Jack Gilbert is one of the best poets I know of!

Alone
by Jack Gilbert

I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody's dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on their lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other's eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.

Jack Gilbert died on this day in 2012.

Jack Gilbert, "Alone" from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2012 by Jack Gilbert. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58412/alone-56d23cc3c2dbe?mc_cid=e6fcc3424a

#poem #poetry #literature

Alone

When she finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap and we watch each other's eyes as I whisper in her soft ears. She likes it best when I touch her head and tell her small things about my days and our friends.

CRIBBAGE LESSONS
by Susan Johnson

The summer Dad decided it was time
I learned crib, counting fifteen two,
fifteen four, I loved doing the sums

in my head, tallying up the pairs,
runs, as if life were arithmetic,
which at six it was. Going into

second grade, the owner of three
hand-me-down bathing suits from
one sister, two cousins, I went

swimming five times a day and at
the general store one mile away,
bought a dime’s worth of penny

candy from a woman who had to
be a hundred. In four years mom
would have her mastectomy; in ten

she’d be dead. We didn’t know any
of that then. Just that it all adds up
until it doesn’t. Then you’re skunked.

—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024

Susan Johnson: “I spent my childhood being outside as much as possible and trying to solve the many puzzles that made up my life. I do the same as an adult, only now it’s language that I use to work through and understand what I encounter. I’m also more accepting when it doesn’t quite add up.”

https://www.rattle.com/cribbage-lessons-by-susan-johnson/

#poem #poetry #literature

Veterans of the Seventies
BY Marvin Bell

His army jacket bore the white rectangle

of one who has torn off his name. He sat mute

at the round table where the trip-wire veterans

ate breakfast. They were foxhole buddies

who went stateside without leaving the war.

They had the look of men who held their breath

and now their tongues. What is to say
beyond that said by the fathers who bent lower

and lower as the war went on, spines curving

toward the ground on which sons sat sandbagged

with ammo belts enough to make fine lace

of enemy flesh and blood. Now these who survived,

who got back in cargo planes emptied at the front,
lived hiddenly in the woods behind fence wires

strung through tin cans. Better an alarm

than the constant nightmare of something moving

on its belly to make your skin crawl

with the sensory memory of foxhole living.

#poem #poetry #literature

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50571/veterans-of-the-seventies?mc_cid=af276c027e

A Phosphorescence
by James Cervantes

I discovered phosphorescence one day

clearing pine needles from an acre plot

in the mountains. I raked and scratched

large piles, then became obsessed with the base

of one tree, raking harder and deeper until black,

matted clumps of needles came up to reveal a glow.

Fire, I thought, afraid for the forest. But no smoke,

no burn smells. There could be light without fire,

like that moment of warmth I mistook for fire,

a gentle touch on your arm that was light

and would be no more than that.

“‘A poem thirty-five years in the making,’ a blurb might read. In truth, my witnessing of ‘A Phosphorescence’ occurred thirty-five years ago, much as described in the poem’s first eight lines. Year after year, I would write out the experience but would then get stuck. Last year, I revisited the definition I found online: ‘light emitted by a substance without combustion or perceptible heat;’ [but this time I read its application] in physics: ‘the emission of radiation in a similar manner to fluorescence but on a longer timescale.’ So that emission continues after excitation ceases. Finally, I had the poem!”
—James Cervantes

https://poets.org/poem/phosphorescence?mc_cid=767b428e27

#poem #poetry #literature

A Phosphorescence

I discovered phosphorescence one day / clearing pine needles from an acre plot

Endlessly

Is this so pointless?
A day, wasted, on a path
from unhealed sorrow

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2024

#haiku #poem #poetry #PoetryCommunity

Hey everyone, I’m #newhere. I’m interested in #blackmetal, #brazil, #celtic, #death-doom, #deathmetal, #doom-metal, #dublin, #epic, #esoteric, #gaelic, #gaelic-folk-rock, #heavy-metal, #httpsdiasporasocialnetstream, #ireland, #literature, #music, #occult, #orion, #pagan, #pagan-metal, #poetry, and #radio.

HAIKU
by petro c. k.

it’s all over
but the counting
distant sirens

—from Poets Respond
 
petro c. k.: “As one who often writes haiku, it’s always a challenge to distill moments to its essence. When I was sitting with my thoughts, I heard sirens off in the distance, which captured the sense I had of melancholy, anxiety, and unknown dangers on the horizon.”

https://www.rattle.com/haiku-its-all-over-by-petro-c-k/

#poem #poetry #literature #news #politics

Happy Birthday Anne Sexton!!

Her Kind
By Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.

one of my favorites (it's like all my dreams/nightmares) and basis of Peter Gabriel's Mercy Street

45 Mercy Street
by Anne Sexton

In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign —
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.

I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant's teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.

Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was…
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget,
me,
with the stranger's seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down —
I don't care!
Bolt the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-sexton

#poem #poetry #poets #literature

Anne Sexton

Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.

To David, About His Education
By Howard Nemerov

The world is full of mostly invisible things,
And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,
Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,
Things like the square root of Everest
Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,
Or whether the law of the excluded middle
Applies west of the Rockies. For these
And the like reasons, you have to go to school
And study books and listen to what you are told,
And sometimes try to remember. Though I don’t know
What you will do with the mean annual rainfall
On Plato’s Republic, or the calorie content
Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be
Good for you, and you will have to learn them
In order to become one of the grown-ups
Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,
But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world
Under his hat, which is where it belongs,
And teaches small children to do this in their turn.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52813/to-david-about-his-education

#poem #poetry #literature

OUR WAITRESS’S MARVELOUS LEGS
by Grace Bauer

It’s men I’m prone to eye, but when she comes
to take our order, I’m too distracted
to think beyond drinks, too awed
by the ink that garments her limbs
to consider appetizers, much less entrees.

It’s not polite to stare, I know,
but the fact of her invites it.
Why else the filigreed ankles,
those Peter Max planets orbiting her
left shin, that Botticelli angel soaring
just below her right knee?

She’s a walking illustration, adorned
to amaze, yet as seemingly nonchalant
as the homely white-sneakered HoJo girl
I myself once was, describing the specials
of the day, listing our options for dressings,
then scribbling the choices we make
on her hand-held pad.

My companion can’t help wondering how far
up the ante goes, says he bets there’s a piercing
or two at the end of the, so to speak, line.
I’m more inclined to ponder motivation
and stamina—how long and how much
she suffered to make herself a work of art.
For I have no doubt, she sees her own flesh
as a kind of canvas. Her body as frame
and wall and traveling exhibition,
a personal statement on public display.

Same could be said of the purple tights
I wear beneath my frilly black skirt—
too bold a choice for some people’s tastes,
but not a permanent commitment.
Clothes make the woman more
than the man, despite the familiar adage,
and body as both self and other is
a contradiction we live with, however comfortably
—or not—we grow into our own skins.

I’ll admit part of what I feel
is admiration, even envy.
Whatever she may ever become
in this world, she will never again be drab.
She’ll wear this extravagance
of color and form as she grays
into more—or less—wisdom.

But tonight she simply performs
her duty as server, courteous and efficient
as she does what she can to satisfy
the hunger we walked in with, but not
the hunger the sight of her
inspires us to take home.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011

https://www.rattle.com/our-waitresss-marvelous-legs-by-grace-bauer/

#poem #poetry #literature

Dating in the Apocalypse Bunker

By Kristen Mears

You take the lamp with your last battery
and meet me at the radios, where it’s quiet,
and we can be alone. I like how the light dims
and flickers, the way it plays across the steel.
I like how we can’t see the sand in the air.
You hold my gloved hand in your gloved hand
and we walk the hydroponic halls. I love you
because your eyes are green, because we eat
protein cans and you tell me about birds,
how your dad still has grass in his vault.
And we’re dressed to the nines, in our cleanest
boots, the dust scrubbed from our tanks
until they gleam. Our utility suits are beeping
beneath our helmet read-outs, but no longer
are we clumsy, like those men who fled to Mars.
And we go not to the movies but to the oxygen
chambers, where we crouch low, lean close
to a vent. You shed your gear first, lips dry
and desert-cracked, and we share that same
recycled air, press our mouths against the wall,
breathe so deeply we see stars.

https://www.palettepoetry.com/2024/10/21/dating-in-the-apocalypse-bunker/

#poem #poetry #literature #specpoetry

Dating in the Apocalypse Bunker - Palette Poetry

"And we’re dressed to the nines, in our cleanest / boots, the dust scrubbed from our tanks / until they gleam."

Jamie Romanet - Dewdrops

#art #peinture #painting #Romanet #autumn #automne #halloween #poésie #poetry

Fog, and this woman,
endlessly cradling the sea..
just a warm soft breeze
to resolve humid vapor
and Hamlet's dewdrops
clinging on a winter's web.

https://jamieromanet.com/artwork/4997627-Dewdrops.html

Sleepless

Forsaken night turns
her back; now, with no dreams left,
I have a cursed day.

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2024

#haiku #poem #poetry #PoetryCommunity

Song for Ancient Days

Darkness falls.
Speak to me, my love,
across the stillness of a pensive night.
I wait to hear the stars
call, from the past,
a mystery of grief, not yet resolved;
nor understood,
but carried through the void,
a silent paean.

I am torn;
never whole, my heart
has, ever, wandered frontiers of night's dream,
to seek the part it lost,
and, ever, sought,
since hours when mourning eyes grew dark, with pain.
Its deeper fear,
to enter, once again,
Dante's despair.

