Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Ruby’s Gift (As told by Sheila...)


Ruby O’Burke

was about 90.

Small, lively.

White, short, flat-cut

sides and bangs.

Interested, pert.


A flat upstairs, in

Noe Valley, San Francisco,

with books and shelves,

not overly neat,

much like a student’s,

and a pottery studio below.


She said, “Oh! Let me

show you

a gift I just got

when I was in Japan.”

Her frail hands, trembling

in anticipation, opened

an elegant, plain wooden

box to reveal a

small tea cup.


“Look,” she said, “how beautifully the

glaze crawled.” Indeed it had, inside and out,

lumpy, mottled, and webbed.

Clearly flawed, I knew,

being a potter as well.

Yet she beheld her gift

with such childlike

amazement. In Japan, this was

a treasure.


Years later, I had made a large mug

for my now departed, somewhat

flawed father. Its glaze had crawled

completely. Yet I have not tossed it.


For each time I hold my father’s mug,

I can see in both

a treasure.



- Scott O'Brien

[Larry Robinson]

Fire On The Hills

The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front of the roaring wave of the brushfire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the black slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders.
He had come from far off for good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue and the hills merciless black,
The somber-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy.

- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

Friday morning
sky a hot pale grey
I’m sitting in the back of a green Subaru Forester
in a parking lot
with a dying dog
Mucha

It’s an ordinary day
in moments the vet will come out with needles
the hole has been dug

months ago I painted a stone
at a garden party
a celebrate life party at a poet’s home
just before she went to cancer
Diane

please understand
I do not feel heavy or morose
in fact I felt the same
driving with a scarcely breathing dog
as I did with a scarcely not breathing dog
these things must be done
part of the big plan

but the smoking sky
the infernos to the north, the east and the south of us
are they necessary
are they part of the plan as well
will I feel different when the blue returns

the stone now a marker has a beagle face
loyal stoic
stones have long life spans
and this small fact is comforting


- Sharon Bard
6/27/08

[Larry Robinson]

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never
even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a
bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

Underside

I imagine the underside of the English language,
a garbaged, mottled dream-tangle
like the reverse side of a tapestry
where each carefully tied thread
runs wild in a course of its own,
where every color is let loose
in a scribbled, shaggy riot of un-being--
the dictionary lists clear words, sounds marked
and numbered, described and dated, but one summer
I stood in the winter-cold of a cave’s dark
and shone my flashlight up
to see a straggle of root dangling
from the roof, knowing then
how the whole forest above me
was anchored in darkness, its grammar rooted
in what falls away, my understanding
leaping into every word to find it bottomless.

- Jay Leeming

[Larry Robinson]

A Morning Offering

I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me
Welcome the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

- John O'Donohue

[Larry Robinson]

The Summer Day


Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,’how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Retirement

After that knifeblade, we breathed
a film on it like a mirror and looked up -
our children were gone, and in their place
a vacant road continued into a storm.
That's when I think we began to know
how the rest would be, the soft
careful sound of little worlds falling.

Those flakes, every one, hit
the windshield with a glad sacrifice
and then never existed. You could
look back and imagine a lifetime
of snowflake incidents again, but
this time - you could hope - with religion,
or some kind of thicker coat on.

For certain young readers:
You don't have to understand this.
Pretend that you don't understand.
Go back to your inhale-exhale
existence. Don't look up now.
There will be time.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

On a Cape May Warbler Who
Flew Against My Window


She's stopped in her southern tracks
Brought haply to this hard knock
When she shoots from the tall spruce
And snaps her neck on the glass.

From the fall grass I gather her
And give her to my silent children
Who give her a decent burial
Under the dogwood in the garden.

They lay their gifs in the grave:
Matches, a clothes-peg, a coin;
Fire paper for her, sprinkle her
With water, fold earth over her.

She is out of her element forever
Who was air's high-spirited daughter;
What guardian wings can I conjure
Over my own young, their migrations?

The children retreat indoors.
Shadows flicker in the tall spruce.
Small birds flicker like shadows —
Ghosts come nest in my branches.

- Eamon Grennan

[Larry Robinson]

Sense of Something Coming


I am like a flag in the center of open space.
I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live
it through.
while the things of the world still do not move:
the doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full
of silence,
the windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.

