Terrible Mother

Poem of the Week

The Romantic

I've been to the movie about the flood where the boy and girl float
under the latticed bridges, miraculously still, their bodies only touching
from elbow to wrist, and somehow, they stay together
admist the wreckage of refrigerators and station wagons,
soggy stuffed animals, wooden houses, eyeless dolls
and picket fences that drift through a city, held together tenderly
as the ash of a cigarette. They survive, get married,
live happily for six months, never fight, make love
on the kitchen tile, until one morning a water logged greeting card
shows up on their doorstep, a heart felt fuck you
scratched on the inside. We find out he has cancer, only one day
to live, and we feel cheated as they spend the last hours feeding
the ducks on Laurelhurst Pond, because we have to return
to our ordinary lives, snapping you bare ass with a wet towel
on Halloween, or you splitting my lip months earlier
in a wrestling match. Or leaving me standing there
in a Home Depot parking lot wondering if you would ever
come back with our two Chihuahuas and the new barbecue loaded
into the backseat of the car, pissed because I paid too much attention
to the cashier, my marriage driving away with her hands
on the wheel, music blaring, the wind smashing her in the face.

-Jay Nebel*
from Best New Poets, 2006

*Jay is a good friend, and completed the MFA at Oregon while I was there.

Poem of the Week

Body Bags

A murder of crows looks on in silence
from the eucalyptus trees above
as we stand over the bodies—
who look as if they might roll over
to wake from a dream and question us
about the blood drying on their scalps,
the bullets lodged in the back of their skulls,
to ask where their wives and children are
this morning, and why this hovering
of flies, the taste of flatbread and chai
gone from their mouths, as they stretch
and rise, wondering who these strangers are
who would kick their hard feet, saying
Last call, motherfucker. Last call.

-Brian Turner

from Here, Bullet

Poem of the Week

Lawrence

On two occasions in the past twelve months
I have failed, when someone at a party
spoke of him with a dismissive scorn,
to stand up for D.H. Lawrence,

a man who burned like an acetylene torch
from one end to the other of his life.
These individuals, whose relationship to literature
is approximately that of a tree shredder

to stands of old-growth forest,
these people leaned back in their chairs,
bellies full of dry white wine and the ova of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name

the way that pygmies with their little poison spears
strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
"O Elephant," they say,
"you are not so big and brave today!"

It's a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven't earned,
and it's a sorry thing when certain other people

don't defend the great dead ones
who have opened up the world before them.
And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
this is a fairly minor entry,

I resolve, if the occastion should recur,
to uncheck my tongue and say, "I love the spectacle
of maggots condescending to a corpse,"
or, "You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life

as to deserve to lift
just one of D.H. Lawrence's urine samples
to your arid psychobiographic
theory-tainted lips."

Or maybe I'll just take the shortcut
between the spirit and the flesh,
and punch someone in the face,
because human beings haven't come that far

in their effort to subdue the body,
and we still walk around like zombies
in our dying, burning world,
able to do little more

than to fight, and fuck, and crow:
something Lawrence wrote about
in such a manner
as to make us seem magnificent.

-Tony Hoagland

from Donkey Gospel

Poem of the Week

Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what's happening,

it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed
anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly
she had to scream out.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

-Bob Hicok

Poem of the Week

Wasps
for my father

Dead C battery, souvenir lighter, spool of thread,
lipstick tube lacking a smudge of red:
we'd rummage junk drawers to fill the squares.
But the lost chessmen?—
they click against glass, black
bishops bidding me open the window,
wheedling a wary God to release them
to crusade for their king gone ahead to Jerusalem.

-Michael Waters

Poem of the Week

Cleopatra's Bra

It is one thing to uphold one’s passions,
another to retain them. That thin seam
between impassioned and fashion: it could be

just another form of governing,
intimacy. Who knows if sequins spiraled
around each nipple, lapis clinging to straps.

Each mouthful of wine would raise her body heat
until a touch of gold slivered and rose
off her dark skin, caught somewhere

in a jewel of sweat. This is the Egypt
I imagine: pyramids, obelisks,
the Valley of Kings, and one torn bra.

Meanwhile, the Romans fashioned their parchment,
filled it with long strings of letters: a
for ave, b for beato (blessed), c,

of course, for Caesar, with no space between,
as to appear infinite. Augustus did try.
The old argument: come home, she’s bad news.

But for Antony there would be no empire
cloven: a pregnant dream as he lay
again with her, clothes strewn on the ground

like artifacts of a forgotten city
under ash, and those two bodies caught
once more, together, for all of Rome to see.