Must we sleep,
hidden, beneath stars,
that know no boundaries, and see us joined?
Must wounded hands not feel
the flowing blood,
that is our guarantee, we will not break –
though fated, yet,
to stand, alone, on shores,
and unfulfilled?

This, my vow;
with my hands, outstretched,
in watching tears, deep hushed, across the sky:
this life, as one too far,
will be the end
of endless searching for a home, long loved;
our hearts, as one,
will join, to claim their due,
and live, again.

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2024

#SJAshcroftsPoems #poems #poetry #PoetryCommunity #MyWordsMyWork

Happy Birthday Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

#poem #poetry #poets #literature

https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night

Do not go gentle into that good night

Discover the meaning of Dylan Thomas's famous villanelle about death, with an audio recording of the poet reading his classic poem. This poem was featured in the 2014 movie Interstellar.

https://youtu.be/dvevj3gxKfQ?si=hLWyMc9FmCzI2oWY
#Music #Poetry #Cello

I Told My Therapist I Put the Bi In Bipolar
Two poems by Bleah Patterson

When I tell my therapist I put the ‘bi’ in Bipolar she asks to see me twice a week

little, I screeched a bucket of water
in the backyard
tadpoles! tadpoles!
look! tadpoles!
but they were— my grandma shakes her head—
mosquito larvae much too small
much too filthy darting around the sludge
of the shallow They’ll bite you
when they’re big, best to kill ’em now
murky part of my
brain emerges manic screech like tadpoles!
tadpoles! look! therapist dips her
fingers into shallow murky
—shakes her head — too filthy too
nasty, it’s always the worst stuff
floating on top says feeling like I could survive
anything if I only wanted to, —big, I
bite razor to wrist, inner thigh— is a
goldfish, belly up, childhood fingers
tapping the tank Why won’t it swim and
my brain is telling me you don’t love me
anymore pink puckered pomegranate lips
chapped not answering the phone
but deep down
an angler fish knows that’s
not true I’m making things up again
imagining the worst I can’t hold my
breath long enough down there
but still they’re in the shallow
the murky not tadpoles!
tadpoles! no, look!

sales lady says stop romanticizing the struggle

but i’m slanted floor boards, always creaking
always leaning too far in one
direction wine out of a chipped mug
and when i take a lint roller to my lipstick
stained cat-hair covered personality
i can’t make anything stick sales lady says
“everyone should own a nice set of dishes, for company”
and i tell her the company i keep is a
handful of bread smeared through the butter dish
forks straight into the still steaming pot
she says my mother must be so proud and
rolls her eyes i say my mother always
told me a little dirt don’t hurt and i took that to
mean it feels good, took that shit
literally, took that and smeared the mud
across my eyelids said i was ready for a
night on the town the sales lady
says “everyone should own a nice pair of heels,
for date night,” but i’m a bare feet on his dash—
bored at the four-star restaurant, let’s
make love on the shingles, orion is mood lighting
she says the boys must love me rolls her eyes
I say fuck the boys I mean that literally
take all of that shit to heart.

https://electricliterature.com/two-poems-by-bleah-patterson/?mc_cid=2618de7d97

Bleah Patterson (she/her) is a southern, queer writer born and raised in Texas. A current MFA candidate and writing instructor, she is a Pushcart nominee and her various genres of work are featured or forthcoming in The Brazos River Review, Write or Die, The Texas Review, Across the Margins, Queerlings, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Beaver Magazine, and elsewhere.

#poem #poetry #literature

I Told My Therapist I Put the Bi In Bipolar - Electric Literature

Two poems by Bleah Patterson

“On Similes”
*by Miller Oberman *

I have read my father’s book and, as I suspected, much of it is bad.
Especially the attempts to teach mindfulness, which,

given that once at a bakery he listened at length to a woman
from a mindfulness class he taught gush about its effectiveness

all the while standing on my mother’s foot, is no surprise to me.
Especially bad are the similes.

“Grief is like an unkempt beggar” (242).
“…sniff these last days of summer like a fine wine” (242).

This compared to when he’s not trying so hard.
When, at 42, he has a heart attack and his father comes,

“he holds me as if I’m made of smoke” (109).

https://lithub.com/on-similes-a-poem-by-miller-oberman/

#poem #poetry #literature

“On Similes,” a Poem by Miller Oberman

“On Similes” I have read my father’s book and, as I suspected, much of it is bad. Especially the attempts to teach mindfulness, which, given that once at a bakery he listened at length to a woman f…

Housekeeping
BY Natasha Trethewey

We mourn the broken things, chair legs
wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,
the threadbare clothes. We work the magic
of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.
We save what we can, melt small pieces
of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones
for soup. Beating rugs against the house,
we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading
across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw
the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs
out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.
I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,
listen for passing cars. All day we watch
for the mail, some news from a distant place.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/90616/housekeeping

#poem #poetry #literature

Housekeeping

We work the magic of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.

#autumn #fall #poetry