30 June: "There Comes the Strangest Moment" by Kate Light

There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free—
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.

Skin’s gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;

you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.

I want—my want. I love—my love. I’ll stay

with you. I thought transitions were the best,

but I want what’s here to never go away.
I’ll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast…

Your heart’s in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You’d have sworn no one knew you more than you.

How many people thought you’d never change?

But here you have. It’s beautiful. It’s strange.

29 June: "The Bell" by Richard Jones

In the tower the bell
is alone, like a man
in his room,
thinking and thinking.

The bell is made of iron.

It takes the weight
of a man
to make the bell move.

Far below, the bell feels

hands on a rope.
It considers this.
It turns its head.

Miles away,

a man in his room
hears the clear sound,
and lifts his head to listen.

28 June: "The High School Band" by Reed Whittemore

On warm days in September the high school band
Is up with the birds and marches along our street,
Boom boom,
To a field where it goes boom boom until eight forty-five
When it marches, as in the old rhyme, back, boom boom,
To its study halls, leaving our street
Empty except for the leaves that descend to no drum
And lie still.
In September
A great many high school bands beat a great many drums,
And the silences after their partings are very deep.

27 June: "The Fathers" by Elizabeth Holmes

Captain Hook and Mr. Darling are traditionally played by the same actor

Something's familiar about that villain
striding the deck of the Jolly Roger, chest
puffed out under the fancy jabot --
a bit like, yes, like Father huffing around
before an evening out, proper shirtfront
outthrust by an important bay window.
Particular about his cuff links as a pirate
about lace at his wrists. Same air of dashing
yet dastardly middle age. A penchant
for issuing orders and threats, and tying
up uncooperative dogs or Indian princesses.

No wonder we sons and daughters laugh
when Hook sits on the hot toadstool
over Peter's chimney, when Tinker Bell
flits out of his grasp. And especially
at his slapstick flailing through the sea,
pursued by that confident long-jawed beast,
time ticking loud in its belly.

26 June: "Poetry" by Don Paterson

In the same way that the mindless diamond keeps
one spark of the planet's early fires
trapped forever in its net of ice,
it's not love's later heat that poetry holds,
but the atom of the love that drew it forth
from the silence: so if the bright coal of his love
begins to smoulder, the poet hears his voice
suddenly forced, like a bar-room singer's -- boastful
with his own huge feeling, or drowned by violins;
but if it yields a steadier light, he knows
the pure verse, when it finally comes, will sound
like a mountain spring, anonymous and serene.

Beneath the blue oblivious sky, the water
sings of nothing, not your name, not mine.

25 June: "After Us" by Connie Wanek

I don't know if we're in the beginning or in the final stage.

-- Tomas Tranströmer

Rain is falling through the roof.

And all that prospered under the sun,

the books that opened in the morning

and closed at night, and all day

turned their pages to the light;

the sketches of boats and strong forearms

and clever faces, and of fields

and barns, and of a bowl of eggs,

and lying across the piano

the silver stick of a flute; everything

invented and imagined,

everything whispered and sung,

all silenced by cold rain.

The sky is the color of gravestones.

The rain tastes like salt, and rises

in the streets like a ruinous tide.

We spoke of millions, of billions of years.

We talked and talked.

Then a drop of rain fell

into the sound hole of the guitar, another

onto the unmade bed. And after us,

the rain will cease or it will go on falling,

even upon itself.

24 June: "Tour" by Carol Snow

Near a shrine in Japan he'd swept the path
and then placed camellia blossoms there.

Or — we had no way of knowing — he'd swept the path
between fallen camellias.

23 June: "On a 3 ½ Oz. Lesser Yellowlegs Departed Boston August 28, Shot Martinique September 3" by Eamon Grennan

For Phoebe Palmer

Little brother, would I could
Make it so far, the whole globe
Curling to the quick of your wing.

You leave our minds lagging
With no word for this gallant
Fly-by-night, blind flight.

But ah, the shot: you clot
In a cloud of feathers, drop
Dead in a nest of text-books.

Now seasons migration without you
Flying south. At the gunman’s door
The sea-grapes plump and darken.

