Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

There is a girl inside

There is a girl inside.
She is randy as a wolf.
She will not walk away and leave these bones
to an old woman.

She is a green tree in a forest of kindling.
She is a greeen girl in a used poet.

She has waited patient as a nun
for the second coming,
when she can break through gray hairs
into blossom

and her lovers will harvest
honey and thyme
and the woods will be wild
with the damn wonder of it.

- Lucille Clifton



FEBRUARY 15, 2010

R.I.P. poet Lucille Clifton
Those who were still snow-bound last weekend might not have heard the sad news: Former state poet laureate and National Book Award winner Lucille Clifton died Saturday at age 73, after a long battle with cancer and other illnesses. Her obituary in the Baltimore Sun noted that the long-time Columbia resident was known for a mix of profundity, earthiness and humor in her 11 books of poetry.

The obit listed some of her many honors: She was state poet laureate from 1979 to 1985. She was the first black woman to win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize award (2007), which is among the most prestigious awards for American poets and which carries a $100,000 stipend. She won the National Book Award in 2001 for "Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000" and was a two-time Pulitzer finalist.

Anthem

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

- Leonard Cohen

Want to be a free man?

It’s simple
first shed your clothes
they say too much about what you wish to be

next, to eliminate the compulsion to dominate remove your testicles and
set them on a shelf high overhead

now lay your ego by the side of the road and in your sternest voice give
the command, “stay!” then run like hell until you can’t hear its protests
anymore

expunge your history by taking a fist sized eraser and rub it away so that
you are not a man anymore, nor are you a Catholic or a protestant or a Jew
or a Muslim you are not Mexican, German or Chinese

don’t consider the future, in fact so you won’t think at all
put your brain in the freezer (thinking is overrated)

find a clock and smash it between two large stones
and feel your way through days and nights

forgive yourself and your children for not being enough
forgive your ex, forgive god for not giving you the answers you seem to
think He owes you

now find a place in the shade, sit silently and then listen closely to
everyone particularly the birds until you recognize the miracle of breath

- Armando Garcia-Dávila

Practice

Not the high mountain monastery

I had hoped for, the real

face of my spiritual practice

is this:

the sweat that pearls on my cheek

when I tell you the truth, my silent

cry in the night when I think

I’m alone, the trembling

in my own hand as I reach out

through the years of overcoming

to touch what I had hoped

I would never need again.

- Kim Rosen

Complaints

The dead complain we lack
the skill to keep them buried.
But that's the grave's job
and there's no safe burial ground.
They'll shine up through the earth
spreading their affection.

They're offered refuge
under markers and memorials
but they refuse and wait
for us in unlit places
tapping their white canes
with the terrible patience
of those possessing time.

In the slow caress of years,
our weight is doubled by
the burden of others
we cultivate and carry,
and deep in the future
our children keep us alive.

- Ruth Daigon

(Ruth Daigon died February 17. You can view her biography at Tryst Poet Emeritus: Ruth Daigon.)

Fool's Errands

A thing
cannot be
delivered
enough times:
this is the
rule of dogs
for whom there
are no fool's
errands. To
loop out and
come back is
good all alone.
It's gravy to
carry a ball
or a bone.

- Kay Ryan

THE WOLF INSIDE

Every dog knows there’s a wolf inside

It is our deepest source of pride.

If I say there’s a wolf in you

Where does your mind go?

Rapacious wolf pack?

Old horror movies?

Terrifying fairy tales?

My dear cousins on two legs

What fear has locked you in that cage?

Where wolves sit quietly outside

Looking at you with soft eyes

Waiting to teach you about family

And cooperation and playfulness.

Here’s my advice:

Throw Little Red Riding Hood out on her ass!

Get down on all fours and play with us

As if you life depended on it.

It does.