I already know the storm, and I am troubled as the sea.
I leap out, and fall back,
and throw myself out, and am absolutely alone
in the great storm.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated by Robert Bly )

[Larry Robinson]

The Journey
Anghiari is medieval, a sleeve sloping down
A steep hill, suddenly sweeping out
To the edge of a cliff, and dwindling.
But far up the mountain, behind the town,
We too were swept out, out by the wind,
Alone with the Tuscan grass.

Wind had been blowing across the hills
For days, and everything now was graying gold
With dust, everything we saw, even
Some small children scampering along a road,
Twittering Italian to a small caged bird.

We sat beside them to rest in some brushwood,
And I leaned down to rinse the dust from my face.

I found the spider web there, whose hinges
Reeled heavily and crazily with the dust,
Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging
And scattering shadows among shells and wings.
And then she stepped into the center of air
Slender and fastidious, the golden hair
Of daylight along her shoulders, she poised there,
While ruins crumbled on every side of her.
Free of the dust, as though a moment before
She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself.

I gazed, close to her, till at last she stepped
Away in her own good time.

Many men
Have searched all over Tuscany and never found
What I found there, the heart of the light
Itself shelled and leaved, balancing
On filaments themselves falling. The secret
Of this journey is to let the wind
Blow its dust all over your body,
To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly
All the way through your ruins, and not to lose
Any sleep over the dead, who surely
Will bury their own, don't worry.

- James Wright

[Larry Robinson]

TOBAR PHADRAIC

Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear into the originality
of it all. Be impatient with explanations
and discipline the mind not to begin
questions it cannot answer. Walk the green road
above the bay and the low glinting fields
toward the evening sun. Let that Atlantic
gleam be ahead of you and the gray light
of the bay below you,
until you catch, down on your left,
the break in the wall,
for just above in the shadow
you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm
of rock holding the water close to the mountain,
a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,
and in the niche above, notes to the dead
and supplications for those who still live.
Now you are alone with the transfiguration
and ask no healing for your own
but look down as if looking through time,
as if through a rent veil from the other
side of the question you’ve refused to ask,

and remember how as a child
your arms could rise and your palms
turn out to bless the world.

- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

Life At War

The disasters numb within us
caught in the chest, rolling
in the brain like pebbles. The feeling
resembles lumps of raw dough

weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart. . .
Could I say of it, it overflows
with bitterness . . . but no, as though

its contents were simply balled into
formless lumps, thus
do I carry it about.’
The same war

continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the gray filth of it:

the knowledge that humankind,

delicate Man, whose flesh
responds to a caress, whose eyes
are flowers that perceive the stars,

whose music excels the music of birds,
whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
whose understanding manifests designs
fairer than the spider’s most intricate web,

still turns without surprise, with mere regret
to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.

We are the humans, men who can make;
whose language imagines mercy,
lovingkindness we have believed one another
mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—

who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is smelling in Vietnam as I write.

Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
in our bodies along with all we
go on knowing of joy, of love;

our nerve filaments twitch with its presence
day and night,
nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying,
nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness,
the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

Faith

The word faith means that when someone sees

A dew-drop or a floating leaf, and knows
That they are, because they have to be.
And even if you dreamed, or closed your eyes
And wished, the world would still be what it was,
And the leaf would still be carried down the river.

It means that when someone’s foot is hurt
By sharp rock, he also knows that rocks
Are here so they can hurt our feet.
Look, see the long shadow cast by the tree;
And flowers and people
throw shadows on the earth:
What has no shadow has no strength to live.

- Czeslaw Milosz
(trans. Robert Hass)

[Larry Robinson]

My Child Wafts Peace

My child wafts peace.
When I lean over him,
It is not just the smell of soap.

All the people were children wafting peace.
(And in the whole land, not even one
Millstone remained that still turned).

Oh, the land torn like clothes
That can't be mended.
Hard, lonely fathers even in the cave of the Makhpela*
Childless silence.

My child wafts peace.
His mother's womb promised him
What God cannot
Promise us.

- Yehuda Amichai




* The traditional burial place in Hebron of Abraham
and the other Patriarchs and Matriarchs of Israel.

[Larry Robinson]

Growing Old

What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
Yes, but not for this alone.

Is it to feel our strength—
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more weakly strung?

Yes, this, and more! but not,
Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be!
'Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,
A golden day's decline!

'Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,
The years that are no more!

It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young.
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel:
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion—none.

