Sample Poems: Volume 25, Numbers 1 and 2

IRISH HISTORY EXPLAINED IN 16 LINES
(or Did You Ever Wonder Why So Many of the Great Writers Are Irish?)

By Jack McCarthy


As anyone who’s considered being God

will know, at Pentecost the gift was not
of tongues, but ears.

                              Their lovely bloody language

was the weapon did us in. The sound
of it, the treasures of its lexicon,
the endless ways of telling what to do,
what god to worship, and what arse to kiss.
They pronounced death sentences; listening,
we heard troubadours. They dictated terms
of our subjection; faerysong to us.

It wasn’t us that they betrayed, but English.

They didn’t live up to it, they were not grand
enough, magnanimous, and now it’s ours.
By fierce, barbaric love—because we let
it charm us and seduce us, we own it now
in ways they never did, and never will.



"PO PROBLEMA"

By Fred Yannantuono


After the din of the day

All of the postmen are braying.
Jesus, just lay me away.
How long do they plan on staying?

All of the postmen are braying,

Shouting out postmodern jokes.
How long do they plan on staying,
Braying and lighting up smokes?

Pounding out postmodern jokes

Crammed with Neanderthal diction,
Braying and lighting up smokes—
God how I wish this were fiction!

Damn their Neanderthal diction—

They’re the guys bring me my letters.
God how I wish this were fiction!
I’d make them all Irish setters.

They’re the guys bring me my letters,

Curly and Larry and Moe.
I’d make them all Irish setters
Silent, observant, and slow.

Curly and Larry and Moe,

Jesus, just lay me away.
Silent, observant, and slow
After the din of the day.

Sample Poems: Volume 24, Numbers 1 and 2

"Love"

By Michele Wyrebek


It starts with stripping,

layer after layer
getting as bare as possible

the surface - it's necessary

for preservation
to treat the wood first

before restoring it - for hours

he can sand and scrape
in silence.

Something is wrong

with me, according to him,
and he's right, of course -

I have yet to get the hang of it,

life, I mean - the living of it
happily.

We are breaking up. He says

he doesn't tear down walls
he deconstructs them -

he builds and repairs, has a gift

for resilience - things improve
in his hands. Except me -

I see suffering's

blueprints wherever I go
and I can't help

wandering through

the plans it devises,
lingering in the details -

simple homes

with plain rooms
and little storage

or intricate structures

with ample space and built-in
shelving - the layouts

for harm are infinite - multi-floored

with well-placed landings
or one-storied open foyers

that welcome hopelessness

and long hallways
that lengthen pain.


Editor's note: This poem was sent to me in September of 1995. Michele had moved to Arlington (MA) but was still attending the Princeton writers group when she could. In her letter, she said, "The poem has gone through many transformations - especially with regard to the title (and I'm not sure "Love" is the best one...)."

Filling My Pen For Action

By Sam Hazo

 

 

I thumb the plunger down

  and siphon black ink up

  the way a hypodermic needle

  siphons plasma from a vein.

My ink of choice is ebony

  because it promises to last.

But last as what?

                              Notations,

  doodles, letters, labels,

  numbers, signatures on checks

  or shopping lists?

                              History's

  no guide.

                   Our circumstances

  change.

                Regardless, writing

  what we think makes thinking

  truer when we see it written down.

The bravest pages of a poem

  or a book began as blanks

  that craved the consecration of a pen.

And written words increase

  in value over time.

                              Shakespeare's

  one surviving letter ( a request

  for money from a lord ) now seems

  as holy as the hairlock of a saint.

The same applies to Jefferson's

  hand-written declaration, Whitman's

  jottings, and ( for me ) my mother's

  letters in a hatbox or my aunt's

  last sentence on an index card....

Recalling this, I watch my nib

  change ink-blood into words

  across this very page to show

  why every word should be as sacred

  as the final word I'll write.

 

 

 