22 June: "The Man into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball" by Thomas Lux

each day mowed
and mowed his lawn, his dry quarter acre,
the machine slicing a wisp
from each blade's tip. Dust storms rose
around the roar: 6:00 P.M., every day,
spring, summer, fall. If he could mow
the snow he would.
On one side, his neighbors the cows
turned their backs to him
and did what they do to the grass.
Where he worked, I don't know
but it sets his jaw to: tight.
His wife a cipher, shoebox tissue,
a shattered apron. As if
into her head he drove a wedge of shale.
Years later his daughter goes to jail.
Mow, mow, mow his lawn
gently down a decade's summers.
On his other side lived mine and me,
across a narrow pasture, often fallow;
a field of fly balls, the best part of childhood
and baseball, but one could not cross his line
and if it did,
as one did in 1956
and another in 1958,
it came back coleslaw -- his lawn mower
ate it up, happy
to cut something, no matter
what the manual said
about foreign objects,
stones, or sticks.

21 June: "Poem for Adlai Stevenson and Yellow Jackets" by David Young

It’s summer, 1956, in Maine, a camp resort
on Belgrade Lakes, and I am cleaning fish,
part of my job, along with luggage, firewood,
Sunday ice cream, waking everyone
by jogging around the island every morning
swinging a rattle I hold in front of me
to break the nightly spider threads.
Adlai Stevenson is being nominated,
but won’t, again, beat Eisenhower,
sad fact I’m half aware of, steeped as I am
in Russian novels, bathing in the tea-
brown lake, startling a deer and chasing it by canoe
as it swims from the island to the mainland.
I’m good at cleaning fish: lake trout,
those beautiful deep swimmers, brown trout,
I can fillet them and take them to the cook
and the grateful fisherman may send a piece
back from his table to mine, a salute.
I clean in a swarm of yellow jackets,
sure they won’t sting me, so they don’t,
though they can’t resist the fish, the slime,
the guts that drop into the bucket, they’re mad
for meat, fresh death, they swarm around
whenever I work at this outdoor sink
with somebody’s loving catch.
Later this summer we’ll find their nest
and burn it one night with a blowtorch
applied to the entrance, the paper hotel
glowing with fire and smoke like a lantern,
full of the death-bees, hornets, whatever they are,
that drop like little coals
and an oily smoke that rolls through the trees
into the night of the last American summer
next to this one, 36 years away, to show me
time is a pomegranate, many-chambered,
nothing like what I thought.

20 June: “The Partial Explanation” by Charles Simic

Seems like a long time
Since the waiter took my order.
Grimy little luncheonette,
The snow falling outside.

Seems like it has grown darker
Since I last heard the kitchen door
Behind my back
Since I last noticed
Anyone pass on the street.

A glass of ice-water
Keeps me company
At this table I chose myself
Upon entering.

And a longing,
Incredible longing
To eavesdrop
On the conversation
Of cooks.

19 June: "The Farewell" by Edward Field

They say the ice will hold
so there I go,
forced to believe them by my act of trusting people,
stepping out on it,

and naturally it gaps open
and I, forced to carry on coolly
by my act of being imperturbable,
slide erectly into the water wearing my captain's helmet,
waving to the shore with a sad smile,
"Goodbye my darlings, goodbye dear one,"
as the ice meets again over my head with a click.

18 June: "The Late Passenger" by C.S. Lewis

The sky was low, the sounding rain was falling dense and dark,
And Noah's sons were standing at the window of the Ark.

The beasts were in, but Japhet said, ‘I see one creature more
Belated and unmated there come knocking at the door.'

‘Well let him knock,' said Ham, ‘Or let him drown or learn to swim.
We're overcrowded as it is; we've got no room for him.'

‘And yet he knocks, how terribly he knocks,' said Shem, ‘It's feet
Are hard as horn–but oh the air that comes from it is sweet.'

‘Now hush,' said Ham, ‘You'll waken Dad, and once he comes to see
What's at the door, it's sure to mean more work for you and me.'

Noah's voice came roaring from the darkness down below,
‘Some animal is knocking. Take it in before we go.'

Ham shouted back, and savagely he nudged the other two,
‘That's only Japhet knocking down a brad-nail in his shoe.'