- Warren Peace

(Translated from canine by Brian Narelle)

Recession

A grotesquerie for so long we mostly ignored it:
Illuminated mammoth Santa atop
the Quikstop's roof, presiding over pumps
That gleamed and gushed in the tarmac lot below it.
Out back, with pumps of their own, the muttering diesels.
And we, for the most part, ordinary folks,
Took things for granted: the idling semis' smoke,
The fuel that streamed into our tanks, above all
Our livelihoods. We stepped indoors to talk
With friends, drank coffee, read the local paper,
Which now bears news of hard hard times. We shiver
Our afternoons are gone. At five 0'clock -
Though once we gave the matter little thought -
Plastic Santa no longer flares with light.

- Sydney Lea

Waiting for the Fire



Not just the temples, lifting

lotuses out of the tangled trees,

not the moon on cool canals,

the profound smell of the paddies,

evening fires in open doorways,

fish and rice the perfect end of wisdom;

but the small bones, the grace, the voices like

clay bells in the wind, all wasted.

If we ever thought of the wreckage

of our unnatural acts,

we would never sleep again

without dreaming a rain of fire:

somewhere God is bargaining for Sodom,

a few good men could save the city; but

in that dirty corner of the mind

we call the soul

the only wash that purifies is tears,

and after all our body counts,

our rape, our mutilations,

nobody here is crying; people who would weep

at the death of a dog

stroll these unburned streets dry-eyed.

But forgetfulness will never walk

with innocence; we save our faces

at the risk of our lives, needing

the wisdom of losses, the gift of despair,

or we could kill again.

Somewhere God is haggling over Sodom:

for the sake of ten good people

I will spare the land.

Where are all those volunteers

to hold back the fire? Look:

when the moon rises over the sea,

no matter where you stand,

the path of the light comes to you.

- Philip Appleman

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. *The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. *Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

- Lisel Mueller

we are running



running and
time is clocking us
from the edge like an only
daughter.
our mothers stream before us,
cradling their breasts in their
hands.
oh pray that what we want
is worth this running,
pray that what we're running
toward
is what we want.


- Lucille Clifton

Last Night As I Was Sleeping
*
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.
Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

- Antonio Machado

(Translated by Robert Bly)

More Rare

more rare
than a bird stumbling
on its shadow
than an ant lying in wait for
its prey,

more rare
than a raven
with white wings,

more rare
than a tornado
enveloped in my arms,
than a mutinous stick,
than a docile flame,

more rare
than all that

is to find myself
at peace for a moment

- Adnan Mohsen
(Translated from the Arabic by James Kirkup)

Death and His Horses


I don't remember the snow falling this evenly when I was a child.
Back then, it seemed all thick drifts and crevasses to dig my hands in.
Now, it's a pale blanket that swaddles my horses' legs.

(No, they are not white; I had borrowed one
the day the apostle took down the details.)

I keep roans and dapple-grays, nothing special.
I like the way their colors flash against
the plains, green in spring, tan in autumn, ice-white in winter.

I live for every stubborn stamp of their hooves,
the swish when they toss their manes.
Most of them I never ride, only keep them fed and watch them roam.

In this season, they stand so still
the snow piles on their haunches and dusts their tails.
they brace together for warmth
and sigh in sudden, steamy plumes.
They eye me resentfully, even at dusk when I lead them into the stables.

The grace of each day slips from their animal minds once it passes.
They forget the green season: new grass crushed between their jaws, sweet spit.
They forget estrus: animal need to regenerate.
They forget what it is to run for joy; in the cold, they only run for terror.

When night comes, I lead them to bed,
Where the straw is soft and ready for their bodies.

- Beth Winegarner

may my heart always be open

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

- e.e. cummings

Plum Branches

I snip tender limbs

knobbed with tight purple swells,

stand their legs in warm water

and wait –

impossibly delicate

pink petals

force darkness open

and sing.

- Jodi Hottel

Waylaid


As the stag and
his does startle
and bolt under
silhouetted firs
and across louring
clouds hunched
on the horizon
a miawing
cat waylays me.

While I bend low
to stroke her
the last birdsong
gives way to a tidal
cricket orchestra.
A star spills out
between the cracks.

I trudge surrounded
by bristling worries

until the whistling
electric tide
snaps me
back once more.

Clouds have vanished.
Stars skip
out to dance
a firefly
plane noses its way
into the silence.