It is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.

- Matthew Arnold

[Larry Robinson]

In Silence

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”

- Thomas Merton

[Larry Robinson]

Patience

Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time's fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn't be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.

- Kay Ryan


From Say Uncle by Kay Ryan, published by Grove Press. Copyright © 2000 by Kay Ryan.

NYTimes.com

Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: July 17, 2008

When Kay Ryan was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, the poetry club rejected her application; she was perhaps too much of a loner, she recalls. Now Ms. Ryan is being inducted into one of the most elite poetry clubs around. She is to be named the country’s poet laureate on Thursday.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Kay Ryan, 62, will become the country’s 16th poet laureate.
Web Extra: Selected Poems by Kay Ryan (July 17, 2008)

Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, Ms. Ryan has won a carriage full of poetry prizes for her funny and philosophical work, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2004, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000.

Still, she has remained something of an outsider.

“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”

Dana Gioia, a poet and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was an early supporter of Ms. Ryan’s work, describing her as the “thoughtful, bemused, affectionate, deeply skeptical outsider.”

“She would certainly be part of the world if she could manage it,” he said. “She has certain reservations. That is what makes her like Dickinson in some ways.”

Poets, editors, critics and academics around the country offered advice to James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, about whom to choose to succeed Charles Simic as the nation’s 16th poet laureate, who was appointed 2007. Ms. Ryan’s work has “this quality of simplicity; it’s highly accessible poetry,” Dr. Billington said. “She takes you through little images to see a very ordinary thing or ordinary sentiment in a more subtle and deeper way.”

Ms. Ryan likes to take familiar images and clichés and reincarnate them in a wholly original form. “The Other Shoe” reads:

Oh if it were
only the other
shoe hanging
in space before
joining its mate.

Her poems are spare. “An almost empty suitcase, that’s what I want my poems to be, few things,” Ms. Ryan said. “The reader starts taking them out, but they keep multiplying.”

Ms. Ryan grew up in small towns throughout the San Joaquin Valley and Mojave Desert. Her mother taught elementary school. A nervous person, her mother craved quiet, so there was virtually no television or radio playing in the home, Ms. Ryan said. In “Shark’s Teeth” she writes, “Everything contains some silence.” The poem continues:

An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark.

Her father was a dreamer. She once said he could “fail at anything,” having tried selling Christmas trees, drilling oil wells and working in a chromium mine.

It was after his death, when she was 19, that she started writing poems. But Ms. Ryan said she always had mixed feelings about it. “I wanted to do it, but I didn’t want to expose myself,” she said.

After briefly attending Antelope Valley College, she transferred to U.C.L.A., where she earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English.

She moved to Marin County in 1971 and lives there now, with her partner, Carol Adair.

In 1976 she finally realized that she could not escape the poet inside her. She had decided to ride a bicycle from California to Virginia in 80 days. Riding along the Hoosier Pass in the Colorado Rockies, she said, she felt an incredible opening up, “an absence of boundaries, an absence of edges, as if my brain could do anything.”

“Finally I can ask the question: Can I be a writer?” The answer came back as a question, she said. “Do you like it?”

“So it was quite simple for me. I went home and began to work.”

Public recognition came slowly. It took 20 years for her to receive acclaim for her work. “All of us want instant success,” she said. “I’m glad I was on a sort of slow drip.”

Ms. Ryan has carved out a life conducive to poetry writing. She has taught the same remedial English course at the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., for more than 30 years. When asked if she thought her new position would make it harder to write, she replied, “No, uh-uh. I think it will make it impossible.”

She has published six books of poetry and her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Review of Books.

One of her first duties as poet laureate is an appearance at the National Book Festival on Sept. 27 on the National Mall in Washington. More formally she will kick off the Library of Congress’s annual literary series on Oct. 16 by reading her own work. The library doesn’t require much of its laureates, although in recent years many have undertaken projects to broaden poetry’s reach to children and adults. Ms. Ryan has no definite plans, but said she might like to “celebrate the Library of Congress,” adding “maybe I’ll issue library cards to everyone.”

For a woman who once shrank from exposing herself, this new position will put her in the public eye more than ever. But at this point Ms. Ryan is philosophical: “I realized that whatever we do or don’t do, we’re utterly exposed.”

