Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

On Discovering a Butterfly

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer - and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.
- Vladimir Nabokov

Valentines Day

　
The drive from the airport

took us two days.

We had to sample each other

in bedrooms and showers,

in hot-tubs, in the frilled thrill

of paid for rooms.


Weeks later, we did it in the car

like kids. It was awkward, I had forgotten

how a small car can restrict a wild dance

to a brief jerky minuet.

We hastily gathered ourselves

lest the young show up

with a camera.


Later still, we found an indented valley

in some hilly grass.

This Valentines Day

there will be a different kind of passion,

a love of wine and warm sheets,

an old movie to watch together.

- Eric Ashford

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

- Jane Hirshfield

The Sonnets to Orpheus
Sonnet XIII, First Part,


Plump apple, smooth banana, melon, peach,
gooseberry…How all this affluence
speaks death and life into the mouth…I sense…
Observe it from a child’s transparent features

while he tastes. This comes from far away.
What miracle is happening in your mouth?
Instead of words, discoveries flow out
from the ripe fruit, astonished to be free.

Dare to say what “apple” truly is.
This sweetness that feels thick, dark, dense at first;
then, exquisitely lifted in your taste

grows clarified, awake and luminous,
double-meaninged, sunny, earthy, real -
Oh knowledge, pleasure - inexhaustible.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Yesterday

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time

he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here

I say nothing

he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you

I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do

- W. S. Merwin

Snow Talk

So I said, “I don’t have a poem about snow

but maybe Snow, you got a poem about me?”

So Snow said, “You? You who hide out from me

in your always green, never freeze, home by the bay?”

So I said, “Hey, lighten up! You’re the first snow I’ve

seen in a long, long time. You caught me by surprise.

Suddenly everything white over night you know? ”

With an attitude that shocked me, Snow said,

“What’s wrong with white,

great overwhelming vistas of white?

White upon white ‘till you pray

for a touch of brown or blue!

But not today buddy, no not today.

Today you are mine, all mine

At fifty-five hundred feet.

Look at me.

Am I not beautiful?

Do I not take your breath away

doing what I do?

I am snow.

Perfectly impartial to all who know me

Yes, even to you who avoid me.

I am snow you fool

And I am beautiful."


- Doug von Koss

Mt. Shasta, CA October 2010

La Niña

Finally, the satellite image showed a storm nearing the Pacific coast. January and February had been dry with record heat, so there might not be many more chances to experience the fierce majesty. If she jumped in her camper van now, she might get to the coast before the front made landfall.

Passing the Cape Fear Café in Duncans Mills she imagined a sign: “Now Entering the Pacific Watershed” and felt a rush of anticipation. She parked her camper high on a bluff above Jenner-by-the-Sea right at the rim of the continent.

alone and all one
wave and ocean surge ashore
smoothing the edge

From the wild horizon it arrived: the electricity in thunderheads, rain then hail pelting the roof, the camper buffeted by gusts. It was nature throwing a pebble at her window. She donned her rain gear and scrambled down to play with the driftwood.

stormy beach

thousands of shore birds

not many flying

And later, all dry and snug with a hot-water bottle, she gazes west and daydreams of dolphins and dead zones, salmon and redwoods, Japan and Zen temples. “To find the self, you must lose the self,” Dogen said.

surfing below the surface

stories rise from silence

-- images in a darkroom


And there, in the eye of a storm on the Pacific Rim, she loses herself in a place that knows no yearning and refuses nothing -- like a cliff or an ocean.


- andrew zarrillo

On Hearing a Poem Recited, Not Read


The poem flew at me
Little darts, pricking my skin
piercing my belly, my arms, my eyes
Flew at me on swift, black wings
trailing a smoky blur past my ears
Flew all around me
furious, then curiously quiet

No words sounded like words
read from a page
They had been lifted
the night before, years before
Flipped up, one by one
letter by letter let fall
on the tongue and dissolved
like melting snowflakes trickling down
through the heart, into the belly
to the toes, the fingertips
Pulled back through the blood
through the brain
down into the back of the throat
into the cheeks and spit out
Little darts of words
big wings of words
charging the air all around me
There were no words, only language
Tongue moved by muscle and blood

The poem entered me and exited
leaving little points of pain and light
soft feathery strokes on my skin and hair
Leaving me empty of words

- Christine Walker

Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World


The morning air is all awash with angels…
- Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

Who is most among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because

He’s astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. “Hey, Ma,

I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?” She gasps,
And then I remember that my father

Has been dead for nearly a year. “Shit, Mom,”
I say. “I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry—

How did I forget?” “It’s okay,” she says.
“I made him a cup of instant coffee

This morning and left it on the table—
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years—

And I didn’t realize my mistake
Until this afternoon.” My mother laughs

At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days
And sing our praise to forgetfulness

Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.
Those angels burden and unbalance us.

Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.
Those angels, forever falling, snare us

And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.

- Sherman Alexie

The Kama Sutra of Kindness: Position Number 3

It's easy to love
through a cold spring
when the poles
of the willows
turn green
pollen falls like
a yellow curtain
and the scent of
Paper Whites
clots
the air
but to love for a lifetime
takes talent
you have to mix yourself
with the strange
beauty of someone
else
wake each morning
for 72,000
mornings in
a row so
breathed and
bound and
tangled
that you can hardly
sort out
your arms
and
legs
you have to
find forgiveness
in everything
even ink stains
and broken
cups
you have to be willing to move through
life
together
the way the long
grasses move
in a field
when you careen
blindly toward
the other
side
there's never going to be anything
straight or predictable
about your path
except the
flattening
and the springing
back
you just go on walking for years
hand in hand
waist deep in the weeds
bent slightly forward
like two question
marks
and all the while it
burns
my dear
it burns beautifully above
you
and goes on
burning
like a relentless
sun

- Mary Mackey

13 Ways To Look At A Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

- Wallace Stevens

My first experience of performed poetry

Of course there was alway the doggerel
that Uncle Dan would recite
when he visited from Seattle
or school assignments
but I am not talking about that.


The first time I sought out the experience of poetry
was at the Berkeley Little Theater
and Robert Bly and Gary Snyder presented.

It was 1972 the Viet Nam War was burning
and I had never heard of Robert Bly.
He presented "Silence in the Snowy Field"
In contrast he presented "Teeth Mother, Naked at Last"
a hate poem, a genere that I,
a Scot with Viking blood
love to this day.

Robert walked and flew his hands
and expectorated with vehemence....
He meant it.
And I, a recently discharged vet
who had become a conscientious objector
secluded myself on Mount Tamalpias
and came down once a week only
to draft council
and this was my first venture out
of my routine for months.... I crossed the bay.

Gary Snyder, author of Axe Handles
was the one I went to see.
Both he and I loved the woods
had sailed in the merchant marine
and had buddhist leanings.
Yet he read from a book.

His words were even sounding
though profound as always
but presented as
an assignment, completed.
Not as a passionate explosion
of viscera, spit and gesticulation
like Robert as they alternated poems.

Gary's presentation was honest
forthright, and the way I now read
my poems, which I did not begin
to write for another 20 years.

But to capture the poem in the blood
not in desiccated text
That is my dream
and my expectation of myself

For poems are like sperm.
There are so many of them.
the good ones, though
I want to commit
to my living being.

- David Bean

Egrets

Where the path closed
down and over,
through the scumbled leaves,
fallen branches,
through the knotted catbrier,
I kept going. Finally
I could not
save my arms
from thorns; soon
the mosquitoes
smelled me, hot
and wounded, and came
wheeling and whining.
And that's how I came
to the edge of the pond:
black and empty
except for a spindle
of bleached reeds
at the far shore
which, as I looked,
wrinkled suddenly
into three egrets - - -
a shower
of white fire!
Even half-asleep they had
such faith in the world
that had made them - - -
tilting through the water,
unruffled, sure,
by the laws
of their faith not logic,
they opened their wings
softly and stepped
over every dark thing.

- Mary Oliver

The Woman at the Washington Zoo


The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I. . . .
this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my grave, with no
Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,
The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief—
Only I complain. . . . this serviceable
Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses
But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,
Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining
In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death—
Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
And there come not to me, as come to these,
The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain,
Pigeons settling on the bears’ bread, buzzards
Tearing the meat the flies have clouded. . . .
Vulture,
When you come for the white rat that the foxes left,
Take off the red helmet of your head, the black
Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man:
The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,
To whose hand of power the great lioness
Stalks, purring. . . .
You know what I was,
You see what I am: change me, change me!

- Randall Jarrell

Requiem for Christchurch

Earthquakes destroy the past.

I never thought I would live
long enough to witness
the end of my city
but Tuesday lunch time, a cold grey day,
the earth, like a hunting cat, pounced.
We tossed and tumbled,
with our houses see-sawing under us.

Initially, our city was built
on a swamp; when the earth
split open, water and silt
bubbled out through the cracks,
pot-holing pavements and roads.