Letter to a Son at War

By Robert Duffy


I thought of you this morning, no

you needn't answer, it's just that
I thought of you. I was in the loft
to throw down the hay; the first
bale broke and blossomed wide
as if flowers dead and pressed
inside had come to life again.
Dust rose on the air and the sun
struck swords of light through knots
and gaps between the boards, and then
I saw you. Kneeling
in the ghastly white of slow
descending flares, your many
shadows shifting dancing on
the rhythm of the fall, your face
as fragile and dangerous
as a looking glass.
I threw down two more bales
and looked again, but the salt wave
of distance troubled my eye like heat
above a pavement. So I went down
the ladder to finish the chores,
chores I would have sent you to do,
if you were still here. The cows all turned
their tan-dark eyes to see their hay,
or perhaps to see if I were you.
Or if you were me. Cows, who's to say?
I'm told they're worshipped
in some places, and I wondered
half-seriously if I might try
to pray to them, except
I couldn't imagine what I ought to say.
Thinking now, something simple,
perhaps a bedtime prayer
from childhood might even be enough.
Do you know one?
There, you see? This
is what it comes to: foolish notions
carefully packaged and sent away,
not knowing whether they'll arrive
or what they'll mean if they do arrive.
Except I know I never meant this,
I never meant to send any
complaints into a desperate war,
one labored page then waking late
to wonder, whatever did I intend?
Let me offer this instead, a bargain
of sorts: If you will find me
changed when you return,
only this, nothing more, nothing
difficult like love; if you will do it,
I will engage to search your face
for wounds to be regretful of.

Sample Poems: Volume 23.2

A Branch Of Beach Plum

By Donald W. Baker


Most days I walk the old track under the pines

and over the dunes to the beach.
I have chosen for you the bend in the path
where a thicket of beach plum survives the backhoes,
where at noon in our season the air
used to be heavy with the smell of blossoms.
This morning I walked on the brown needles
as gently as I could so that no abrupt
gesture would temper the music of the warblers
in the spruce. Returning, I broke off
a branch of beach plum and carried it home.
Now it rises from the blue vase on the mantel,
the flowers, fragile and pink, beginning to wither,
one broken twig oozing a clear drop.
Yes, that is where I should like to meet you,
halfway between home and the shore, knowing
that back there are kitchen and books and bedroom,
a house full of lives and living,
and, not far ahead, the comforting sea.



Pulling In The Mirrors

By Jim Daniels


The sign we missed said Park Here and Walk.

Intoxicated by the tilt of that hilltop village,
we keep driving till houses squeeze
the road to a slender path we can’t squeeze
down. Can we back up? We pull in the mirrors.
I climb out and lead you back inch by inch between
the darkened stones. Fifteen years together.
How long is a long time? Too long?
Behind the wheel, you inch the van toward me
as I walk backward through the village,
your eyes full of desire to see this through.
An old woman shakes her head
from a window above us, the side of her building
scraped with other fools like us.
I signal carefully, guiding you back
as if there were any other way.

 

 

Ab irata
By Linda Warren


Don't tell me all the angles

unless you talk geometry
I want words that hold their own with truth,
Quod Erat Demonstrandum of the heart:
Euclid knew his language.

Say what you mean in Greek:

I want to be your complement
I want to be your supplement
I want to lie beside you with the sides of us
adjacent from the vertex out forever
so the missing pieces of each other
form a horizontal line
that cuts the universal plane in half.

I'm not playing with probabilities.

I don't want decimals.

I am Hypatia, with her mathematics

and I know she died for what she knew
but let me tell you
she was not stoned to death
because she was obtuse
she was stoned because she was
right

and it's true the truth can get you killed

but it also draws a long, straight line
one unassailable dimension,
ad infinitum
perfect connection
my soul to yours
and we do not get there
baby,
when you speak
oblique.

Sample Poems: Volume 23.1

Elegy for Denise Levertov
By Fran Quinn


"When you hear the voice

pause, you pause."
Clearly the sky is
overcast and the lamppost
is doing its best to hold it
up; the weight of heaven is
much too much for us. "Listen
again....

This pause is much longer and more

necessary than the first." A foot
hangs from the clouds, her foot,
recently risen there; with it
she is gone to do other
work, not the work we
see, but the work we
hear.

Being one less

we move on. We could wait
to see what will arrive
next, but when it arrives
it may not arrive here, because
she is gone, even the foot has
withdrawn.

But don't believe that

nothing's left; the lamppost
is there and the sky;
and, especially if we don't
fill it there is the
silence.

We have no way of measuring

that, so our job is to listen,
clearly listen. "The mountain will
say it to you through the
mist:

'Now that she is gone,

she has gone right
here,

heart.'"

Sample Poems: Volume 22.2

I Owe My Dog Everything

By Peter Harris


Four times a day, the bulge of shag

who's draped across the couch top
under the big window that exposes
the insides of our house to the every dog,
every person street, wakes up,
yips, yanks me, leashed, outside
where it's always winter, or
about to be, or recovering. Much of
the time, darkness reigns. And cold.

