Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Taking the Dogs to the Beach

Took my dogs to the beach today -the old lady Sara and
the young upstart Emmy.

Sara, a lab mix, used to live to go places but is now mostly confined to the yard; she was very excited!

Nevertheless, I had to lift all 95lbs of her
into the back of my Prius.

Emmy, my sharp and alert 68 pound Sheppard
practically jumped over us to fit in as well.

They smelled the beach miles before we arrived.
The car fogged up with dog breath.

Out like we came in, old lady Sara huffing and puffing
before we got 10 feet from the car, Emmy already annoyed at the slow pace.

30 yards from where we started, Sara lies down near the lapping shore of the sea. Her eyes and her memory were much bigger than her arthritic body could manage. No frolicking in the surf, no chasing of balls sticks, birds or sea foam.

This was it.

She could go no further. She lay panting in the sand, staring out to sea.

Emmy wined and pulled on the leash saying without any words: “come on let’s go!”

I wonder what she sees, my old friend, in the rhythmic pounding of the surf, the eternal grinding down of things.

Does she know?

Perhaps…

All that lives must die,

all things flow back to the sea from which they came.

The best we can do is remember the good things
and not be afraid.

For God will not leave us comfortless.


- George Gittleman

[Larry Robinson]

O Sweet Spontaneous


O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting


fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked


thee,
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy


beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and


buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true


to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover


thou answerest




them only with


spring)


- e.e. cummings

[Larry Robinson]

Until We Rise


They stood, teetering, on the window sills,
97 stories or 100 stories high,
and then, looking back
into the smoke and flames,
they held hands and jumped
hurling
spinning
careening
tumbling
through miles of open air
until they landed here,
in our hearts, where we
dig through the rubble
of our lives
to find them
and reach in, taking their hands in ours,
until we rise with them
from the Land of the Dead
into the new life we promise to become.


- Pesha Joyce Gertler

[Larry Robinson]

Shirt


The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians


Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band


Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze


At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—


The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out


Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.


A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once


He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—


Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked


Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans


Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,


Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,


The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:


George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit


And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,


The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.


- Robert Pinsky

[Larry Robinson]

Sonnets To Orpheus
Part Two, XII


Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
Where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much.
as the curve of the body as it turns away.


What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.


Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.


Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne,
becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.


- Rainer Marie Rilke
(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

[Larry Robinson]

Milk Bone
only crumbs in my pocket
we walk slowly


smells no longer interest you
your world reduced to me


I am your religion
I will betray you
we walk the edge together
we will both fall far


- Les Bernstein

[Larry Robinson]

Debtors


They used to say we're living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I'm alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?

- Jim Harrison

[Larry Robinson]

Blessings for the Tomb, the Cocoon, the Liminal Space



May you surrender to the tender gravity of your grief and loss

May you give honor and homage to that which has fallen away

May you integrate the wisdoms of your passage

May you feel the sacred burden of your own life in your arms

May you treat yourself with exquisite kindness and patience

May you find peace in your cocoon . . . acceptance and surrender

May you be transformed by your own darkness and rise renewed

• Kay Crista

[Larry Robinson]

Gravity of Stars


Discovered while staring at the bottom of a coffee-cup
that I’ve spent too much time looking-up.
That if your head is arched too high in the clouds
you can’t appreciate how much you have grown
once you have forgotten the ground.
I want to forget about stars.
About things that fly.
Skyscrapers.
Superheroes.
And God.
I want to find magnitude in a molehill,
hard work on an ant’s back,
bad choice in an empty bottle,
forgiveness in a person’s car wreck.
I want to see color the same way a blind man must feel it.
Tell me when it was when I forgot about simplicity.
When I started to believe that someone who could do trigonometry in their
head mattered more than a 33-year-old man who finally woke up this
morning
and decided he was done wasting his life.
Today, he was gonna figure out to be better at living again.
We need to remember to go up to every person we see with scars
shake their hand and say,
Congratulations for surviving whatever it was
that caused you to hurt yourself.
Stop wishing on stars and start believing in ourselves again
for this world is a ticking time bomb;
everyday that passes is just another moment less.
I want to see my reflection in an eye of a fly.
No more stargazing.
Waterfall wishing.
Prayer giving.
I’m starting to get a crook in my neck by starring in the clouds for too long.
I want to be inspired by heartbeats again.
Hold people like my favorite book,
kiss the fat pimple on a teenager’s forehead and say,
I hope you don’t think that is a factor in how beautiful you are,
‘Cuz it is not.
Tell Michael Ray Stevens
It doesn’t make you bad to be in love with a boy—
love is what makes us human.
Be happy that you feel something for someone—
you’d be surprised how difficult that is for some.
I want to tell pilots to try swimming.
That the sky is way too beautiful for us to be in it.
We need to come down from our high-horse.
Tomorrow I’m going to travel Austin, TX by crawling on my knees
in hopes that when I stand back up I’ll see things differently.
I’m done dreaming of astronauts.
The moon is a made-up romantic.
Put me in the pavement.
Lie my carcass in the cracks.
Let me be humbled by the power of speaking by the silent dance
of a deaf man’s hands.
I want to watch closely the lips of a mute
who wishes for nothing other than to hear the sound of his voice.
Visit a hospital and hold the hand of a woman in a comma dreaming
about moving again.
For the sky has nothing in it as interesting as the diversity on this earth.
That is why I don’t care anymore about flying.
There is a reason the stars keep falling.
They are jealous of the things we get to see
by just being here—
On
the
ground. . .. .


