Three Rivers | Alpay Ulku

[exceptindreams.livejournal.com]

"Three Rivers"
Alpay Ulku

What are you doing now, Anne-Marie, on the night we would bring home good things to cook and watch movies from the 1940's, the work week finally at an end.

Who will light the stove for you now that I'm not there?

I imagine you in our city of bridges, where the mid-West flows into the East and South, singing.

What with the apple trees baring their branches, the light "like none other that I've seen before, worn and soft,"

and your new coat that matches the color of your hair perfectly, so that you cross the lawn to the Cathedral of Learning trailing footprints in the frost;

what with Mau-Mau Kitty, who leaves presents in our bed for you, their fur licked in one direction and their heads neatly reattached, so they will be pleasing to the eye as well,

do you still look for me, for a moment, when you swing into our favorite cafe, in our neighborhood named for its squirrels?

When I come home at last in the season of cherry blossoms in the rain, will you still love me?

You've started saving magazines again, bus passes, too, and receipts from the grocery store. Colored paper clips. Coupons. Old sea shells, from the winter we lived on the Cape.

When Mr. Lobster visits my Jacuzzi, no one tries to talk me into setting him free in the harbor: the days are long and silent:

I drop him in, and we watch each other through the steam.

I'm driving home from the airport without you. I feel sad in my stomach.

RIP, Adrienne Rich

[stormydown.livejournal.com]

We've lost one of the greats -- Poet Adrienne Rich, 82, has died.

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Orion - Adrienne Rich

Far back when I went zig-zagging
through tamarack pastures
you were my genius, you
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
lion-heart king in prison.
Years later now you’re young

my fierce half-brother, staring
down from that simplified west
your breast open, your belt dragged down
by an oldfashioned thing, a sword
the last bravado you won’t give over
though it weighs you sown as you stride

and the stars in it are dim
and maybe have stopped burning.
But you burn, and I know it;
as I throw back my head to take you in
an old transfusion happens again:
divine astronomy is nothing to it.

Indoors I bruise and blunder,
break faith, leave ill enough
alone, a dead child born in the dark.
Night cracks up over the chimney,
pieces of time, frozen geodes
come showering down in the grate.

A man reaches behind my eyes
and finds them empty
a woman’s head turns away
from my head in the mirror
children are dying my death
and eating crumbs of my life.

Pity is not your forte.
Calmly you ache up there
pinned aloft in your crow’s nest,
my speechless pirate!
You take it all for granted
and when I look you back

it’s with a starlike eye
shooting its cold and egotistical spear
where it can so least damage.
Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon
out here in the cold with you
you with your back to the wall.

RIP, adrienne rich

[wicked-sassy.livejournal.com]

Adrienne Rich passed away yesterday. Tonight, no poetry will truly serve to honor her life, but here's this.


Memorial Day for the War Dead
by Yehuda Amichai

Memorial day for the war dead. Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you. Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.

( Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread )

Maxine Kumin, 'Woodchucks'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Woodchucks

Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.

Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.

( The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling )

(Cut for grim imagery)