26 Aug 2020: "Messenger" by Margaret Atwood

A Messenger

by Margaret Atwood

The man came from nowhere
and is going nowhere

one day he suddenly appeared
outside my window
suspended in the air
between the ground and the tree bough

I once thought all encounters
were planned:
newspaper boys passing
in the street, with cryptic
headlines, waitresses and their coded
menus, women standing in streetcars
with secret packages, were sent to
me. And gave some time
to their deciphering

but this one is clearly
accidental; clearly this one is

no green angel, simple black and white
fiend; no ordained
messenger; merely
a random face
revolving outside the window

and if no evident abstract
significance, then
something as contingent
as a candidate for marriage
in this district of exacting neighbours:
not meant for me personally
but generic: to be considered
from all angles (origin; occupation;
aim in life); identification
papers examined; if appropriate,
conversed with; when
he can be made to descend.

Meanwhile, I wonder

black and white
myths he swallowed by mistake
is feeding on him like a tapeworm
has raised him from the ground
and brought him to this window

swivelling from some invisible rope
his particular features
fading day by day
his eyes melted
first; Thursday
his flesh became translucent
shouting at me
(specific) me
desperate messages with his
obliterated mouth

in a silent language

From The Circle Game by Margaret Atwood, page 6

25 Aug 2020: "After the Flood, We" by Margaret Atwood

After the Flood, We

by Margaret Atwood

We must be the only ones
left, in the mist that has risen
everywhere as well
as in these woods

I walk across the bridge
towards the safety of high ground
(the tops of the trees are like islands)

gathering the sunken
bones of the drowned mothers
(hard and round in my hands)
while the white mist washes
around my legs like water;

fish must be swimming
down in the forest beneath us,
like birds, from tree to tree
and a mile away
the city, wide and silent,
is lying lost, far undersea.

You saunter beside me, talking
of the beauty of the morning,
not even knowing
that there has been a flood,

tossing small pebbles
at random over your shoulder
into the deep thick air,

not hearing the first stumbling
footsteps of the almost-born
coming (slowly) behind us,
not seeing
the almost-human
brutal faces forming
(slowly)
out of stone.

from The Circle Game by Margaret Atwood, page 4

24 Aug 2020: "This Is a Photograph of Me" by Margaret Atwood

This Is a Photograph of Me

Margaret Atwood

It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;

then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)

14 Aug 2020: "Then" by Aaron Shurin

Then

BY AARON SHURIN

Once we were in the loop . . . slick with information and the luster of good timing. We folded our clothes. Once we stood up before the standing vigils, before the popping vats, before the annotated lists of marshaled forces with their Venn diagrams like anxious zygotes, their paratactic chasms . . . before the set of whirligig blades, modular torrent. We folded our clothes. Once we remembered to get up to pee . . . and how to pee in a gleaming bowl . . . soaked as we were in gin and coconut, licorice water with catalpa buds, golden beet syrup in Johnny Walker Blue and a beautiful blur like August fog, cantilevered over the headlands . . . We tucked into the crevices of the mattress pad twirling our auburn braids, or woke up at the nick of light and practiced folding our clothes. Our pod printed headbands with hourly updates, announcing the traversals of green-shouldered hawks through the downtown loop, of gillyfish threading the north canals, of the discovery of electron calligraphy or a new method of washing brine. We smoothed our feathers like birds do, and twitched ourselves into warm heaps, and followed the fourth hand on the platinum clocks sweeping in arcs from left to right, up and down, in and out . . . We were steeped in watchfulness, fully suspended, itinerant floaters — ocean of air — among the ozone lily pads and imbrex domes, the busting thickets of nutmeg, and geode malls. At night we told stories about the future with clairvoyant certainty. Our clothing was spectacular and fit to a T. We admired each other with ferocity.

13 Aug 2020: "Hesitations Outside the Door" by Margaret Atwood

HESITATIONS OUTSIDE THE DOOR

I'm telling the wrong lies,

they are not even useful.

The right lies would at least

be keys, they would open the door.

The door is closed; the chairs,

the tables, the steel bowl, myself

shaping bread in the kitchen, wait

outside it.

By Margaret Atwood

12 Aug. 2020: "Vade Mecum" by Billy Collins

Vade Mecum

I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.

by Billy Collins

11 Aug. 2020: "The Man in the Moon" by Billy Collins

The Man In The Moon

He used to frighten me in the nights
of childhood,
the wide adult face, enormous, stern, aloft
I could not imagine such loneliness, such coldness
But tonight as I drive home over
these hilly roads
I see him sinking behind stands of winter trees
And rising again to show his familiar face
And when he comes into full view
over open fields
he looks like a young man who has fallen in love
with the dark earth
a pale bachelor, well-groomed and
full of melancholy
his round mouth open
as if he had just broken into song.

Billy Collins

10 Aug 2020: "This World is no Conclusion." by Emily Dickinson

This World is not Conclusion (373)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond -

Invisible, as Music -

But positive, as Sound -

It beckons, and it baffles -

Philosophy, dont know -

And through a Riddle, at the last -

Sagacity, must go -

To guess it, puzzles scholars -

To gain it, Men have borne

Contempt of Generations

And Crucifixion, shown -

Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies -

Blushes, if any see -

Plucks at a twig of Evidence -

And asks a Vane, the way -

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -

Strong Hallelujahs roll -

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul -

THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON: READING EDITION, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 , by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.

Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, edited by R.W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999)

9 Aug 2020: "Questions About Angels" by Billy Collins

Questions About Angels

BY BILLY COLLINS

Of all the questions you might want to ask

about angels, the only one you ever hear

is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time

besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin

or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth

or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?

Do they swing like children from the hinges

of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?

Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,

their diet of unfiltered divine light?