[Larry Robinson]

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth
let’s not speak in any language.
Let’s stop for a second
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment, without rush, without engines;
we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales,
and the man gathering salt would look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers and sisters in the shade,
doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused with total inactivity:
Life is what it is about.
If we were not so singleminded about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead in winter,
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet
and I’ll go.

- Pablo Neruda

A Callarse

Ahora contaremos doce
y nos quedamos todos quietos.

Por una vez sobre la tierra
no hablemos en ningún idioma,
pour un segundo detengámonos,
no movamos tanto los brazos.

Sería un minuto gragante,
sin prisa, sin locomotoras,
todos estaríamos juntos
en una inquietud instantánea.

Los pescadores del mar frío
no harían daño a las ballenas
y el trabajador de la sal
miraría sus manos rotas.

Los que preparan guerras verdes,
guerras de gas, guerras de fuego,
victorias sin sibrevivientes,
se pondrían un traje puro
y andarían con sus hermanos
por la sombra, sin hacer nada.

No se confunda lo que quiero
con la inacción definitiva:
la vida es sólo lo que se hace,
no quiero nada con la muerte.

Si no pudimos ser unánimes
moviendo tanto nuestras vidas,
tal vez no hacer nada una vez,
tal vez un gran silencio pueda
interrumpir esta tristeza,
este no entendernos jamás
y amenazarnos con la muerte,
tal vez la tierra nos enseñe
cuando todo parece muerto
y luego todo estaba vivo.

Ahora contaré hasta doce
y tú te callas y me voy.

- Pablo Neruda

[Larry Robinson]

Wise Men Keep Talking About


Time is the shop
Where everyone works hard

To build enough love
To break the
Shackle.

Wise men keep talking about
Wanting to meet Her.

Women sometimes pronounce the word God
A little differently:
They can use more feeling and skill
With the heart-lute.

All the world's movements,
Apparent chaos, and suffering I now know happen
In the Splendid Unison:

Our tambourines are striking
The same thigh.

Hafiz stands
At a juncture in this poem.
There are a thousand new wheels I could craft
On a wagon
And place you in -
Lead you to a glimpse of the culture
And seasons in another dimension.

Yet again God
Will have to drop you back at the shop
Where you still have work
With

Love.

- Hafiz

(The Gift -- versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)

[Larry Robinson]

Home to Roost

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small -
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost - all
the same kind
at the same speed.

- Kay Ryan
Copyright © 2005 from the collection "The Niagara River" (Grove Press)

[Larry Robinson]

A Contribution to Statistics

Out of a hundred people

those who always know better
- fifty-two

doubting every step
- nearly all the rest,

glad to lend a hand
if it doesn't take too long
- as high as forty-nine,

always good
because they can't be otherwise
- four, well maybe five,

able to admire without envy
- eighteen,

suffering illusions
induced by fleeting youth
- sixty, give or take a few,

not to be taken lightly
- forty and four,

living in constant fear
of someone or something
- seventy-seven,

capable of happiness
- twenty-something tops,

harmless singly, savage in crowds
- half at least,

cruel
when forced by circumstances
- better not to know
even ballpark figures,

wise after the fact
- just a couple more
than wise before it,

taking only things from life
- thirty
(I wish I were wrong),

hunched in pain,
no flashlight in the dark
- eighty-three
sooner or later,

righteous
- thirty-five, which is a lot,

righteous
and understanding
- three,

worthy of compassion
- ninety-nine,

mortal
- a hundred out of a hundred.
Thus far this figure still remains unchanged.

- Wislawa Szymborska

[Larry Robinson]

The Gift

Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.
It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come - maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.
It's a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you've been and how people
and weather treated you. It's a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours."

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Breeze in the Apple Orchard

This breeze, the hussy, has traveled around the world,
gathering smoke from cook-fires in Afghanistan, stealing the sweat of lovers in London,
the stink of traffic in Marrakech,

blowing her hot breath through your threadbare heart,
huffing up your skirt,
roughening your genius hair,
hot with the stench of battlefields,
cool and sweet with the cries of gulls.

Breeze! Tell me it's me
and me alone that you love.

How can I tell you that
when I have just caressed the seashell ears of a baby
and caught, with equal care,
the parched last breath of the woman
whose strangled, abandoned body
won't be found for months to come?

When this morning I whipped veils against the foreheads
of that long line of refugees
carrying their lives on their backs
through an endless gray-and-white newspaper desert?