Said Noah, ‘Boys, I hear a noise that's like a horse's hoof.'
Said Ham, ‘Why, that's the dreadful rain that drums upon the roof.'

Noah tumbled up on deck and out he put his head;
His face went grey, his knees were loosed, he tore his beard and said,

‘Look, look! It would not wait. It turns away. It takes its flight.
Fine work you've made of it, my sons, between you all tonight!'

‘Even if I could outrun it now, it would not turn again
–Not now. Our great discourtesy has earned its high disdain.

‘Oh noble and unmated beast, my sons were all unkind;
In such a night what stable and what manger will you find?

‘Oh golden hoofs, oh cataracts of mane, oh nostrils wide
With indignation! Oh the neck wave-arched, the lovely pride!

‘Oh long shall be the furrows ploughed across the hearts of men
Before it comes to stable and to manger once again,

‘And dark and crooked all the ways in which our race shall walk,
And shrivelled all their manhood like a flower with a broken stalk,

‘And all the world, oh Ham, may curse the hour when you were born;

Because of you the Ark must sail without the Unicorn.'

17 June: "Praise Song" by Lucille Clifton

to my aunt blanche

who rolled from grass to driveway
into the street one sunday morning.
i was ten. i had never seen
a human woman hurl her basketball
of a body into the traffic of the world.
Praise to the drivers who stopped in time.
Praise to the faith with which she rose
after some moments then slowly walked
sighing back to her family.
Praise to the arms which understood
little or nothing of what it meant
but welcomed her in without judgment,
accepting it all like children might,
like God.

16 June: "At the Other End of the Telescope" by George Bradley

the people are very small and shrink,
dwarves on the way to netsuke hell
bound for a flea circus in full
retreat toward sub-atomic particles--
  difficult to keep in focus, the figures
at that end are nearly indistinguishable,
generals at the heads of minute armies
differing little from fishwives,
emperors the same as eskimos
huddled under improvisations of snow--
  eskimos, though, now have the advantage,
for it seems to be freezing there, a climate
which might explain the population's
outré dress, their period costumes
of felt and silk and eiderdown,
their fur concoctions stuffed with straw
held in place with flexible strips of bark,
and all to no avail, the midgets forever
stamping their match-stick feet,
blowing on the numb flagella of their fingers--
  but wait, bring a light, clean the lens....
can it be those shivering arms are waving,
are trying to attract attention, hailing you?
seen from the other end of the telescope,
your eye must appear enormous,
must fill the sky like a sun,
and as you occupy their tiny heads
naturally they wish to communicate,
to tell you of their diminishing perspective--
  yes, look again, their hands are cupped
around the pinholes of their mouths,
their faces are swollen, red with effort;
why, they're screaming fit to burst,
though what they say is anybody's guess,
it is next to impossible to hear them,
and most of them speak languages
for which no Rosetta stone can be found--
  but listen harder, use your imagination....
the people at the other end of the telescope,
are they trying to tell you their names?
yes, surely that must be it, their names
and those of those they love, and possibly
something else, some of them.... listen....
the largest are struggling to explain
what befell them, how it happened
that they woke one morning as if adrift,
their moorings cut in the night,
and were swept out over the horizon,
borne on an ebbing tide and soon
to be discernible only as distance,
collapsed into mirage, made to become
legendary creatures now off every map.

15 June: "A Myopic Child" by Yannis Ritsos

The other kids romped around the playground: their voices

rose up to the roofs of the quarter, also the "splock" of their ball

like a globular would, all joy and impertinence.

But he was reading the whole time, there in the spring window,

within a rectangle of bitter silence,

until he finally fell asleep on the window sill in the afternoon,

oblivious to the voices of those his own age

and to premature fears of his own superiority.

The glasses on his nose looked like

a little bike left leaning against a tree,

off in a far-flung, light-flooded countryside,

a bike of some child who had died.

14 June: "Rain: by Naomi Shihab Nye

A teacher asked Paul
what he would remember
from third grade, and he sat
a long time before writing
"this year somebody tutched me
on the sholder"
and turned his paper in.
Later she showed it to me
as an example of her wasted life.
The words he wrote were large
as houses in a landscape.
He wanted to go inside them
and live, he could fill in
the windows of "o" and "d"
and be safe while outside
birds building nests in drainpipes
knew nothing of the coming rain.