What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall

these tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole

in a river and would the hole float along endlessly

filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive

in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume

the appearance of the regular mailman and

whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

No, the medieval theologians control the court.

The only question you ever hear is about

the little dance floor on the head of a pin

where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions,

billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse

into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:

one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,

a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful

eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over

to glance at his watch because she has been dancing

forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

Billy Collins, “Questions About Angels” from Questions about Angels. Copyright © 1991 by Billy Collins. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press, www.pitt.edu/~press/.

8 Aug 2020: "My Number" by Billy Collins

My Number

Billy Collins

(1941– )

Is Death miles away from this house,
reaching for a widow in Cincinnati
or breathing down the neck of a lost hiker
in British Columbia?

Is he too busy making arrangements,	5
tampering with air brakes,
scattering cancer cells like seeds,
loosening the wooden beams of roller coasters
to bother with my hidden cottage
that visitors find so hard to find?	10

Or is he stepping from a black car
parked at the dark end of the lane,
shaking open the familiar cloak,
its hood raised like the head of a crow,
and removing the scythe from the trunk?	15

Did you have any trouble with the directions?
I will ask, as I start talking my way out of this.

7 Aug 2020: "Whispers of Immortality" by T.S. Elliot

Whispers of Immortality

BY T. S. ELIOT

Webster was much possessed by death

And saw the skull beneath the skin;

And breastless creatures under ground

Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

Daffodil bulbs instead of balls

Stared from the sockets of the eyes!

He knew that thought clings round dead limbs

Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

Donne, I suppose, was such another

Who found no substitute for sense,

To seize and clutch and penetrate;

Expert beyond experience,

He knew the anguish of the marrow

The ague of the skeleton;

No contact possible to flesh

Allayed the fever of the bone.

. . . . .

Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye

Is underlined for emphasis;

Uncorseted, her friendly bust

Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

The couched Brazilian jaguar

Compels the scampering marmoset

With subtle effluence of cat;

Grishkin has a maisonnette;

The sleek Brazilian jaguar

Does not in its arboreal gloom

Distil so rank a feline smell

As Grishkin in a drawing-room.

And even the Abstract Entities

Circumambulate her charm;

But our lot crawls between dry ribs

To keep our metaphysics warm.

1918, 1919

Note: as read in "When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanithi

6 Aug 2020: "Caelica 83" by Baron Brooke Fulke Greville

Today (years ago now, ~2016) I finished reading When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. It is a very cool book and I recommend it. He was an English major turned neuroscientist turned cancer patient. The book is a memoir about the author and his obsession with mortality while he raced against time to finish this book before he died. The perspective is very enlightening. Before I finished the book I wrote down many of the poetry references he made. These will be the poems for the first week. They will be about death. What better way to bring poetry to life?

"Caelica 83" by Baron Brooke Fulke Greville

Related Poem Content Details

You that seek what life is in death,

Now find it air that once was breath.

New names unknown, old names gone:

Till time end bodies, but souls none.

Reader! then make time, while you be,

But steps to your eternity.

5 Aug 2020: "Pale Colors in a Tall Field" by Carl Phillips

Pale Colors in a Tall Field by Carl Phillips
Remind me to show you where the horses finally got freedfor good—not for the freedom of it, or anything likebeauty, though their running was for sure a loveliness, I'mthinking more how there's a kind of violence to re-enteringunexpectedly a space we never meant to leave but gottorn away from so long ago it's more than half forgotten,not that some things aren't maybe best forgotten, at acertain point at least, I've reached that point in my own lifewhere there's so much I'd rather not remember, thatto be asked to do so can seem a cruelty, almost; bad enough,some days, that there's memory at all, though that's notexactly it, it's more what gets remembered, how wedon't get to choose. For example, if love used to meanrescue, now it's more gladiatorial, though in the endmore clean: Who said that? Not the one whose face I'vedescribed somewhere as the sun at that moment when,as if half unwilling, still, to pull itself free from the night'sshadow-grove of losses, it first begins to appear. No.Not that one. And not the one whose specialty wasmaking a bad habit sound more excusable by calling itritual—since when do names excuse? Wish around for ithard enough, you can always find some deeper formof sadness where earlier—so at least you thought—meresorrow lay ... I'd been arguing the difference betweenthe soul being cast out and the soul departing, so Istill believed in the soul, apparently. It was that long ago.
from Pale Colors in a Tall Field: Poems Hardcover – March 3, 2020

4 Aug 2020: "Somnia" by Allie Jo Dreadfulwater

Last night

the middle self

strewn bare across

the starry sky behind

my closed forehead.

I flew as the great

Blue Morpheus!

Eating

enough dust to

preen my scales

and tidy the Wind;

Essence of Ajna,

by Allie Jo Dreadfulwater

July 17, 2020

https://tsavoritelittlebird.blogspot.com/2020/07/somnia.html

3 Aug 2020: "Watching the moon..." by Izumi Shikibu

Watching the moon

at midnight,

solitary, mid-sky,

I knew myself completely,

no part left out.

2 Aug 2020: " Insomnia" by Billy Collins

INSOMNIA

by Billy Collins

After counting all the sheep in the world

I enumerate the wildebeests, snails,

camels, skylarks, etc.,

then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,

country by country.

By early light I am asleep

in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,

yelling across the rising water

at preoccupied Noah as his wondrous

ark sails by and begins to grow smaller.

Now a silhouette on the horizon,

the only boat on earth is disappearing.

As I rise and fall on the rocking waves,

I concentrate on the giraffe couple,

their necks craning over the roof,

to keep my life from flashing before me.

After all the animals wink out of sight

I float on my back, eyes closed.

I picture all the fish in creation

leaping a fence in a field of water,

one colorful species after another.

1 Aug 2020: "The Lesson" by Billy Collins

Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins, Page 6