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A Metaphor For My Life
by Charles Deemer
Each morning before sunrise
I move through the dark house
in small, careful steps
trying not to bump into anything
trying not to knock over anything
and gaining no confidence whatever
from the hundreds and hundreds of times
I've done this before
For my friend Gretchen.
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
Over all the hilltops
is calm.
In all the treetops
you feel
hardly a breath of air.
The little birds fall silent in the woods.
Just wait... soon
you'll also be at rest.
Self-Pity
by D.H. Lawrence
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
TOWARDS FREEDOM
by Mervyn Taylor
In the cell where Mandela languished for years,
President Obama stands, tall enough to see
from the window the rocks of Robben Island
where the gulls slip and stumble, like the
former prisoner’s lawyers, when their cases
grew weak and fell apart. Alone, the American
leans, in chinos, his forehead against the bars,
his wife and kids allowing him a moment to reflect
upon his hero, whose fancy shirt is now covered
by the shadows of birds swooping low outside
his room, doctors in the hallway conferring.
The world awaits one leader’s passing, while
the other bends under the blades of the waiting
helicopter, unlike Madiba, whose wings will
have to lift, and carry him the rest of the way.
Mervyn Taylor is a Trinidad-born poet who divides his time between Brooklyn and his native island. He has taught at The New School and in the New York City public school system, and is the author of four books of poetry, namely, An Island of His Own (1992) , The Goat (1999), Gone Away (2006), and No Back Door (2010). He can be heard on an audio collection, Road Clear, accompanied by bassist David Williams.
Eden
No matter what the day brings
it begins here and now at 4 a.m.
in silence as comforting as breath
the mind without distraction
the streets empty, the dogs asleep
only thought alive in reflection
of good fortune, of past blessings
enjoyed before the engines start
the lights come on, the dogs bark
and day begins here where noise
and frantic action drive the hour
and no one knows how to be still.
Charles Deemer
Puzzle Dust
by Dorianne Laux
When the final piece is lifted and set in place,
completing the field, filling the hole
in a grove of trees, a jagged gap
in the ocean or the flat, black sky.
When the scene is whole before me:
tiny men, arms thin as wicks, walking
briskly along a gray rain-riven street,
the woman bent to her dog under an awning,
his wet head held up with trust,
one white paw in her hand, tip
of his tail I kept trying all day
to press into the starry night, ruffled
hem of her blown-up skirt
that never fit into the distant waves
breaking along the shore,
and the bridge, its rickrack of steel girders
I thought were train tracks or a fallen fence,
when it all, at last, makes sense, a vast
satisfaction fills me: the mossy boulders,
pleasing in their eternal random piles,
the river eased around them, green
with its fever to reach the sea,
a ragged bunch of flowers gathered
from the hills I've locked together,
edge to edge, and placed in a glittering vase
behind a window streaked with rain
which the child in his woolen cap
looks into: boxes of candy wrapped
and displayed, desire burning
in his belly, precursor to the fire
that could have broken his small heart
open like a coal someday
in his future, which for him
is nothing but this empty box
layered with a fine dust, the stuff
from which he was born and will
die into, carried, weightless,
to summer's open door
where I bang my hand against
the cardboard, watch the particles,
like chaff or ashes, vanish in wind.
"Puzzle Dust" by Dorianne Laux, from Facts About the Moon. © Norton, 2006.
Request
by Lawrence Raab
For a long time I was sure
it should be "Jumping Jack Flash," then
the adagio from Schubert's C major Quintet,
but right now I want Oscar Peterson's
"You Look Good to Me." That's my request.
Play it at the end of the service,
after my friends have spoken.
I don't believe I'll be listening in,
but sitting here I'm imagining
you could be feeling what I'd like to feel—
defiance from the Stones, grief
and resignation with Schubert, but now
Peterson and Ray Brown are making
the moment sound like some kind
of release. Sad enough
at first, but doesn't it slide into
tapping your feet, then clapping
your hands, maybe standing up
in that shadowy hall in Paris
in the late sixties when this was recorded,
getting up and dancing
as I would not have done,
and being dead, cannot, but might
wish for you, who would then
understand what a poem—or perhaps only
the making of a poem, just that moment
when it starts, when so much
is still possible—
has allowed me to feel.
Happy to be there. Carried away.
"Request" by Lawrence Raab, from Visible Signs. © Penguin, 2003