The cathedral, where we prayed
to God, that same cathedral
collapsed -one wall and its spire,
on to unwitting passers-by.

Yet it is quite surreal;
my garden is still a wonderland,
even though half a block away,
everything is in disarray.

I mourn for the lost, the maimed, the dead.
I mourn for our grieving city.

- Diana Neutze


(Diana Neutze is a poet living in Christchurch NZ.)

Loving Humans
For Aung San Suu Kyi

Loving humans
Is tricky
Sometimes
A slap
In the face
Is all you get
For doing it
Just right.

Loving humans is a job
Like any other
Only
More
Bumps
On the way
To work
Which is full on
All the time.

Loving humans
Makes us
Want
To invite
Ourselves to tea
With rancid
Dictators
We think we
Can convince
Of our
Story’s side
While all
They think
About
While
We sit & dream
Is how
They can
Get away
With
Poisoning
Our tea.

And how
If only they
Had
Enough tea
Already
Brewed
They could
Waterboard us
To death
With it.

Loving humans
Means
Writing poems & songs
Novels & plays, slogans, chants
& protest signs
Our critics
Want
To stone
Us for
While
We think of
Them
As people
Under different
Circumstances
We might
Be able
To help.

There is
Indeed
A Buddha
In
Every one
Of us
Loving humans
With all
Our clear &
Unmistakable
Reluctance
To evolve
Makes this hard
For most humans
To see.

But not you.

- Alice Walker

A Winter Day

Snow on the roof.

All afternoon I read in the sunlit room
and jotted down words now and then,
troubled now and then by thoughts
of how long
the light would last. Now

shadows have amassed
at the feet of objects, and soon
the unmade bed, the scattered papers, the books
in rows and piles, the cups of tea gone cold,
the plates and crumbs from the lunch we shared,

will all look stranded in the rising dark,
like wreckage from a ship spoiled by storm.
Until I turn on a lamp
and see

the heart's sphere squared to make a room,
the mind's love entrusted
to a few words on a page.

- Li-Young Lee

It Is March
It is March and black dust falls out of the books
Soon I will be gone
The tall spirit who lodged here has
Left already
On the avenues the colorless thread lies under
Old prices

When you look back there is always the past
Even when it has vanished
But when you look forward
With your dirty knuckles and the wingless
Bird on your shoulder
What can you write

The bitterness is still rising in the old mines
The fist is coming out of the egg
The thermometers out of the mouths of the corpses

At a certain height
The tails of the kites for a moment are
Covered with footsteps

Whatever I have to do has not yet begun
- W. S. Merwin

How to Create an Agnostic

Singing with my son, I clapped my hands
Just as lightning struck.

It was dumb luck,
But my son, in awe, thought

That I’d created the electricity.
He asked, “Dad, how’d you do that?”

Before I could answer, thunder shook the house
And set off neighborhood car alarms.

I thought that my son, always in love with me,
Might fall to his knees with adoration.

“Dad,” he said. “Can you burn
down that tree outside my window?

The one that looks like a giant owl?”
O, my little disciple, my one-boy choir,

I can’t do that because your father,
Your half-assed messiah, is afraid of fire.

- Sherman Alexie

What We Need

The Emperor,
his bullies
and henchmen
terrorize the world
every day,

which is why
every day

we need

a little poem
of kindness,

a small song
of peace

a brief moment
of joy.

- David Budbill

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry

Young Man

I seemed always standing
before a door
to which I had no key,
although I knew it hid behind it
a gift for me.

Until one day I closed
my eyes a moment, stretched
then looked once more.
And not surprised, I did not mind it
when the hinges creaked
and, smiling, Death
held out his hands to me.

- John Haines
(1924-2011)

Listening to the Koln Concert


After we had loved each other intently,
we heard notes tumbling together,
in late winter, and we heard ice
falling from the ends of twigs.

The notes abandon so much as they move.
They are the food not eaten, the comfort
not taken, the lies not spoken.
The music is my attention to you.

And when the music came again,
later in the day, I saw tears in you r eyes.
I saw you turn your face away
so that the others would not see.

When men and women come together,
how much they have to abandon! Wrens
make their nests of fancy threads
and string ends, animals

abandon all their money each year.
What is that men and women leave?
Harder then wrens' doing, they have
to abandon their longing for the perfect.

The inner nest not made by instinct
will never be quite round,
and each has to enter the nest
made by the other imperfect bird.