- Lacey Roop

[Dorothy Friberg]

Another beautiful start to another beautiful day. Thanks, Larry

Gravity of Stars

[Larry Robinson]

In the Storm


Some black ducks
were shrugged up
on the shore.
It was snowing


hard, from the east,
and the sea
was in disorder.
Then some sanderlings,


five inches long
with beaks like wire,
flew in,
snowflakes on their backs,


and settled
in a row
behind the ducks --
whose backs were also


covered with snow --
so close
they were all but touching,
they were all but under


the roof of the duck's tails,
so the wind, pretty much,
blew over them.
They stayed that way, motionless,


for maybe an hour,
then the sanderlings,
each a handful of feathers,
shifted, and were blown away


out over the water
which was still raging.
But, somehow,
they came back


and again the ducks,
like a feathered hedge,
let them
crouch there, and live.


If someone you didn't know
told you this,
as I am telling you this,
would you believe it?


Belief isn't always easy.
But this much I have learned --
if not enough else --
to live with my eyes open.


I know what everyone wants
is a miracle.
This wasn't a miracle.
Unless, of course, kindness --


as now and again
some rare person has suggested --
is a miracle.
As surely it is.


- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Break The Mirror
In the morning
After taking cold shower
—–what a mistake—–
I look at the mirror.
There, a funny guy,
Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin,
—–what a pity—–
Poor, dirty, old man!
He is not me, absolutely not.
Land and life
Fishing in the ocean
Sleeping in the desert with stars
Building a shelter in the mountains
Farming the ancient way
Singing with coyotes
Singing against nuclear war–
I’ll never be tired of life.
Now I’m seventeen years old,
Very charming young man.
I sit down quietly in lotus position,
Meditating, meditating for nothing.
Suddenly a voice comes to me:
“To stay young,
To save the world,
Break the mirror.”


- Nanao Sakaki

[Larry Robinson]

What They Did To Sitting Bull


Lured into the fort by promise
of meat for his people, they meant to
murder him for the Ghost Dance
and because he was a power they
could not understand or tame,
sho they did.
Murder him.
They shot and shot him until
he fell in the snow like a sack
of wet corn meal and the blood
ran out of him like the cry
of a lone Crow in an empty sky.


Then they quartered the body,
hacked it into 4 pieces
with an axe,
thinking this would keep him
from coming back and put an end
to his power.
Because they had not understanding,
they could not know
it increased his power 4 times,
sent him in the 4 directions and
opened 4 doors into the the starry worlds.
You can fool a straving dog with
the promise of meat, but
a man of real power will
eat your heart and relish
every lie and frail conceit;
he will feast on your weakness
and for every one you kill,
4 will come seeking your unborn children
and they will carve them from your loins and
they will carry them away
and feed them in the empty sky
for the meat which was promised him.


- Red Hawk

[sandoak]

Thank you for posting this poem by Red Hawk. I'm especially happy to see it today. Just after midnight I finished editing the chapter on Sitting Bull in my book, Twenty-six Companions (available mid-June). I have met him in one of the four directions he was sent.

What They Did To Sitting Bull

Lured into the fort by promise
of meat for his people, they meant to
murder him for the Ghost Dance...

