Susan Minot

[moonglows.livejournal.com]

There's a man I've thought of many hours . . .

By Susan Minot
(from Poems 4 A. M.)

( Read more... )

(no subject)

[lightup-tea.livejournal.com]

I'm new here.

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Spirits at the Edge of Bayonet Woods



Crabgrass thickens, and catalpas bloom

gigantic, hoping to hide our homestead, the poverty

and grime that kept us mired here

for generations, as if we were sleeping

off a bender for one hundred years.

Sooty hankies against our mouths, in the kitchen

chicken spitting in the fryer,

thick smoke rising, and we’re in the mineshafts,

the ones that swallowed our men

and cooked them and spat them into our beds.

Forgive us, Lord, we did not know them,

humpbacked and ruined, crawling toward us

wanting clean shirts, kisses, more children.

Tell me, what was a woman’s purpose in those woods?

Trading quails’ eggs for the babies’ medicine,

boiling lye and animal grease to shampoo coal dust

from our men’s curling hair?

They clung to us in sleep, that watery place,

and I swear, as I lay beside my own husband

I did not know him, even as he struck me,

muttering his terrors, whimpering the struggle

of slowly drowning in a shaft flood, or burning

alive in a coke fire. And though we pitied Grace,

the valley’s only suicide, we understood

when she wrote, I cannot go on here, in this place…

In fact, we watched her strip beside Stone Path

where she had gone to pray, faithful to the current’s

constant swirling, watched her weep beside

the river’s illiterate banks, lay her dress upon

its slick grasses, wade into the inch of loam,

then lie facedown in its merciful pull.

Forgive her, Lord, for leaving this earth so early.

She was terribly lonely.


--Paula Bohince

"With No Immediate Cause", by Ntozake Shange

[the-xtina.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what the guidelines are for lj-cuts here, other than for length, so I used my usual potential-triggers guideline.

---

"With No Immediate Cause"

( (Possible rape/assault triggers, putting behind a cut.) )

- Ntozake Shange, translated by unknown, original here.

Dorianne Laux

[opheliablue.livejournal.com]

I know this isn't a poem, please delete if it's not appropriate - I just noticed that a lot of people seem to like Dorianne Laux (me too!) and wanted to say that she has a MySpace page if you're interested - she's very friendly and down to earth... http://www.myspace.com/doriannelaux

Sorry, I would post one of her poems but the one that springs to mind has already been posted ('Trying To Raise The Dead').

Minor Poem, by Bill Knott

[vowel-in-thug.livejournal.com]

The only response
to a child's grave is
to lie down before it and play dead

bpk

[lightup-tea.livejournal.com]

Imagining Their Own Hymns

by Brigit Pegeen Kelly



What fools they are to believe the angels
in this window are in ecstasy. They
do not smile. Their eyes are rolled back in annoyance
not in bliss, as my mother’s eyes roll back
when she finds us in the dirt with the cider—
flies and juice blackening our faces and hands.
When the sun comes up behind the angels
then even in their dun robes they are beautiful,
with their girlish hair and their mean lit faces,
but they do not love the light. As I
do not love it when I am made clean
for the ladies who bring my family money.
They stroke my face and smooth my hair. So sweet,
they say, so good, but I am not sweet or good.
I would take one of the possums we kill
in the dump by the woods where the rats slide
like dark boats into the dark stream and leave it
on the heavy woman’s porch just to think
of her on her knees scrubbing and scrubbing
at a stain that will never come out.
And these angels that the women turn to
are not good either. They are sick of Jesus,
who never stops dying, hanging there white
and large, his shadow blue as pitch, and blue
the bruise on his chest, with spread petals,
like the hydrangea blooms I tear from
Mrs. Macht’s bush and smash on the sidewalk.
One night they will get out of here. One night
when the weather is turning cold and a few
candles burn, they will leave St. Blase standing
under his canopy of glass lettuce
and together, as in a wedding march,
their pockets full of money from the boxes
for the sick poor, they will walk down the aisle,
imagining their own hymns, past the pews
and the water fonts in which small things float,
down the streets of our narrow town, while
the bells ring and the birds fly up in the fields
beyond—and they will never come back.

(no subject)

[claymedeiros.livejournal.com]

A Few Items to Consider

First there is the scent of barley
to remember. Barley and rain.
The smooth terrain to recollect and savor.

Unforgiving whiteness of the room.
Ambiguity of linen. Purity.
Mute and still as photographs on the moon.

Everything here must be analyzed.
Catalogued. Studied twice.
A painstaking arrangement, almost vain.

Brandy glass with its one amber eye
on the bedside table. Shirt
draped across the chair. Woolen
trousers folded neatly in a square.
Little clock repeating—
precise, precise.

Not a stray whisker.
No comb full of dead hair.
No cup filled with coins and cuff
Links and fingernail clippers.
A scrupulous chess game.
Formal. Concise.

There is much to learn.
Grace of the neck to memorize.
Heliotrope of sleep.
Hieroglyph of bones to decipher
Love, if at all, comes later.

For now, the hands take to their dialogue.
Gullible as foreigners.
A greedy chattering, endlessly on nothing
Nothing at all.

Sandra Cisneros

Verger, Winter Afternoon, Galilee Chapel

[thewickedtongue.livejournal.com]

Durham Cathedral, March 2004


Careful, here,

as polishing cloth across a floor,
police officer,
voyeur.

Air closes over the angel's departure.
Always, in the air. The river
in the floor

inhabits it, as light inhabits water
or the heart's interior
or here.

Gillian Allnutt

Pages 2-4 in "The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton".

[acreofbones.livejournal.com]

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles's Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry in our heart the Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God's sake not to inquire further...

From a letter of Schopenhauer
to Goethe, November 1815.

You, Doctor Martin.

You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their bones against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalk

of death. We stand in broken
lines and wait while they unlock
the door and count us at the frozen gates
of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken
and we move to gravy in our smock
of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates
scratch and whine like chalk

( in school. There are no knives )

Anne Sexton