apoemaday

[apoemaday]

June

by Alex Dimitrov

There will never be more of summer than there is now. Walking alone through Union Square I am carrying flowers and the first rosé to a party where I’m expected. It’s Sunday and the trains run on time but today death feels so far, it’s impossible to go underground. I would like to say something to everyone I see (an entire city) but I’m unsure what it is yet. Each time I leave my apartment there’s at least one person crying, reading, or shouting after a stranger anywhere along my commute. It’s possible to be happy alone, I say out loud and to no one so it’s obvious, and now here in the middle of this poem. Rarely have I felt more charmed than on Ninth Street, watching a woman stop in the middle of the sidewalk to pull up her hair like it’s an emergency — and it is. People do know they’re alive. They hardly know what to do with themselves. I almost want to invite her with me but I’ve passed and yes it’d be crazy like trying to be a poet, trying to be anyone here. How do you continue to love New York, my friend who left for California asks me. It’s awful in the summer and winter, and spring and fall last maybe two weeks. This is true. It’s all true, of course, like my preference for difficult men which I had until recently because at last, for one summer the only difficulty I’m willing to imagine is walking through this first humid day with my hands full, not at all peaceful but entirely possible and real.

[apoemaday]

Untitled

by Franz Wright

Will I always be eleven, lonely in this house, reading books that are too hard for me, in the long fatherless hours. The terrible hours of the window, the rain-light on the page, awaiting the letter, the phone call, still your strange elderly child

[apoemaday]

Fault

by Sara Teasdale

They came to tell your faults to me, They named them over one by one; I laughed aloud when they were done, I knew them all so well before, -- Oh, they were blind, too blind to see Your faults had made me love you more.

[apoemaday]

Shape Sorter

by Tom Snarsky

What’s crazy is we live long enough to toss ourselves differently into the waves of time, like as children pain was endless, intolerable, & now weeks float by like coriander in the potato soup of being not our parents but not entirely not them either, snow falling more in the memory now than in real life, mid-Atlantic winters mostly gray duration punctuated by rain & surprise 65-degree days, fresh apples in the grocery store, edible stickers that tell you the four-digit code to type in when they won’t scan. The man who invented the barcode scanner helped me survive my teaching career, all seven years of it, by giving me money. I spent the money on things like white board markers & laminated posters with messages such as: “The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.” Set theory has a high body count when it comes to madness, Cantor lecturing on Bacon -Shakespeare connections that no experts now believe because to look directly at different infinities for too long must just be so inconsonant with living, in which most seeds crack open but don’t grow, or are flooded to the surface to feed the birds. Asphalt worms, displaced snails, the whole system of governance that emerges when pack animals need to move upstream, even the phrase pack animal — does it mean animal in a pack, or animal I’ve put a pack on? I try to tell someone I love I’m here if they need to talk, & the message says “Seen.” The cats take turns rubbing their faces on the new fish toy I got for Mackerel & Kristi shows me a video of a possum doing the same thing, slubbing a pillow that smells like his mom until the wildlife rehabber pries him gently but firmly away. The other day I tried to pray but my mouth wouldn’t form Hail. Probably too low. All seriousness, though do you let ice from the sky hold your tongue? Why not? (One long, hideous thought I have kept to myself: what if I’ve been good enough cue drums the whole time?)

[apoemaday]

Our Ghosts Will Smoke Cigarettes Together

by Bethany A. Breitland

I look forward to a long talk with you finally after we’re dead, our ghost legs flopped over a blackened sill. The storm window with its rickety metal ridge no longer cutting into the backs of our thighs, like it did when we were young, perching over the porch roof to see the moon of the young corn. It’ll be cool summer nights forever — Indiana, crickets singing — freight trains fat with silage howling across the flat land. And we shall sit,��our spirits willing a heft into our backsides as we inhale. And because we’re ghosts, the tar smell won’t seep into our hands or hair as it did when we were sisters — sure signs we weren’t the good of girls we’d been raised to be.

But we’re dead now, so we don’t have to lie. And we also don’t have to avoid talking about the nuances of love and violence we were born into. How need and want and touch and hate bundled our bones for kindling. It’s easier now to feel safe in my body because I don’t have one. It’s easier now to admit we all were just trying to stub out a nightmare

                                                        and instead, we set the fields on fire.

[apoemaday]

Instead of Depression

by Andrea Gibson

try calling it hibernation. Imagine the darkness is a cave in which you will be nurtured by doing absolutely nothing. Hibernating animals don’t even dream. It’s okay if you can’t imagine Spring. Sleep through the alarm of the world. Name your hopelessness a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug, Sweetheart, instead of a grave.

[apoemaday]

Why I Wake Early

by Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and crotchety --

best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light– good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

[apoemaday]

Sonnet

by Stanley Plumly

Like a light coastal rain, with its sadness, the windshield spotted with it, wiped away, the wipers like a metronome, an hour maybe, my sister and I waiting in the truck, the motor running to keep us company, and night coming on at any minute… He’d say he’d be a minute, and knowing was enough, the streetlights already bright among the black slick coiling of the air and the counting of headlights passing through the cab and the wet singing of the tires against the wetter pavement — and what else? — people on the street, sometimes looking in or looking straight ahead, red neon signing on, signing off, the great evening all around us darker, tighter.