[Larry Robinson]

Frank Givens Encountering Crazy Horse

When Frank Givens first wondered
how many souls he himself possessed,
where each one resided and who else,
pondering the same things, was
ahead or behind him in this exploration,
Frank Givens accepted the notion that
he might, just perhaps, be just a little
crazy as in “crazed” as Crazy Horse
or any other commonly accepted
hot house shaman or witch doctor,
all of which goes to prove that
accepting anything stops creation cold,
leaving its tracks frozen as fossil
embedded in those proverbial sands of time
where footsteps either vanish or
immortalize like chevrons on sleeves
worn by Christian soldiers onward
in futile battles fought for no purpose
other than the preachments of late night
downtown British soap operas crying,
laughing, entertaining as if seriousness
of purpose solely seeks to sadden
such viewers who judge themselves above
Letterman, Leno, Night Live, or Kimmel.

However, let us go back with Frank Givens
to just what Crazy Horse is all about,
horse disturbed by the American armies,
first of hunterous madmen slaughtering
tatanka on the plains removing
life in the form of food, buffalo food.
“Before I go crazy,” horse musing,
“First I must try and try to understand,
just what I am missing about by what
authority, by what Jesus, these hunters
simply (Horse-Now-Crazy discovering irony)
presume all right to the food of my
people, these herds which diminish


before the onslaught of long guns
fired from their smoking iron beasts.
By what right? And so, I break
from any sense of reality, justice,
or Sioux civility and, instead,
become bitter weed, ferocious steed,
invisible soul of all my people,
raining carnage upon the barbaric
infidel, the crusading hateful killer
of all that we know to be sacred, I the
forever wronged and enraged, Crazy Horse.”


- Ed Coletti

[Larry Robinson]

The Dead Woman

If suddenly you do not exist,
if suddenly you no longer live,
I shall live on.


I do not dare,
I do not dare to write it,
if you die.


I shall live on.


For where a man has no voice,
there, my voice.


Where blacks are beaten,
I cannot be dead.
When my brothers go to prison
I shall go with them.


When victory,
not my victory,
but the great victory comes,
even though I am mute I must speak;
I shall see it come even
though I am blind.


No, forgive me.
If you no longer live,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but
I shall stay alive,
because above all things
you wanted me indomitable,
and, my love, because you know that I am not only a man
but all mankind.

- Pablo Neruda

[Larry Robinson]

First Night


The chapel holds
many truths
Christ on the wall
Surrounded by stations
Rose-red crackled glass
Setting the last
Hot May Day rays
To the west


Resting
Peaceful
Not crucified
Buddha
Praying-hand mudra


Medipraying
Medipraying


Common ground found
Amid cubicled kneelers,


Alters and offerings
Flowers and incense
Not so different
Buddha and Christ


Common mind Blind
Deaf and blind
No ears, no eyes
No knowing
No difference


Medipraying
Medipraying




Prayatating
Prayatating


Fitting so nicely
Together


Supporting
Supporting
This little piece of peace




Angela's white walls
Dorothy's brown
The new
The old
The dogs still click and
The clocks still bark


But the Silence


Remains


The same


- Connie Ayers

[Larry Robinson]

Monet's Garden


I long in Spring to go again

where the Epte weds the Seine,
to see the glories of Giverny
born on Monet's palette, willowy
brushed nymphea fronds, the
lilies open to the new day's dawn.


We saw it flamboyant May
as all about the gardens lay
the colors that seduced his brush
that muse and canvas matched and meshed
to create in this private heaven
the promise of his soaring passion.


Yes, we shall return tomorrow
seek him out in winter's shadow,
ask to borrow from his cache
of wildest color and request
he give the seeds we'll take with care,
to plant our own Giverny here.


Giverny, France


- Maxine Collin Williams

[Larry Robinson]

Listening to My Mother


My mother says the author
has a musky intelligence. Musky
because you can smell the forest
shoaled with the secrets of earth,
roots, hooved beasts nosing the ground
alert animal, breathing and listening.

I know what she means. Still
it startles me to hear her say it, as if
she were myself, the same
erotic attachment of body
to body. Rivers in us, storms
and spinning stars. All parts,
all scents and shiftings, shades
of salt and fragrant blossoming,
blood and the grit of the soil
of memory. She says

the sound of stones turning
underwater is a kind of music.
Resonant, I answer. We are quiet
then, remembering together
our separate lives.

