Terrible Mother

Poem of the Week

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

-W.S. Merwin

Poem of the Week

A Blessing from My Sixteen Years' Son

I have this son who assembled inside me
during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared,
in a tiny blaze. Outside, pines toppled.

Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras.
Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous.
Look at the muscled obelisk of him now

pawing through the icebox for more grapes.
Sixteen years and not a bone broken,
nor single stitch. By his age,

I was marked more ways, and small.
He’s a slouching six-foot, three,
with implausible blue eyes, which settle

on the pages of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”
with profound belligerence.
A girl with a navel ring

could make his cell phone go buzz,
or an Afro-ed boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell--
creatures strange to me as dragons or eels.

Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel
arcane as any oracle’s. Rodney claims school
is harshing my mellow. Case longs to date

a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman
willing to do stuff she’ll regret.
They’ve come to lead my son

into his broadening spiral.
Someday soon, the tether
will snap. I birthed my own mom

into oblivion. The night my son smashed
the car fender then rode home
in the rain-streaked cop car, he asked, Did you

and Dad screw up so much?
He’d let me tuck him in,
my grandmother’s wedding quilt

from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’t
blame us, I said. You’re your own
idiot now. At which he grinned.

The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy
took it hard. He’d found my son
awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights,

where he’d draped his own coat
over her shaking shoulders. My fault,
he’d confessed right off.

Nice kid, said the cop.

-Mary Karr, from Sinners Welcome

Poem of the Week

The Maple

is a system of posture for wood.
A way of not falling down
for twigs that happens
to benefit birds. I don't know.
I'm staring at a tree,
at yellow leaves
threshed by wind and want you
reading this to be staring
at the same tree. I could
cut it down and laminate it
or ask you to live with me
on the stairs with the window
keeping an eye on the maple
but I think your real life
would miss you. The story
here is that all morning
I've thought of the statement
that art is about loneliness
while watching golden leaves
become unhinged.
By ones or in bunches
they tumble and hang
for a moment like a dress
in the dryer.
At the laundromat
you've seen the arms
thrown out to catch the shirt
flying the other way.
Just as you've stood
at the bottom of a gray sky
in a pile of leaves
trying to lick them
back into place.

-Bob Hicok

Poem of the Week

How to Fall in Love With Your Father

Put your hands beneath his armpits, bend your knees,
wait for the clasp of his thinning arms; the best lock
cheek to cheek. Move slow. Do not, right now,

recall the shapes he traced yesterday
on your back, moments before being wheeled to surgery.
Do not pretend the anxious calligraphy of touch
was sign beyond some unspeakable animal stammer. Do not

go back further into the landscape of silence you both
tended, with body and breath, until it nearly obscured all
but the genetic gravity between you.

And do not imagine wind now blowing that landscape
into a river which spills into a sea. Because it doesn’t.
That’s not this love poem. In this love poem
the son trains himself on the task at hand,
which is simple, which is, finally, the only task
he has ever had, which is lifting
the father to his feet.

-Ross Gay

Poem of the Week

Slow Dance

More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dining room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home, to knock it out of the park. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about how all the stars in the sky
are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I fed my face. I drank my beer.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children
before they turn three. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what’s to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress
covered in a million beads
comes toward me like an oversexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutang slow dance.

-Matthew Dickman

Poem of the Week

Pentagon Orders Dead Officers To Report For Duty

The U.S. army said Friday it would apologize to the families of about 75 officers killed in action who were mistakenly sent letters urging them to return to active duty.

--January 5, 2007 WASHINGTON (AP)

Will The Dead Please Rise

Will the dead please rise and raise
your right hands. Will the dead please
swear to uphold that hand for as long
as it takes. Will the dead please
reassemble your bones, replace
your heads, return your hearts, recant
your screams. Will the dead please
salute the flag ripped from the body
politic. Will the dead please step
onto the helicopters and into the bodies
of soldiers about to become you. Give
the living your history, your wisdom,
your sleepless eternities, your missteps
only they can make right, remind them
nightly to go on living. Will the dead
please buckle up and bring them home.