- Raphael Block

Birthday Cake

For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past.
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor
of another era. But how lovely it was,
that time in my restless memory.

This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briars
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.

- Hayden Carruth

Living Things

Our poem
Are like the warthogs
In the zoo
It's hard to say
Why there should be such creatures

But once our life gets into them
As sometimes happens
Our poems
Turn into living things
And there's no arguing
With living things
They are
They way they are

Our poems
May be rough
Or delicate
Little
Or great

But always
They have inside them
A confluence of cries
And secret languages

And always
They are improvident
And free
They keep
A kind of Sabbath

They play
On sooty fire escapes
And window ledges

They wander in and out
Of jails and gardens
They sparkle
In the deep mines
They sing
In breaking waves
And rock like wooden cradles.

- Anne Porter

The Journey

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.

Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that

small, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving
you are arriving.

- David Whyte

IOWA , winter in town, 1941

Furnace heat flows up my flannel pajamas
from the hot grate on the kitchen floor.
When you're nine, it's a boon.

Don McNiell, all the way from Chicago, calls out,
"second call to breakfast, Philco's call to breakfast"
every school morning from our own
Philco Cathedral radio on the shelf that Dad built.
Boon number two.

Oatmeal bubbling at my elbow on the big burner
of the Tappan stove with the always wrong clock
I stand by with the full cup of raisins.
Boon number three.

Watching my Dad shaving and singing
with that radio at the cracked porcelain sink
with the stainless steel back splash
he made to last forever.
His delight with his off key singing is ...
Boon number four.

"Hand me a towel," he says, "not that one
with the chicken, that one with the stripe."
No boon, no harm.

The mismatched oak chairs,
this time painted a strange green
crowd around the way too big table
in the too small Iowa kitchen.
No harm.

I get the worst seat in the room, there,
by the G.E. frig with the coil on top.
"Hand me this. Hand me that.
Honey boy, reach for the milk in there."
Still lookin' for a boon.

And the yellow and red rose patterned oil cloth,
from Woolworth's Five and Dime,
scrubbed at least three times a day,
so close to my nine year old nose
never stopped stinking.

- Doug von Koss

On the banks of that river, the river Gualala—

Memorial Day Weekend 2003



On the banks of that river, the river Gualala,

in the forest land of the Kashia Pomo

whose few remaining and ancient redwood elders

first stretched skyward

centuries before the birth of Christ,

amidst a community

of ordinary men

who had gathered there,

I was held,

for an instant,

by the clear night air,

as if in a dream,

on the edge

of an unseen

precipice.



Quiet, open and attentive,

straining to see, I gazed steadily

into the gradual, growing light

of another dawn,

and into that dimness

a faint, yet terrifying beauty began

to emerge—

contours of a vast, unexplored canyon

intricate,

surprising shapes,

carved, carefully over the years,

down,

down through the richly colored, layered,

soft sandstone

of my soul—



shapes, etched in the beginning upon the surface

by tiny rivulets

of loss,

insinuating their way down

into cracks and crevices,

cutting

little gullies,

growing gradually into streams,

small tributaries,

yearning to be a part

that final flowing river

of loss.



And with that fleeting vision

came a certainty,

a knowing where I must go—

down those treacherous

crumbling canyon walls,

down deep

beyond denial,

beyond rage,

down those canyon walls

till I reach that river

and plunge headlong

into the years

and years

and years

of unshed

tears.

- Bill Denham

We Have A Beautiful Mother

We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green lap
Immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything we know.

- Alice Walker

Things About The Sun

Any time the sun
touches our part of the earth
we say the sun shines.

Sometimes dogs bark at the sun,
but I don’t mind it.

There are flowers the sun never sees.

Many times I have said to it,
“Wait!” And it waited.

With the sun, it will be all right
after I’m gone.

Where it can, the sun endlessly
examines things, nothing too large
or small for long, long attention.
When I walk I would view
like that -- all: rich, poor, young,
old, near, far. And I’d save a report
for whenever the sun does.