Because it did end, Virgil says, in ruins
of a city, toppled towers, and one
fictitious Dido who let it all hang out

one Carthage summer so hot the oarsmen
gave up their fears, Acestes descended his throne
without bearskin, Aeneas loved and left,

Dido died. I like to imagine her scrawling
a message to the future regarding love—
flagrant love—and sacrificial fires

like those she clothed her city in one night:
Beware the Roman come to lie with you,
one hand heart-heavy and bound there

like the swearing-in of a city
official. Feeling her lover fiddle
with the clasp, Cleopatra must have thought,

does everything come undone with this
one small breach of virtue? One giant step
backward, she hears the inevitable

unleashing of the dogs, the centuries
head to toe in armor, and the lift,
they say, of a shallow wicker basket.

I like to imagine her calmly spreading
her robe, a leisurely cup of wine,
her fingers unclasping the bra from behind

as the asp negotiates the sea
of azure silk that separates them, empires
colliding, and the golden tint of scales.

-Chad Davidson

Poem of the Week

When I was four, we drove to Nashville

When I was four, we drove to Nashville,
Grand Ole Opry-bound, and stopped
the night at a broken down motel
in Tennessee—shag walls,
mossy carpet, dank concrete—
and I remember standing in
the doorway as evening fell,
a busful of believers rattling their way
to the pool for a makeshift
baptism, the Amens and Hear us, Lords
ricocheting through the courtyard
as underwater lights glowed
the pool algae green.

They would come to him, the big
preacher man, and he’d lay
a palm across their foreheads, brace
them at the small of their backs.
They’d release themselves to him:
teethsucking the air before
falling back into salvation,
held under unstruggling and
splashing up anew all gasping
grace and sanctified glory
hallelujah til my mother shut the door
and made me watch tv.

My parents don’t recall it,
but that’s the way
memory works in the South—
the truth is always lying
in some field somewhere between
the bones of the fallen
and the weapons they reach for.

-Stacey Lynn Brown

Poem of the Week

Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy

For some semi-tropical reason
when the rain falls
relentlessly they fall

into swimming pools, these otherwise
bright and scary
arachnids. They can swim
a little, but not for long

and they can’t climb the ladder out.
They usually drown-- but
if you want their favor,
if you believe there is a justice,
rewards for not loving

the death of ugly
and even dangerous (the eel, hogsnake,
rats) creatures, if

you believe these things then
you would leave a lifebuoy
or two in your swimming pool at night.

And in the morning
you would haul ashore
the huddled, hairy survivors

and escort them
back to the bush, and know,
be assured, that at least these saved,
as individuals, would not turn up

again someday
in your hat, drawer,
or the tangled underworld

of your socks, and that even--
when your belief in justice
merges with your belief in dreams--
they may tell the others

in a sign language
four times as subtle
and complicated as man’s

that you are good,
that you love them,
that you would save them again.

-Thomas Lux

Poem of the Week

White Slip on the Paris Metro

From the fouled nests of Villejuif
to the street below,
then the walk, the steps down
to the catacomb metro—
I have waited with Moroccans squatting like tajines
and Senegalese women asleep against their bundles,
waited in this crowd like a soul for a ferry
and how many skies exiled?

How many skies.
To ride this silent film
under cobbled Paris, her exposed-bone sycamores,
to pitch and tilt and judder,
in scumbled light,
there among the speeding cataleptic,
rocking like the drowned,
being how many kinds of foreign
and living like Saint Jerome.

And I speak stone but no one speaks.
I have slept against my reflection.
I have pretended a bored sleep.

But once I raised my head
and saw, I swear, a woman wearing falling snow.

She glowed supernova in a slip.
Not a knot or a kiln or a boat ramp,
but a dress from the silver water of the moon
and a liquid shape, each way free.

Not wine-lips red or black,
but blue-shadowed pearl white silk,
a dress of movie light,
a dress that's all of May,
the force of curve, all liquid words,
a whirly night sea's murmur—

Then at once the doors leapt open,
and in that hiss like a wave pulling back on the sand
she was gone.
Yet in a city of crows, my ribs marimba'd,
at that temple door, I was accordion lunged.
I saw a candlelit woman in the fluorescent metro,
a woman like a sudden pillar of doves.

-Eliot Khalil Wilson

Poem of the Week

Little Things

After she's gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl's breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a small
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the beautiful blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this tiny image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son's sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have -
as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

- Sharon Olds