Perhaps she heard the stones turn
like that before I was born,
standing at the water’s edge,
her ear tuned to the dense energies
of the wordless world. Perhaps
she turned her body underwater
like a slick fish, and heard the stones
as I have heard them roll
downstream in the current that
shoved against her, that musk
of presence the angels envy us
in their disembodied glory.

Once I turned like those stones
humming in her belly, in that original
watery world. I weighed her down
with the musk of my presence.
Heavily she turned in her sleep,
dreaming of water, dreaming
herself a turning stone, dreaming
the weightless resonance
of her own life. I listen,

the sound moves out from turning
stones through water, not fast as light,
but slow as a fetus turning. Not
like church bells, but like china
become bone, the resonance
of ancestors. Her voice and my voice
the same musky history
of generations, our lives together

turning like the radio rosary hour,
like small stones murmuring
in the same stream. Sometimes
I hear my own voice, see my own
face, a mirror dance, the long line
of women a ribbon running
in an Irish knot, origin and end
the same mystery. My mother says

and I listen. Stones underwater
and the rich world turning through
us, in us, a musky music, raw
with the wild we love.


- Elizabeth Herron

[Larry Robinson]

Walking Meditation

My elderly mother
takes my arm,
leaning on me
for support
as we head uphill
toward home.

She moves
very, very slowly,
and I find
I must focus
and breathe
for balance,
her every step
becoming mine.



- Iain Macdonald

[Larry Robinson]

Don’t Tell Anyone


We had been married for six or seven years
when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me
that she screams underwater when she swims—


that, in fact, she has been screaming for years
into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool
where she does laps every other day.


Buttering her toast, not as if she had been
concealing anything,
not as if I should consider myself


personally the cause of her screaming,
nor as if we should perform an act of therapy
right that minute on the kitchen table,


—casually, she told me,
and I could see her turn her square face up
to take a gulp of oxygen,


then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious.
For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming
as they go through life, silently,


politely keeping the big secret
that it is not all fun
to be ripped by the crooked beak


of something called psychology,
to be dipped down
again and again into time;


that the truest, most intimate
pleasure you can sometimes find
is the wet kiss


of your own pain.
There goes Kath, at one PM, to swim her twenty-two laps
back and forth in the community pool;


—what discipline she has!
Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages,
that will never be read by anyone.


- Tony Hoagland

[Larry Robinson]

The Earth is a Being Who Deserves to be Loved


Wounded with bombs and highways, the Earth coughs, bleeds,
and warns, and is not heard nor heeded.


And still she loves, her tremendous heart
expanding, contracting in awesome measure.


After the magical thrust through root and bark
of blood-streams of seas and thunderous rivers,


magnificently various, she offers
the sacrifice of elegance, in flowers.


Multiple is she in anger and reverence,
passion and prayer. Even in catastrophe


and tempest, confounding harmonies enlighten.
She is haloed with many balancing haloes,


each day crowned with a corona of caroling
as bird-note meets bird-note at dawn moving westward.


Warmed, made fertile and lucent by her Sun,
laved by her rains, loved by her delicate snows,


I see her sleeping dreaming, waking,
streaming rays from glorious eyes, of blue light;


measuring the secret of us all in a mighty
splendid montage, she is hermaphrodite.


Let the palm of our love caress the line
of her multiform breasts; the hips of her hills;


embrace her tree barks, mightier than books;
lie in her arms. She will give us golden bread, and wine.


- Daisy Aldan

[Larry Robinson]

Moving Into Language

We walk
on the bones of our mother,
shape earth silence
into elegy,
mourn the lost words that
lie with her,
searching
for our own lost song.


- Fran Glaggett

[Larry Robinson]

The Island


Every visit, my mother-in-law Ruth
sang us under the table.
A few hours of old standards
and Barbara and I would duck out,
ready for bed, knowing
her mom could go on all night.


This time, she’d had a health crisis
and was recovering in assisted care.
Our visits consisted of watching her O-T and P-T,
arranging her transition back home
and talking with doctors, therapists, family.
No time for music. She hadn’t even
seemed strong enough, at first.


Coming back from a museum-visit break
my last afternoon, I impulsively
pulled the guitar from the trunk,
then found mom and daughter
in the lounge room, finishing
a discussion of foods
needed at home.


We started with the songs
I knew by heart, easier
for eye contact:
“Blue Moon”, “Begin the Beguine,
“Sentimental Journey.” I opened
the songbook for “Love Is Here To Stay.”


