the-daily-poem

[the-daily-poem]

Rapunzel

by Anne Sexton

A woman who loves a woman is forever young. The mentor and the student feed off each other. Many a girl had an old aunt who locked her in the study to keep the boys away. They would play rummy or lie on the couch and touch and touch. Old breast against young breast… Let your dress fall down your shoulder, come touch a copy of you for I am at the mercy of rain, for I have left the three Christs of Ypsilanti for I have left the long naps of Ann Arbor and the church spires have turned to stumps. The sea bangs into my cloister for the politicians are dying, and dying so hold me, my young dear, hold me… The yellow rose will turn to cinder and New York City will fall in before we are done so hold me, my young dear, hold me. Put your pale arms around my neck. Let me hold your heart like a flower lest it bloom and collapse. Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark. Give me your nether lips all puffy with their art and I will give you angel fire in return. We are two clouds glistening in the bottle glass. We are two birds washing in the same mirror. We were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us for we lie together all in green like pond weeds. Hold me, my young dear, hold me. They touch their delicate watches one at a time. They dance to the lute two at a time. They are as tender as bog moss. They play mother-me-do all day. A woman who loves a woman is forever young. Once there was a witch’s garden more beautiful than Eve’s with carrots growing like little fish, with many tomatoes rich as frogs, onions as ingrown as hearts, the squash singing like a dolphin and one patch given over wholly to magic - rampion, a kind of salad root a kind of harebell more potent than penicillin, growing leaf by leaf, skin by skin. as rapt and as fluid as Isadoran Duncan. However the witch’s garden was kept locked and each day a woman who was with child looked upon the rampion wildly, fancying that she would die if she could not have it. Her husband feared for her welfare and thus climbed into the garden to fetch the life-giving tubers. Ah ha, cried the witch, whose proper name was Mother Gothel, you are a thief and now you will die. However they made a trade, typical enough in those times. He promised his child to Mother Gothel so of course when it was born she took the child away with her. She gave the child the name Rapunzel, another name for the life-giving rampion. Because Rapunzel was a beautiful girl Mother Gothel treasured her beyond all things. As she grew older Mother Gothel thought: None but I will ever see her or touch her. She locked her in a tow without a door or a staircase. It had only a high window. When the witch wanted to enter she cried’ Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. Rapunzel’s hair fell to the ground like a rainbow. It was as strong as a dandelion and as strong as a dog leash. Hand over hand she shinnied up the hair like a sailor and there in the stone-cold room, as cold as a museum, Mother Gothel cried: Hold me, my young dear, hold me, and thus they played mother-me-do. Years later a prince came by and heard Rapunzel singing her loneliness. That song pierced his heart like a valentine but he could find no way to get to her. Like a chameleon he hid himself among the trees and watched the witch ascend the swinging hair. The next day he himself called out: Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, and thus they met and he declared his love. What is this beast, she thought, with muscles on his arms like a bag of snakes? What is this moss on his legs? What prickly plant grows on his cheeks? What is this voice as deep as a dog? Yet he dazzled her with his answers. Yet he dazzled her with his dancing stick. They lay together upon the yellowy threads, swimming through them like minnows through kelp and they sang out benedictions like the Pope. Each day he brought her a skein of silk to fashion a ladder so they could both escape. But Mother Gothel discovered the plot and cut off Rapunzel’s hair to her ears and took her into the forest to repent. When the prince came the witch fastened the hair to a hook and let it down. When he saw Rapunzel had been banished he flung himself out of the tower, a side of beef. He was blinded by thorns that prickled him like tacks. As blind as Oedipus he wandered for years until he heard a song that pierced his heart like that long-ago valentine. As he kissed Rapunzel her tears fell on his eyes and in the manner of such cure-alls his sight was suddenly restored. They lived happily as you might expect proving that mother-me-do can be outgrown, just as the fish on Friday, just as a tricycle. The world, some say, is made up of couples. A rose must have a stem. As for Mother Gothel, her heart shrank to the size of a pin, never again to say: Hold me, my young dear, hold me, and only as she dreamed of the yellow hair did moonlight sift into her mouth.