Mornings when it looks
at me, for an instant there are
all those other times.

- William Stafford

Spring

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her –
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.


- Mary Oliver

The Dry Tortugas

They were building a house in the Dry Tortugas,
less for the solitude there than the open eyes
of a swallowtailed hummingbird they had seen once
on a fishing trip — the early Fifties, he reeling in
an oversized yellowfin, Humphrey Bogart
facing the wind, one foot on the rail in To Have and Have Not,
she whistling the stuttered call of the Amazonian kingfisher,
and singing in Spanish to flocks of Bonaparte gulls.
It comes to nothing in the end, though the land
is paced off and measured and two palms felled
to expand the view, a road graded the requisite mile,
and some of their friends fly down from New York
to surprise them, circle the islands all morning, gleeful and chic
in their 4-seater Cessna (he's something exalted at Chase),
and later the bottles of Myer's and Appleton Gold sweat
dark rings on the terrace flagstones, and someone's pink
lipstick makes delicate kissprints along the rim of her glass.
No one has told me what happened — his heart
attack in Guatemala, her premonition about the wide
and empty view, or the world swinging in
with its usual brazen distractions — but they framed
the architect's plans of the house, and this
is what I inherit, a rendering in colored pencil:
what they were dreaming before I was born.

- Molly Fisk

The Enigma We Answer by Living
*
Einstein didn't speak as a child
waiting till a sentence formed and
emerged full-blown from his head.
*
I do the thing, he later wrote, which
nature drives me to do. Does a fish
know the water in which he swims?
*
This came up in conversation
with a man I met by chance,
friend of a friend of a friend,
*
who passed through town carrying
three specimen boxes of insects
he'd collected in the Grand Canyon—
*
one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,
one for butterflies and skippers,
each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,
*
tiny morphologic differences
revealing how adaptation
happened over time. The deeper down
*
he hiked, the older the rock
and the younger
the strategy for living in that place.
*
And in my dining room the universe
found its way into this man
bent on cataloguing each innovation,
*
though he knows it will all disappear—
the labels, the skippers, the canyon.
We agreed then, the old friends and the new,
*
that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart
from the whole, as if we'd sprung
from an idea out in space, rather than emerging
*
from the sequenced larval mess of creation
that binds us with the others,
all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet
*
that's made us want to name
each thing and try to tell
its story against the vanishing.
*
- Alison Hawthorne Deming

Thatcher

Bespoke for weeks, he turned up some morning
Unexpectedly, his bicycle slung
With a light ladder and a bag of knives.
He eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,

Opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw.
Next, the bundled rods: hazel and willow
Were flicked for weight, twisted in case they'd snap.
It seemed he spent the morning warming up.

Then fixed the ladder, laid out well-honed blades
And snipped at straw and sharpened ends of rods
That, bent in two, made a white-pronged staple
For pinning down his world, handful by handful.

Couchant for days on sods above the rafters,
He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched alltogether
Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,
and left them gaping at his Midas touch.

- Seamus Heaney

The Ticket

On the night table
Beside my bed
I keep a small
Blue ticket ...

I keep it carefully
Because I'm old
Which means
I'll soon be leaving
For another country

Where possibly
Some blinding-bright
Enormous angel
Will stop me
At the border

And ask
To see my ticket.

- Anne Porter

The Man Who Killed His Brother

I do not know
how to spare him
from this wound
that still throbs
beneath the flesh.

Reminder of how it was,
that sudden rip of light,
that toppling,
the discovery
that nothing
could be undone, ever, act frozen in
time.

How he has lived with it,
so many days,
so many nights
stretching into manhood,
carrying it
like a weight of
stone fastened to his back,
always the sorrow,
unending grief,
ceaseless lamentation
of the heart.

Even now it is sobbing quietly,
still not knowing,
if it ever did,
how not to remember.

- Dorothy Walters

(The man who accidentally killed his younger brother, in a hunting accident, was the well known poet Gregory Orr. I wonder how many of us still carry the pain of unintentional hurts we dealt to others at some time in the past. footnote: Dorothy Walters)