13 June: "Wheels" by Jim Daniels

Wheels

My brother kept
in a frame on the wall
pictures of every motorcycle, car, truck:
in his rusted out Impala convertible
wearing his cap and gown
waving
in his yellow Barracuda
with a girl leaning into him
waving
on his Honda 350
waving
on his Honda 750 with the boys
holding a beer
waving
in his first rig
wearing a baseball hat backwards
waving
in his Mercury Montego
getting married
waving
in his black LTD
trying to sell real estate
waving
back to driving trucks
a shiny new rig
waving
on his Harley Sportster
with his wife on the back
waving
his son in a car seat
with his own steering wheel
my brother leaning over him
in an old Ford pickup
and they are
waving
holding a wrench a rag
a hose a shammy
waving.

My brother helmetless
rides off on his Harley
waving
my brother's feet
rarely touch the ground-
waving waving
face pressed to the wind
no camera to save him.

—Jim Daniels

12 June: "Passer- By, These Are Words..." by Yves Bonnefoy

Passer-by, these are words. But instead of reading

I want you to listen: to this frail

Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.

Lend an ear, hear first of all the happy bee

Foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.

It flits between two sprays of leaves,

Carrying the sound of branches that are real

To those that filigree the still unseen.

Then know an even fainter sound, and let it be

The endless murmuring of all our shades.

Their whisper rises from beneath the stones

To fuse into a single heat with that blind

Light you are as yet, who can still gaze.

May your listening be good! Silence

Is a threshold where a twig breaks in your hand,

Imperceptibly, as you attempt to disengage

A name upon a stone:

And so our absent names untangle your alarms.

And for you who move away, pensively,

Here becomes there without ceasing to be.

11 June: "Love Poem 1990" by Peter Meinke

When I was young and shinny as an apple in the good Lord's garden,
I loved a woman whose beauty like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music
till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song
and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened
and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young.

When I was a man sharp as a polished axe in the polleny orchard,
I loved a woman whose perfumes swayed in the air, turning the modest flowers scarlet and loose
till the jonquils opened their throats and cackled out loud
when I broke my hand on her door and cried I was tortured
and she laughed and refused me, only one man in a crowd.

When I grew old, owning more than my share of the garden,
I loved a woman young and fresh as a larkspur trembling in the morning's translucent coolness,
her eyes had seen nothing but good, and as the sun's gold
rolled off her wrists with reluctance, she pardoned
my foolishness, laughed and turned me down gently, I was so old.

And when I fell ill, rooted in a deep house spotted with curses,
I loved a woman whose bones rustled like insects wings through the echoing darkening rooms
and the ceiling dropped like a gardener's hoe toward my bed
so I stretched out my hand to her begging my God for mercy
and she laughed and embraced me sweetly, I was so dead.

10 Jun: "I'm a Fool to Love You" by Cornelius Eady

Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman,

Some type of supernatural creature.

My mother would tell you, if she could,

About her life with my father,

A strange and sometimes cruel gentleman.

She would tell you about the choices

A young black woman faces.

Is falling in love with some man

A deal with the devil

In blue terms, the tongue we use

When we don't want nuance

To get in the way,

When we need to talk straight.

My mother chooses my father

After choosing a man

Who was, as we sing it,

Of no account.

This man made my father look good,

That's how bad it was.

He made my father seem like an island

In the middle of a stormy sea,

He made my father look like a rock.

And is the blues the moment you realize

You exist in a stacked deck,

You look in a mirror at your young face,

The face my sister carries,

And you know it's the only leverage

You've got.

Does this create a hurt that whispers

How you going to do?

Is the blues the moment

You shrug your shoulders

And agree, a girl without money

Is nothing, dust

To be pushed around by any old breeze.

Compared to this,

My father seems, briefly,

To be a fire escape.

This is the way the blues works

Its sorry wonders,

Makes trouble look like

A feather bed,

Makes the wrong man's kisses

A healing.

9 Jun: "A Poetry Reading At West Point" by William Matthews

A Poetry Reading At West Point

I read to the entire plebe class,
in two batches. Twice the hall filled
with bodies dressed alike, each toting
a copy of my book. What would my
shrink say, if I had one, about
such a dream, if it were a dream?