[the-daily-poem]

For the Dead

by Adrienne Rich

I dreamed I called you on the telephone to say: Be kinder to yourself but you were sick and would not answer The waste of my love goes on this way trying to save you from yourself I have always wondered about the left-over energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill long after the rains have stopped or the fire you want to go to bed from but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down the red coals more extreme, more curious in their flashing and dying than you wish they were sitting long after midnight

[the-daily-poem]

Solitude

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own. Sing, and the hills will answer; Sigh, it is lost on the air; The echoes bound to a joyful sound, But shrink from voicing care. Rejoice, and men will seek you; Grieve, and they’ll turn and go; They want full measure of all your pleasure, But they do not need your woe. Be glad, and your friends are many; Be sad, and you lose them all,— There are none to decline your nectared wine, But alone you must drink life’s gall. Feast, and your halls are crowded, Fast, and the world goes by. Succeed and give, and it helps you live, But no man can help you die. For there is room in the halls of pleasure For a large and lordly train, But one by one we must all file on Through the narrow aisles of pain.

[the-daily-poem]

Is/Not

by Margaret Atwood

Love is not a profession genteel or otherwise sex is not dentistry the slick filling of aches and cavities you are not my doctor you are not my cure, nobody has that power, you are merely a fellow traveler Give up this medical concern, buttoned, attentive, permit yourself anger and permit me mine which needs neither your approval nor your surprise which does not need to be made legal which is not against a disease but against you, which does not need to be understood or washed or cauterized, which needs instead to be said and said. Permit me the present tense. 

[the-daily-poem]

Every Town a Hometown

by Kaniyan Punkunran

Every town our hometown, Every man a kinsman.

Good and evil do not come from others. Pain and relief of pain come of themselves. Dying is nothing new. We do not rejoice that life is sweet nor in anger call it bitter.

Our lives, however dear, follow their own course, rafts drifting in the rapids of a great river sounding and dashing over the rocks after a downpour from skies slashed by lightnings–

we know this from the vision of men who see.

So, we are not amazed by the great, and we do not scorn the little.

[the-daily-poem]

In the Desert

by Stephen Crane

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.”

[the-daily-poem]

It would be easy to forgive,

If I could but remember;

If I could hear, lost love of mine,

The music of your cruelties,

Shaking to sound the silent skies,

Could voice with them their song divine,

Red with pain’s leaping ember:

It would be easy to forgive,

If I could but remember.

  It would be easy to forget,

If I could find lost Sorrow;

If I could kiss her plaintive face,

And break with her her bitter bread,

Could share again her woeful bed,

And know with tears her pale embrace.

Make yesterday, to-morrow:

It would be easy to forget,

If I could find lost Sorrow.

Leonora Speyer / Enigma

[the-daily-poem]

Lord, I ain’t asking to be the Beastmaster gym-ripped in a jungle loincloth or a Doctor Dolittle or even the expensive vet down the street, that stethoscoped redhead, her diamond ring big as a Cracker Jack toy. All I want is for you to help me flip off this lightbox and its scroll of dread, to rip a tiny tear between this world and that, a slit in the veil, Lord, one of those old-fashioned peeping keyholes through which I can press my dumb lips and speak. If you will, Lord, make me the teeth hot in the mouth of a raccoon scraping the junk I scraped from last night’s plates, make me the blue eye of that young crow cocked to me—too selfish to even look up from the black of my damn phone. Oh, forgive me, Lord, how human I’ve become, busy clicking what I like, busy pushing my cuticles back and back to expose all ten pale, useless moons.  Would you let me tell your creatures how sorry I am, let them know exactly what we’ve done? Am I not an animal too? If so, Lord, make me one again. Give me back my dirty claws and blood-warm horns, braid back those long- frayed endings of every nerve tingling with all I thought I had to do today. Fork my tongue, Lord. There is a sorrow on the air I taste but cannot name. I want to open my mouth and know the exact flavor of what’s to come, I want to open my mouth and sound a language that calls all language home.