And this afternoon recorded the wheeze
of the bull elephant as he chased through the underbrush
trumpeting after his mate,
and listened just as intently
to the cricket, fiddling her delicate desire?

Well, then, what do you want with me?

I want one stray hair from your scalp,
one drop of sweat from under your armpit.
Give me that short breath you just took without thinking,
the blood-blister on your toe, inside your gritty sandal,
the fleeting impulse too swift to write down.

- Alison Luterman

[Larry Robinson]

Standing Deer

As the house of a person
in age sometimes grows cluttered
with what is
too loved or too heavy to part with,
the heart may grow cluttered.
And still the house will be emptied,
and still the heart.

As the thoughts of a person
in age sometimes grow sparer,
like a great cleanness come into a room,
the soul may grow sparer;
one sparrow song carves it completely.
And still the room is full,
and still the heart.

Empty and filled,
like the curling half-light of morning,
in which everything is still possible and so why not.

Filled and empty,
like the curling half-light of evening,
in which everything now is finished and so why not.

Beloved, what can be, what was,
will be taken from us.
I have disappointed.
I am sorry. I knew no better.

A root seeks water.
Tenderness only breaks open the earth.
This morning, out the window,
the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.

- Jane Hirschfield

[Larry Robinson]

Something I've Not Done



Something I’ve not done

is following me

I haven’t done it again and again

so it has many footsteps

like a drumstick that’s grown old and never been used


In late afternoon I hear it come closer

at times it climbs out of a sea

onto my shoulders

and I shrug it off

losing one more chance


Every morning

it’s drunk up part of my breath for the day

and knows which way

I’m going

and already it’s not done there


But once more I say I’ll lay hands on it

tomorrow

and add its footsteps to my heart

and its story to my regrets

and its silence to my compass.


- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Paradise

I used to live there. Every morning
The downtown streets were cobbled with gold, honey
Flowed—all that stuff. I'm not kidding. Summers
Lasted a lifetime, broken by Christmas
And New Year's.
Mornings were like waking to someone's scent
You hadn't yet met and married for life,
Though I didn't know that then—the night-cooled
Muskmelons rolling belly up to the stars,
And by late afternoon the dusk-colored
Dust of apricots on everything.
From that earth, my body
Assembled itself, and when the veil dropped,
I tried to say what I saw. The light winds
Around me died, the sheers of summer wavered
As though all of it were mirage. Cantaloupes,
Grapes, clusters of ruby flames like champagne,
Though I didn't know that then—
Nectarines like morphine—didn't know that either.
Oranges, almonds, rainbows,
Tangs—rolling in all year long, that bounty.
You tell people that, over and over,
And it's really crazy, they won't believe you.
All that sugar coaxed out of clay, and you
Can't even give it away—and each dawn
More is just piled on. I took in as much
As I could, like larder, and walked away.

- Arthur Smith

[Larry Robinson]

Just Walking Around
What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is not name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

- John Ashbery

[Larry Robinson]

Odysseus' Decision
The great man turns his back on the island.
Now he will not die in paradise
nor hear again
the lutes of paradise among the olive trees,
by the clear pools under the cypresses. Time

begins now, in which he hears again
that pulse which is the narrative
sea, ar dawn when its pull is stongest.
What has brought us here
will lead us away; our ship
sways in the tined harbor water.

Now the spell is ended.
Give him back his life,
sea that can only move forward.

- Louise Gluck

[Larry Robinson]

Mulching

Me in my bugproof netted headpiece kneeling
to spread sodden newspapers between broccolis,
corn sprouts, cabbages and four kinds of beans,

prostrate before old suicide bombings, starvation,
AIDS, earthquakes, the unforeseen tsunami,
front-page photographs of lines of people

with everything they own heaped on their heads,
the rich assortment of birds trilling on all
sides of my forest garden, the exhortations

of commencement speakers at local colleges,
the first torture revelations under my palms
and I a helpless citizen of a country

I used to love, who as a child wept when
the brisk police band bugled Hats off? The flag
is passing by, now that every wanton deed

in this stack of newsprint is heartbreak,
my blackened fingers can only root in dirt,
turning up industrious earthworms, bits

of unreclaimed eggshell, wanting to ask
the earth to take my unquiet spirit,
bury it deep, make compost of it.

- Maxine Kumin