-Dorianne Laux

Poem of the Week

What I Like

Friend-- the face I wallow toward
through a scrimmage of shut faces.
Arms like towropes to haul me home, aide-
memoire, my lost childhood docks, a bottled ark
in harbor. Friend-- I can't forget
how even the word contains an end.
We circle each other in scared bolero,
imagining stratagems: postures and imposters.
Cold convictions keep us solo. I ahem
and hedge my affections. Who'll blow the first kiss,
land it like the lifeforces we feel
tickling at each wrist? It should be easy
easy to take your hand, whisper down this distance
labeled hers or his: what I like about you is

-Alice Fulton

Poem of the Week

Orange Sutra

I wanted to take you in, peel and all,
with the mind's all-swallowing
mouth. But the mind prefers
unoranging the orange
until a segment unhinges
and shines upright
in the night sky, unaware
of the night or of its own shining.

In such a way the mind makes a darker thing
of night's conception of itself.
Its crescent admonishes lamentation as
a temporary setback, mindful of the round,
the moon's fullness, from which it came
and from which it draws power
to increase or disappear
into us, entirely.

Gone full again, how orange are you, Orange,
now that a moon mistakes you for its
daughter? Just as I
thought: you are a wisecrack
in the abundance of the night's spiraling obituary,
willing to carry us with you
like poor relations,
until we run out of pretexts, alterations
and gambits.

If I choose to live in mind of you,
it will be known only on the blackboard
of a thought's mad all-over grammar,
those woolly bees of the heart
that want to sting a moment to death
with memory -- spelling the past wuz,
with its fur on, and letting it roll before us
like an orange, a portable altar
that prays all over itself
with itself.

You could say so, Orange.
You could kneel as you said so.
The way an orange is always kneeling
and upright at once.

-Tess Gallagher

Tess Gallagher reads April 12th at the UofO. I'll be there. And anyone not-so-local is welcome to crash on my couch. And, regardless, I'd love to see some of you at the reading and after (at the requisite Drinking After Reading). Let me know if you're planning on coming.

*tm

Poem of the Week

"Only the Mistakes Belong to Us"
-Jorge Luis Borges

This tree keeps falling over. I prop it up,
it falls again. And the rain falls
day after day like a broken wet record.
Here are the birds--tiny, smaller

than birds. And like fresh butcher's
paper, the light so bright it hurts.
So the birds are the paper and so is the sky.
It will be easiest if I draw you a picture,

each of us a different shade of gray.
What goes right is an accident. It can't
be blamed on us. What goes wrong

is almost impossible to see. How quickly
it disappears, like someone's hand
into someone else's pocket.

-Matthew Thorburn

Poem of the Week

Making Love to Leopard Man

Tom Leppard...has approximately 99.9%
of his body covered in tattoos...
a leopard-skin design...[He} now lives
as a hermit on the Isle of Skye.
-Guinness World Records

Though I'm not a needle, let me touch you.
Let me look into the pink secret of your ear.
Let me part, one by one, your reclusive, unmarked toes.

Trust me, you are not the first man I've known
who thought he was an animal, who's sharpened
his claws without knowing what to do with them.

Like continents your bruised-green spots drift apart.
Lying beside you, I watch the ink bleed slowly
into the tiny channels of skin, edges blurring

into your yellow sea. One-hundred-six islands
I've counted so far: that one looks like a storm cloud,
that one at your hip like the head of a woman.

You're not the only one who knows how to make
the body an elaborate disguise. How I wish
the children who torment you would throw stones

at the ugly hut of my life and scatter like birds
when I glare at them. I want to bathe my scars
in the isle's dirty river. I want fangs.

Let me show you how hermit crabs do it: tap
my borrowed shell until I uncurl like a raw finger,
exposing myself to salt. Out there, I could be eaten.

I could be carried away by the current into the mouth
of prey. Hold me closer with your human claws.
For now, let's pretend we have nothing to hide.

-Stephanie Lenox

from Best New Poets 2006