Nickole Brown / A Prayer to Talk to Animals

[the-daily-poem]

In one story, the lovers are two halves split by jealous gods, and in another story, the lovers are victims of a wicked baby with a bow and arrow. In one story, love means never touching, but exchanging a lot of handkerchiefs, and in another story, love means a drastic change in brain chemistry that lasts a year, even though the after effects are lifelong. In one story, love is the north star guiding sailors, and in one story love is a sharp blade, a body of water, and a trophy all at once. The truth is that love is nothing but itself, an axiomatic property of humankind, like storytelling and explanation giving, which explains why everyone explains love in stories, the way I once called it a form of disappearing, and my favorite philosopher called it a holiday. Listen, storytelling animals: today, we say, love is only love. Put down the crossbow, baby. Put down the handkerchief, Lancelot. Put away the easy chair, Babs. Let’s let love be felt in its touch, and be known by its face. Let’s let love speak Ada and Lucas, and then let’s let love be silent.

Stories About Love / Jason Schneiderman

[the-daily-poem]

I don’t call it sleep anymore.              I’ll risk losing something new instead— like you lost your rosen moon, shook it loose. But sometimes when I get my horns in a thing— a wonder, a grief or a line of her—it is a sticky and ruined              fruit to unfasten from, despite my trembling. Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. Let me call it, a garden. Maybe this is what Lorca meant              when he said, verde que te quiero verde— because when the shade of night comes, I am a field of it, of any worry ready to flower in my chest. My mind in the dark is una bestia, unfocused,              hot. And if not yoked to exhaustion beneath the hip and plow of my lover, then I am another night wandering the desire field— bewildered in its low green glow, belling the meadow between midnight and morning. Insomnia is like Spring that way—surprising              and many petaled, the kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow. I am struck in the witched hours of want— I want her green life. Her inside me in a green hour I can’t stop.              Green vein in her throat green wing in my mouth green thorn in my eye. I want her like a river goes, bending. Green moving green, moving. Fast as that, this is how it happens—              soy una sonámbula. And even though you said today you felt better, and it is so late in this poem, is it okay to be clear,              to say, I don’t feel good,   to ask you to tell me a story about the sweet grass you planted—and tell it again              or again— until I can smell its sweet smoke,              leave this thrashed field, and be smooth.

Natalie Diaz/From the Desire Feild

[the-daily-poem]

I have studied so hard to pass as one of you. I've spent a lifetime on it. I have tells. Blisters, tremors, bruises, all the signs that I was not meant for your world, was not meant to be contained in your clothes, your shoes. I have this terribly inconvenient allergy to cold iron. Hives, really. Welts. I stand out. When I was little, I asked my alleged mother, what's a girl? She said you, you're a girl, and she laced me into dresses (that I tore off in the school parking lot, in line for the bus). Laced me into ballet shoes that left blisters and bloodied my feet until I had calluses. Which she had filed off, beauticians pinning me down, because it's not beauty if you don't bleed. My dancing was different. My dancing was swaying treelike, or launching myself across the room, spinning madly, but that is not what girls do, not human girls, not ladylike, not contained. And everything is about containment is about being delicate and pretty laced into corsets whalebone stays digging into your ribs because it's not beauty if it doesn't hurt. But I studied. I pretended. I hid the bruises and the tics. I hid the big dark parts of me. I tamed my hair. I watched my mouth. I hid my magic. I did not speak of such things because we do not speak of such things – not anger, not homesickness, not longing. Not this sense that I don't know what the hell a human girl is and I can tell, I can, that everyone knows I don't belong here. I laugh too loud; I am too fast or slow to laugh. I am an anthropologist in the field of girl. I study but none of it ever comes naturally. None of it is in my nature. I am something larger, more fluid, less constrained. But I am stranded in this place. I have had to learn how to live here. I have tried. So hard.