An hour in that vein, until we
remembered some errands we had to do
before dark, and promised to return
before visiting hours ended at 8.


She was asleep at 7:15. We didn’t know
what to do, surrounded as she was
by two roommates, each only
a hospital curtain away.


One on each side of the bed, we looked
at each other and took
a chance, singing softly:
“I’ll be seeing you…”


Ruth’s eyes opened.
She looked as if she might
think this a pleasant dream.
Dream or not, she joined in.


The songs became simpler,
more elemental. Too cramped to open
the book, I had to rely on suggestions:


“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
“Danny Boy.” “Old Man River”.
Finally “Auld Lang Syne,”


and why I’m writing this
is to try to tell you
what is impossible to verbalize--


how when we sang,
“We’ll drink a cup of Kindness yet”,
the cup was really there,
and it was full,


as if, song by song,
distraction and worry had been
rivers flowing away,
leaving us dry on an island
that had been submerged,
and the name of that island
was the Heart.


In this place,
words did not
merely suggest,
they embodied:
How long since I’d been here?


Ruth motioned for me to bend
a little closer. When I did,
she said, “Music is the greatest gift
you can give someone in life.”


The silence in the room
was breathing this truth, and I didn’t
want to just leave it all there.
Maybe this will help me,
and you, to remember.


- Max Reif

[Larry Robinson]

Stepping Westward

What is green in me
darkens, muscadine.
If woman is inconstant,
good, I am faithful to
ebb and flow, I fall
in season and now
is a time of ripening.
If her part
is to be true,
a north star,
good, I hold steady
in the black sky
and vanish by day,
yet burn there
in blue or above
quilts of cloud.
There is no savor
more sweet, more salt
than to be glad to be
what, woman,
and who, myself,
I am, a shadow
that grows longer as the sun
moves, drawn out
on a thread of wonder.
If I bear burdens
they begin to be remembered
as gifts, goods, a basket
of bread that hurts
my shoulders but closes me
in fragrance. I can
eat as I go.


- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

The Rider


A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.


- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

The Mower


The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.


I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:


Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful


Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.


- Phillip Larkin

[Larry Robinson]

The Continent's End




At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain,
wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite.

I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks,
felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and double stretch of water.

I said: You yoke the Aleutian seal-rocks with the lava and coral sowings
that flower the south,
Over your flood the life that sought the sunrise faces ours
that has followed the evening star.

The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you,
you have forgotten us, mother.
You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb
and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline.

It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and
you have grown bitter; life retains
Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness,
the insolent quietness of stone.

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child,
but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched
before there was an ocean.

That watched you fill your beds out of the condensation of thin vapor
and watched you change them,
That saw you soft and violent wear your boundaries down, eat rock,
shift places with the continents.

Mother, though my song’s measure is like your surf-beat’s ancient rhythm
I never learned it of you.
Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones
flow from the older fountain.


- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

Heart Labor


When I work too hard and then lie down,
even my sleep is sad and all worn out.
You want me to name the specific sorrows?
They do not matter. You have your own.
Most of the people in the world
go out to work, day after day,
with their voices chained in their throats.
I am swimming a narrow, swift river.
Upstream, the clouds have already darkened
and deep blue holes I cannot see
churn up under the smooth flat rocks.
The Greeks have a word, paropono,
for the complaint without answer,
for how the heart labors, while
all the time our faces appear calm
enough to float through in the moonlight.


- Maggie Anderson

[Larry Robinson]

With Elephants

With elephants everything
volumes
down.

A cascade of cliff
lumbering
on four limber pillars.

A fog of stone
always slowly
moving west.

A strolling Niagara, yes.

Wearing a wardrobe
of loose-fitting determination,
she looms
her great sweet
buxom
daunt.

You have felt their stone-tough,
bristly,
sensitive
proboscis.
It snouts around like the foot of a snail.
until it clamps the morsel of crackerjack,
which it,
like an undersea thing,
daintily,
and confidently
and insouciantly
and speedily
imparts
into its heart-shaped maw.

Bad for the tusks?

Well, elephant dentists and nutritionists say
Elephants must eat
for their health and satisfaction,
every day
of popcorn
a silo.

So who am I to lecture an elephant –
vegan as she is –
about weight-loss?

Elephants remember
to diet on whole savannahs
and toss their massy heads about,
making gales with their ears

and, with their Cyrano noses,
announce ––
stand back! ––

Triumphals!


- Bruce Moody