Question and answer time.
"Sir," a cadet yelled from the balcony,
and gave his name and rank, and then,
closing his parentheses, yelled
"Sir" again. "Why do your poems give
me a headache when I try

to understand them?" he asked. "Do
you want that?" I have a gift for
gentle jokes to defuse tension,
but this was not the time to use it.
"I try to write as well as I can
what it feels like to be human,"

I started, picking my way care-
fully, for he and I were, after
all, pained by the same dumb longings.
"I try to say what I don't know
how to say, but of course I can't
get much of it down at all."

By now I was sweating bullets.
"I don't want my poems to be hard,
unless the truth is, if there is
a truth." Silence hung in the hall
like a heavy fabric. My own
head ached. "Sir," he yelled. "Thank you. Sir."

8 Jun: "Sidekicks" by Ronald Koertge

Sidekicks

They were never handsome and often came
with a hormone imbalance manifested by corpulence,
a yodel of a voice or ears big as kidneys.

But each was brave. More than once a sidekick
has thrown himself in front of our hero in order
to receive the bullet or blow meant for that
perfect face and body.

Thankfully, heroes never die in movies and leave
the sidekick alone. He would not stand for it.
Gabby or Pat, Pancho or Andy remind us of a part
of ourselves,

the dependent part that can never grow up,
the part that is painfully eager to please,
always wants a hug and never gets enough.

Who could sit in a darkened theatre, listen
to the organ music and watch the best
of ourselves lowered into the ground while
the rest stood up there, tears pouring off
that enormous nose.

7 Jun: "The Book of Hand Shadows" by Marianne Boruch

An eagle and a squirrel. A bull and a sage.
All take two hands, even the sheep
whose mouth is a lever for nothing, neither
grass nor complaint. The black swan’s
mostly one long arm, bent
at the elbow but there’s always feathers
to fool with. Front leaf: a boy
with a candle, leaning curious while
an old man makes
a Shakespeare. The small pointed beard
is a giveaway.
I always wanted to, especially
because of the candle part. How the eye is finally
a finger bent to make an emptiness. Or that
a thing thrown up there
is worlds bigger than how it starts. So I liked
the ceiling better than the wall, looking up
where stars roamed and moon sometimes
hovered, were the roof lost,
were we lucky
and forgot ourselves.

6 Jun: “Only One of My Deaths” by Dean Young

Because it seems the only way to save the roses

is to pluck the Japanese beetles out of

their convoluted paradise

and kill them, I think for a moment,

instead of crushing them in the driveway,

of impaling them on the thorns.

Perhaps they'd prefer that.

5 Jun: “Alzheimer's” by Bob Hicok

Chairs move by themselves, and books.

Grandchildren visit, stand

new and nameless, their faces' puzzles

missing pieces. She's like a fish

in deep ocean, its body made of light.

She floats through rooms, through

my eyes, an old woman bereft

of chronicle, the parable of her life.

And though she's almost a child

there's still blood between us:

I passed through her to arrive.

So I protect her from knives,

stairs, from the street that calls

as rivers do, a summons to walk away,

to follow. And dress her,

demonstrate how buttons work,

when she sometimes looks up

and says my name, the sound arriving

like the trill of a bird so rare

it's rumored no longer to exist.

4 Jun: “Fat Is Not a Fairy Tale” by Jane Yolen

“Fat Is Not a Fairy Tale” by Jane Yolen

I am thinking of a fairy tale,

Cinder Elephant,

Sleeping Tubby,

Snow Weight,

where the princess is not

anorexic, wasp-waisted,

flinging herself down the stairs.

I am thinking of a fairy tale,

Hansel and Great,

Repoundsel,

Bounty and the Beast,where the beauty

has a pillowed breast,

and fingers plump as sausage.

I am thinking of a fairy tale

that is not yet written,

for a teller not yet born,

for a listener not yet conceived,

for a world not yet won,

where everything round is good:

the sun, wheels, cookies, and the princess.

Tell Me I'm Fat is an interesting talk on the same issue.

3 Jun: "The Oldest Living Thing in L.A." by Larry Lewis

The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.

Read Good Poetry

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