Shira Lipkin / The Changeling's Lament

[the-daily-poem]

There’s a kind of white moth, I don’t know what kind, that glimmers by mid-May  in the forest, just  as the pink moccasin flowers are rising. If you notice anything,  it leads you to notice more and more. And anyway I was so full of energy. I was always running around, looking at this and that. If I stopped  the pain was unbearable. If I stopped and thought, maybe the world can’t be saved,  the pain  was unbearable. Finally, I noticed enough. All around me in the forest the white moths floated. How long do they live, fluttering in and out of the shadows?  You aren’t much, I said one day to my reflection in a green pond,  and grinned. The wings of the moths catch the sunlight and burn so brightly. At night, sometimes,  they slip between the pink lobes of the moccasin flowers and lie there until dawn,  motionless in those dark halls of honey.

Mary Oliver / The Moths

[the-daily-poem]

First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it’s a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently about the wreck We dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

Adrienne Rich / Diving into the Wreck

[the-daily-poem]

Once from a big, big building, When I was small, small, The queer folk in the windows Would smile at me and call.        And in the hard wee gardens Such pleasant men would hoe: “Sir, may we touch the little girl’s hair!”— It was so red, you know.        They cut me coloured asters With shears so sharp and neat, They brought me grapes and plums and pears And pretty cakes to eat.        And out of all the windows, No matter where we went, The merriest eyes would follow me And make me compliment.        There were a thousand windows, All latticed up and down. And up to all the windows, When we went back to town,        The queer folk put their faces, As gentle as could be; “Come again, little girl!” they called, and I Called back, “You come see me!”

Edna St. Vincent Millar / A Visit to the Asylum

[the-daily-poem]

Why the heck is this hanging in the emergency room at a mental hospital..?

[the-daily-poem]

I'm back

But not back enough. I’ll do my best to keep posting as frequently as I can. ‘cept a breakdown landed me in the psych ward and I haven’t had the head space to keep up with this for a while. So I’ll be daily-ish, and attempt to post things I find most uplifting, interesting and inspiring.

… Peace out.

[the-daily-poem]

Only through a disaster or a renovation does the entire brick side of a house come down and in this case the workmen threw stoves and refrigerators out the windows, letting them bounce off the fire escapes into the little Brooklyn yard. And I wouldn’t presume to say they did it gleefully, but the brute force resulting in the massive sound well, it would be difficult not to feel some satisfaction I would think, but I don’t take apart whole houses for long hours at a time, and I can’t say how anything around me experiences life— for instance whether the sparrows who burrow in the small hill of dirt by sitting close as cookies on a cookie sheet then fluttering and chittering, and turning a bit like gears in a watch, and more chittering as if they are winding it— whether enjoyment comes to the sparrows; nor the tenor when the mice, bucking expectation change direction to squeeze inside after the long winter, seemingly undeterred by the four of us having an earnest discussion about the painting in the Whitney but racing—calmly, somehow—between the couches as if it were their private two a.m.; or the ants who also appeared in the kitchen as if the first daffodils in the yard trumpeted directions to them to carry items thrice their size right away finding just what they needed, a year later; and all this triggering a cleaning jag during which I pulled the refrigerator and stove out from the wall, cleared the shelves, took out the rugs and saw the naked planes and corners we made a life within, while across the yards the construction crew, passing their own halfway point, had begun to rebuild the place. How emphatically the truly knowledgeable have worked to insure we don’t ascribe delight to living things other than ourselves! But when the cardinal joins his mate on the top of the fence— a peck on the beak—framed by the bared stories of the house and the furred buds on the winter straw of a bush look like green hoofs about to gallop into leafness you can’t tell me to separate the work of instinct from the moment for a jay when something feels one-hulled-sunflower-seed-better than the moment-before-the-sunflower-seed or to deny that fortune in this place has allowed optimism to alight with sunlight on the orange construction helmet of the man now home in bed—regardless, regardless of it all.

Jessica Greenbaum / Regardless of Disaster