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