- Robert Bly

Report of the Fourteenth Subcommittee on Convening a Discussion Group

This is how things begin to tilt into change,
how coalitions are knit from strands of hair,
of barbed wire, twine, knitting wool and gut,
how people ease into action arguing each inch,
but the tedium of it is watching granite erode.

Let us meet to debate meeting, the day, the time,
the length. Let us discuss whether we will sit
or stand or hang from the ceiling or take it lying
down. Let us argue about the chair and the table and
the chairperson and the motion to table the chair.

In the room fog gathers under the ceiling and thickens
in every brain. Let us form committees spawning
subcommittees all laying little moldy eggs of reports.
Under the grey fluorescent sun they will crack
to hatch scuttling lizards of more committees.

The Pliocene gathers momentum and fades.
the earth tilts on its axis. More and more snows
fall each winter and less melt each spring.
A new ice age is pressing the glaciers forward
over the floor. We watch the wall of ice advance.

We are evolving into molluscs, barnacles
clinging to wood and plastic, metal and smoke
while the stale and flotsam-laden tide of rhetoric
inches up the shingles and dawdles back.
This is true virtue: to sit here and stay awake,

to listen, to argue, to wade on through the muck
wrestling to some momentary small agreement
like a pinhead pearl prized from a dragon-oyster.
I believe in this democracy as I believe
there is blood in my veins, but oh, oh, in me

lurks a tyrant with a double-bladed ax who longs
to swing it wide and shining, who longs to stand
and shriek, You Shall Do as I Say, pig-bastards.
No more committees but only picnics and orgies
and dances. I have spoken. So be it forevermore.

- Marge Piercy

Ancient Egyptian Love
*** Translated by Michael V. Fox
*
This love is as good
as oil and honey to the throat,
as linen to the body,
as fine garments to the gods,
as incense to worshippers when they enter in,
as the little seal-ring to my finger.
*
It is like a ripe pear in a man's hand.
It is like the dates we mix with wine.
It is like the seeds the baker adds to bread.
*
We will be together even when old age comes.
*
And the days in between
will be food set before us,
dates and honey, bread and wine.
*
The poem/song dates from the 19th or 20th Egyptian dynasty (ca. 1300-1100 B.C.E.).* It was found written in hieroglyphics on a vase.
*
*The poem was translated by Michael V. Fox, currently professor of Hebrew & Semitic studies at the U of Wisconsin in Madison.*

An African Elegy

We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.
We are precious.
And one day our suffering
Will turn into the wonders of the earth.
There are things that burn me now
Which turn golden when I am happy.
Do you see the mystery of our pain?
That we bear poverty
And are able to sing and dream sweet things
And that we never curse the air when it is warm
Or the fruit when it tastes so good
Or the lights that bounce gently on the waters?
We bless things even in our pain.
We bless them in silence.
That is why our music is so sweet.
It makes the air remember.
There are secret miracles at work
That only Time will bring forth.
I too have heard the dead singing.
And they tell me that
This life is good
They tell me to live it gently
With fire, and always with hope.
There is wonder here
And there is surprise
In everything the unseen moves.
The ocean is full of songs.
The sky is not an enemy.
Destiny is our friend.

- Ben Okri

Hurt Hawks

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.

I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

- Robinson Jeffers

Just Enough
*
Soil for legs
Axe for hands
Flower for eyes
Bird for ears
Mushrooms for nose
Smile for mouth
Songs for lungs
Sweat for skin
Wind for mind
*
- Nanao Sakaki

Winter Stars

I went out at night alone;
The young blood flowing beyond the sea
Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings—
I bore my sorrow heavily.

But when I lifted up my head
From shadows shaken on the snow,
I saw Orion in the east
Burn steadily as long ago.

From windows in my father’s house,
Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,
I watched Orion as a girl
Above another city’s lights.

Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,
The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,
All things are changed, save in the east
The faithful beauty of the stars.

- Sara Teasdale

The following five poems from Japan were translated by Kenneth Rexroth.


I can no longer tell dream from reality.
Into what world shall I awake
from this bewildering dream?

— Akazome Emon



The fireflies' light
How easily it goes on
How easily it goes out again.

— Chine-Jo


The crying plovers
on darkening Narumi
Beach, grow closer, wing
To wing, as the moon declines
Behind the rising tide.

— Fujiwara No Sueyoshi



I loathe the seas of being
And not being
And long for the mountain
Of bliss untouched by
The changing tides.

— Anonymous



If only the world
Would remain this way,
Some fishermen
Drawing a little rowboat
Up the riverbank.

— Minamoto No Sanetomo