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Mar. 25th, 2004 11:04 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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greatpoetryI'm new here. Instead of spamming with four separate entries for my four favorites that I wish to share, I've just put 'em all under a cut.
I Go Back to the House for a Book
Billy Collins
I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor's office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me —
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.
Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.
But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in synch,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,
but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.
He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,
shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid —
I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.
---
New Dog
Mark Doty
Jimi and Tony
can't keep Dino,
their cocker spaniel;
Tony's too sick,
the daily walks
more pressure
than pleasure,
one more obligation
that can't be met.
And though we already
have a dog, Wally
wants to adopt,
wants something small
and golden to sleep
next to him and
lick his face.
He's paralyzed now
from the waist down,
whatever's ruining him
moving upward, and
we don't know
how much longer
he'll be able to pet
a dog. How many men
want another attachment,
just as they're
leaving the world?
Wally sits up nights
and says, I'd like
some lizards, a talking bird,
some fish. A little rat.
So after I drive
to Jimi and Tony's
in the Village and they
meet me at the door and say,
We can't go through with it,
we can't give up our dog,
I drive to the shelter
-- just to look -- and there
is Beau: bounding and
practically boundless,
one brass concatenation
of tongue and tail,
unmediated energy,
too big, wild,
perfect. He not only
licks Wally's face
but bathes every
irreplaceable inch
of his head, and though
Wally can no longer
feed himself he can lift
his hand, and bring it
to rest on the rough gilt
flanks when they are,
for a moment, still.
I have never seen a touch
so deliberate.
It isn't about grasping;
the hand itself seems
almost blurred now,
softened, though
tentative only
because so much will
must be summoned,
such attention brought
to the work -- which is all
he is now, this gesture
toward the restless splendor,
the unruly, the golden,
the animal, the new.
---
Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-second Year
Ray Carver
October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father's embarrassed young man's face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad Beer.
In jeans and denim shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,
Wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.
But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either,
and don't even know the places to fish?
---
The Tooth Fairy
Dorianne Laux
They brushed a quarter with glue
and glitter, slipped in on bare
feet, and without waking me,
painted rows of delicate gold
footprints on my sheets with a love
so quiet, I still can't hear it.
My mother must have been
a beauty then, sitting
at the kitchen table with him,
a warm breeze lifting her
embroidered curtains, waiting
for me to fall asleep.
It's harder to believe
the years that followed, the palms
curled into fists, a floor
of broken dishes, her chainsmoking
through long silences, him
punching holes in his walls.
I can still remember her print
dresses, his checkered taxi, the day
I found her in the closet
with a paring knife, the night
he kicked my sister in the ribs.
He lives alone in Oregon now, dying
slowly of a rare disease.
His face stippled gray, his ankles
clotted beneath wool socks.
She's a nurse on the graveyard shift.
Comes home mornings and calls me.
Drinks her dark beer and goes to bed.
And I still wonder how they did it, slipped
that quarter under my pillow, made those
perfect footprints...
Whenever I visit her, I ask again.
"I don't know", she says, rocking, closing
her eyes. "We were as surprised as you."
I Go Back to the House for a Book
Billy Collins
I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor's office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me —
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.
Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.
But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in synch,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,
but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.
He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,
shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid —
I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.
---
New Dog
Mark Doty
Jimi and Tony
can't keep Dino,
their cocker spaniel;
Tony's too sick,
the daily walks
more pressure
than pleasure,
one more obligation
that can't be met.
And though we already
have a dog, Wally
wants to adopt,
wants something small
and golden to sleep
next to him and
lick his face.
He's paralyzed now
from the waist down,
whatever's ruining him
moving upward, and
we don't know
how much longer
he'll be able to pet
a dog. How many men
want another attachment,
just as they're
leaving the world?
Wally sits up nights
and says, I'd like
some lizards, a talking bird,
some fish. A little rat.
So after I drive
to Jimi and Tony's
in the Village and they
meet me at the door and say,
We can't go through with it,
we can't give up our dog,
I drive to the shelter
-- just to look -- and there
is Beau: bounding and
practically boundless,
one brass concatenation
of tongue and tail,
unmediated energy,
too big, wild,
perfect. He not only
licks Wally's face
but bathes every
irreplaceable inch
of his head, and though
Wally can no longer
feed himself he can lift
his hand, and bring it
to rest on the rough gilt
flanks when they are,
for a moment, still.
I have never seen a touch
so deliberate.
It isn't about grasping;
the hand itself seems
almost blurred now,
softened, though
tentative only
because so much will
must be summoned,
such attention brought
to the work -- which is all
he is now, this gesture
toward the restless splendor,
the unruly, the golden,
the animal, the new.
---
Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-second Year
Ray Carver
October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father's embarrassed young man's face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad Beer.
In jeans and denim shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,
Wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.
But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either,
and don't even know the places to fish?
---
The Tooth Fairy
Dorianne Laux
They brushed a quarter with glue
and glitter, slipped in on bare
feet, and without waking me,
painted rows of delicate gold
footprints on my sheets with a love
so quiet, I still can't hear it.
My mother must have been
a beauty then, sitting
at the kitchen table with him,
a warm breeze lifting her
embroidered curtains, waiting
for me to fall asleep.
It's harder to believe
the years that followed, the palms
curled into fists, a floor
of broken dishes, her chainsmoking
through long silences, him
punching holes in his walls.
I can still remember her print
dresses, his checkered taxi, the day
I found her in the closet
with a paring knife, the night
he kicked my sister in the ribs.
He lives alone in Oregon now, dying
slowly of a rare disease.
His face stippled gray, his ankles
clotted beneath wool socks.
She's a nurse on the graveyard shift.
Comes home mornings and calls me.
Drinks her dark beer and goes to bed.
And I still wonder how they did it, slipped
that quarter under my pillow, made those
perfect footprints...
Whenever I visit her, I ask again.
"I don't know", she says, rocking, closing
her eyes. "We were as surprised as you."
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-25 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-26 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-25 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-25 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-26 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-26 03:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-26 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-26 03:13 pm (UTC)The day that becomes fashionable, the world will be a happier place for me. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-03-25 09:29 pm (UTC)I am a fan of description, but not overly-flowery description. I'm a very smart person (or so says standardized testing, so take it with a grain of salt), but some things don't click as well as others do with me. And if there's too much language surrounding the point, I get confused. I love Shakespeare, if I'm reading it in class with a teacher to point me in the right direction on just what in the heck he's saying. Therefore, most of my favorites are modern, as well as grounded in realism instead of in the abstract.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-26 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-25 08:42 pm (UTC)I'm a big Dorianne Laux fan too. Good choices. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-03-25 09:25 pm (UTC)I saw a video in my creative writing class of poets reading their work, and Mark Doty reading New Dog was one of them. It's really a poem you should hear in his voice. Just amazing. I wish I could remember what the video series was. Maybe I'll do some hunting and see if I can figure it out.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-25 09:31 pm (UTC)I wonder if that was one of the Bill Moyers series? I can't remember if Doty's in one of those or not. Very possibly so.