–15;  back formation from pettifogger,  equivalent to petty  + fogger  < Middle Low German voger  or Middle Dutch voeger  one who arranges things; akin to Old English gefōg  a joining


Supply and demand are, alas, two things I find no uses for, Econometric processes to me are just an awful bore; I use my mathematics skill to pettifog my treatises, And use my flair for jargon-speak to obfuscate my sophistries.

There is nothing else to say

Javier Sicilia is a novelist and a poet. In 2009, he was awarded Mexico's prestigious Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize. This September, he read a poem dedicated to his son, Juan Francisco, at a rally:


There is nothing else to say
The world is not worthy of the word
They drowned it, deep inside of us
As they asphyxiated you
As they ripped your lungs apart
And the pain does not leave me
All we have is a world
For the silence of the just
Only for your silence and my silence, Juanelo.

This was the last poem Sicilia wrote. His son was murdered in the central state of Morelos in March, along with six other people, by members of a drug cartel.


Javier Sicilia renounced poetry and became the leader of a national protest against the drug war. Yet he says poetry has been an integral part of the "Peace with Justice and Dignity" movement.


"Poetry has been present, the poets have been part of it," Sicilia says. "The problem is that the mass media don't like to cover it and don't understand that this movement was born out of poetry, and the reason why it's important is because it's filled with a poetic content that has transformed the language. And behind all of this is a profound ethics, as with all poetry."


Sicilia says the poet has a moral responsibility to tell these stories.


From Weekend Edition Saturday

Lot's Wife

LOT'S Wife


Sometime soon after the embers cooled, 
after dust clouds settled, after the last strings 
of smoke, hoisted by desert breezes, cleared the air, 


they must have come, people of those three cities 
remaining, to pick among the charred bones, 
the rubble of what was once temple and house,


stable and brothel; to kick at stones; to tug 
at handles of buckets, blades of shovels and spades. 
Later, raising ash plumes in the scorched plain, 


cloths at their mouths and noses, eyes burning, 
neither fearful nor repentant but full of wonder, 
full of the scavenger's overabundant hope, 


they would have found her--even as now 
some men encounter the woman of their dreams 
(beauty of the movie screen, princess they capture 

with a camera's flash, girl whose finger brushes theirs
when she takes their card at the market register)--
found her, that is, not as-the person she was 


but as whom they needed her to be, and, man or woman, 
each of them would have wanted a piece of her. 
Standing in that wasted landscape, 


she must have seemed a statue erected there 
as a tribute to human frailty, white, crystallized, 
her head turned back as if in longing to be the girl 


she had been in the city she had known. 
And they must have stood there, as we do, 
a bit awestruck, taking her in for a time,


and then, with chisel and knife, spike and buckle, 
chipped at her violendy and stuffed their leathern 
pouches full of her common salt, salt with which


to season for awhile their meat, their daily bread.


Gary J. Whitehead


From The New Yorker January 2, 2012 

Pennsylvania Pastoral

PENNSYLVANIA PASTORAL


The car stops, not because
the driver decided they'd gone 
far enough or because the woman
said "1'm sick" or the boy 
had to pee. It simply stopped 
because it had to, and when the
three get out and he pops
the hood they discover the fan 
belt has vanished and the engine
shut down, wisely. It could 
be worse, it could always be
worse--a cylinder could seize 
for no foreseeable reason and send
them into irreversible debt. 
Cars are, after all, only 
machines and this one-- 
a '48 Pontiac 6--is 

aged and whimsical. It could
be much worse--the Mohave
in mid-July with no shade 
in sight or northern Ontario 
in winter, the snow already burning
the backs of Father's hands and
freighting Mother's lashes.
They've stalled descending into a gully 
in rural Pennsylvania, a quiet
place of maples leafing out,
a place with its own creek 
high in its banks and beyond 
the creek a filling station, 
its lights still on after dawn, 
the red and green pumps ready to
give, and someone there, half-awake. 


Philip Levine

From The New Yorker January 2, 2012

Love Poem with Toast

Poem: "Love Poem with Toast"

by Miller Williams, from Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems. © University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.










The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

From the Writer's Almanac