[apoemaday]

Mushrooms

by Margaret Atwood

In this moist season, mist on the lake and thunder afternoons in the distance they ooze up through the earth during the night, like bubbles, like tiny bright red balloons filling with water; a sound below sound, the thumbs of rubber gloves turned softly inside out. In the mornings, there is the leaf mold starred with nipples, with cool white fishgills, leathery purple brains, fist-sized suns dulled to the colors of embers, poisonous moons, pale yellow. Where do they come from? For each thunderstorm that travels overhead there’s another storm that moves parallel in the ground. Struck lightning is where they meet. Underfoot there’s a cloud of rootlets, shed hairs or a bundle of loose threads blown slowly through the midsoil. These are their flowers, these fingers reaching through darkness to the sky, these eyeblinks that burst and powder the air with spores. They feed in shade, on halfleaves as they return to water, on slowly melting logs, deadwood. They glow in the dark sometimes. They taste of rotten meat or cloves or cooking steak or bruised lips or new snow. It isn’t only for food I hunt them but for the hunt and because they smell of death and the waxy skins of the newborn, flesh into earth into flesh. Here is the handful of shadow I have brought back to you: this decay, this hope, this mouth -- full of dirt, this poetry.

[apoemaday]

Rumination

by Jim Harrison

I sit up late dumb as a cow, which is to say somewhat conscious with thirst and hunger, an eye for the new moon and the morning’s long walk to the water tank. Everywhere around me the birds are waiting for the light. In this world of dreams don’t let the clock cut up your life in pieces.

[apoemaday]

When I Have Fears

by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain Before high piled books in charact'ry Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain; When I behold upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the fairy powre Of unreflecting love -- then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone and think, Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

[apoemaday]

i thank you God for this most amazing

by E.E. Cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any -- lifted from the no of all nothing -- human merely being doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

[apoemaday]

Allowables

by Nikki Giovanni

I killed a spider Not a murderous brown recluse Nor even a black widow And if the truth were told this Was only a small Sort of papery spider Who should have run When I picked up the book But she didn’t And she scared me And I smashed her

I don’t think I’m allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened

[apoemaday]

Nightclub

by Billy Collins

You are so beautiful and I am a fool to be in love with you is a theme that keeps coming up in songs and poems. There seems to be no room for variation. I have never heard anyone sing I am so beautiful and you are a fool to be in love with me, even though this notion has surely crossed the minds of women and men alike. You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool is another one you don’t hear. Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful. That one you will never hear, guaranteed.

For no particular reason this afternoon I am listening to Johnny Hartman whose dark voice can curl around the concepts of love, beauty, and foolishness like no one else’s can. It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette someone left burning on a baby grand piano around three o'clock in the morning; smoke that billows up into the bright lights while out there in the darkness some of the beautiful fools have gathered around little tables to listen, some with their eyes closed, others leaning forward into the music as if it were holding them up, or twirling the loose ice in a glass, slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream. Yes, there is all this foolish beauty, borne beyond midnight, that has no desire to go home, especially now when everyone in the room is watching the large man with the tenor sax that hangs from his neck like a golden fish. He moves forward to the edge of the stage and hands the instrument down to me and nods that I should play. So I put the mouthpiece to my lips and blow into it with all my living breath. We are all so foolish, my long bebop solo begins by saying, so damn foolish we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

[apoemaday]

Crows

by Mary Oliver

It is January, and there are crows like black flowers on the snow. While I watch, they rise and float toward the frozen pond, they have seen some streak of death on the dark ice. They gather around it and consume everything, the strings and the red music of that nameless body. Then they shout, one hungry, blunt voice echoing another. It begins to rain. Later, it becomes February, and even later, spring returns, a chorus of thousands. They bow, and begin their important music. I recognize the oriole. I recognize the thrush, and the mockingbird. I recognize the business of summer, which is to forge ahead, delicately. So I dip my fingers among the green stems, delicately. I lounge at the edge of the leafing pond, delicately. I scarcely remember the crust of the snow. I scarcely remember the icy dawns and the sun like a lamp without a fuse. I don’t remember the fury of loneliness. I never felt the wind’s drift. I never heard of the struggle between anything and nothing. I never saw the flapping, blood-gulping crows.

[apoemaday]

Haiku

by Fukuda Chiyo-ni tr. Daniel C. Buchanan

Bearing no flowers, I am free to toss madly like the willow tree.

[apoemaday]

The God Who Loves You

by Carl Dennis

It must be troubling for the god who loves you To ponder how much happier you’d be today Had you been able to glimpse your many futures. It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings Driving home from the office, content with your week — Three fine houses sold to deserving families — Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened Had you gone to your second choice for college, Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted Whose ardent opinions on painting and music Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion. A life thirty points above the life you’re living On any scale of satisfaction. And every point A thorn in the side of the god who loves you. You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments So she can save her empathy for the children. And would you want this god to compare your wife With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus? It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight Than the conversation you’re used to. And think how this loving god would feel Knowing that the man next in line for your wife Would have pleased her more than you ever will Even on your best days, when you really try. Can you sleep at night believing a god like that Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is And what could have been will remain alive for him Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill Running out in the snow for the morning paper, Losing eleven years that the god who loves you Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend No closer than the actual friend you made at college, The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight And write him about the life you can talk about With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed, Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.