Now in the backyard, I must

attend as, first, she whiffs subtle
bodies in the air, then teases
the news from trace molecules
in the snow or mud or what passes
for grass, then paces a tightening,
self-entrancing oval that
leads her to the Absolute
Exact Spot, so as to express
the day's remains - glacially,
it seems, if she's snarfed a napkin
from the trash - while the cold
closes in around me
like a chuck around a drill bit
reminding me: God is choice:
either I can be at-two with
my shivers, smelting lead minutes
out of gold standard seconds
or I can listen to the wind
rustle sibilance from the six
dead leaves left stranded on the white oak,
listen and watch as my dog hunches,
ripples her peristaltic muscles,
waits, ripples again, succeeds
in providing me intimate,
much-needed, instruction on
how to do the nothing new
as if - no, not as if -
as actually giving birth to
a warm, glistening new world.


Icarus

By Brenda J. Cook


A dog stands on three legs

in the middle of the street,
blocking traffic
while he scratches behind his ear,
heedless of the little girl crying
in the yard where she can't find him
and of the man three cars back
who has just left his wife,
who cannot comprehend his suffering
or he hers- she sees the one true union of her life
now broken, and this pain and shock
blind her to the pathos of a friend
whose stability falters now and again.
No one, it seems, takes notice either
of the small figure high in the sky
whose wings begin to drop away,
and even he, just now, I'm sure,
couldn't care less about the pesky flea
behind the ear of that dog.

Sample Poems: Volume 21

DUST BOWL

by Lee Price

 

 

Remember when the storm came flashing?

Thunder cracking? Black sky on fire?

Sucking up bone-white

Blood-red, swirls of dust

into the raging squall.

 

Sometimes three times, sometimes twice a day

We draped Old Glory over some

dust-blown West Texas town....

Six men to a box.

In white-gloved splendor....

We brought back what we could.

(Funeral Detail 1969)

 

 

 

1924

by Juli Nunlist


Millicent Davis lived upstairs,

Millicent Davis, pale of skin,
dark of hair, with eyes like buttons.

 

Millicent was a perfect child.
I know; my mother told me so,
and so did Millicent.

 

Her hair was always combed and curled,
her dresses neat. My skirts were torn,
I chopped my hair with pinking shears.

 

One afternoon in every week
her mother came to tea with mine,
bringing Millicent, of course,

 

and Millicent's favorite china doll.

They came downstairs in their Sunday best,
Millicent's mother wearing a hat.

 

The china doll was bibbed in white.
Millicent carried a handkerchief
and sipped her tea and was polite.

 

Millicent was the teacher's pet.
Millicent was good. She knew
the answer to every question asked.

 

Everything that Millicent said
was gospel truth. I lied a lot,
and wished that Millicent was dead-
and knew that I would roast in hell.

Sample Poems: Volume 20

CALLING

by Mary Fell

 

Birds are afloat
in the backyard and the cat
bursts from the open door,
urging them into a brief explosion.

 

The world is hers and she
its center, hers the eyes
that imagine birds,
the leap that releases the wings,

 

her feathered jaws their just
end and meaning. She knows
exactly what to do. She doesn't
doubt it for a moment.

 

 

 

RECOIL

by Dan Lewis

When it comes it will be, I think
like the kick
of my father's twelve gauge shotgun
when I was nine. Anticipated glory, it exploded
inside my body, surprising sinew, unbuckling
my joints. I would have fallen backward
but my father's hewn hands, firm
on my shoulders held me fast to the world.

 

Now fifty yards into the woods and coughing again,
he leans unsteadily against a tree and waits
for the spasm to pass.
Extra innings
is what the doctor says we have of him now.
Extra innings, the measured part of the game
concluded, the rulebook suspended,
the crowd antsy in their seats.

 

Doubtless he should not be walking in the woods at all,
though I likely should not have panicked five minutes ago
finding him suddenly gone from the porch.
He will sit now on a boulder,
to tease a tendril of breath out of the thin air,
shaking his head at me, sheepish
as if this weakness were his own doing
(fathers should be strong for their sons).
But he is tired; the pretense will not hold;
he will walk back to the house slowly
leaning on my arm.

 

The first time I fired the shotgun
it was exactly as I thought it would be, exactly,
except that nothing could have prepared me
for that fierce blow, delivered from nowhere
that I could see. Obdurate, intractable, more genuine
than any seem thing. It was not the force,
but the sudden clear knowledge
that knocked the wind out of me.

 

 

 

Dying in Massachusetts

by Donald Baker

 

 

I think I should like to die in Massachusetts,
wading Parker's River in sneakers at slack water,
my wire basket a quarter full of blue crabs,
and I easing my long-handled net towards a big one.

 

The sun is shining as hard as it can, for it is August.
Clamshell clouds are crowding over the western horizon.
I mash a green-head fly against the nape of my neck,
and the big crab scuttles away under the peat.

 

No matter. Because I am thinking of what I read
last night in Van Gogh's letters: I am in it
with all my heart. I must become more skilled than I am
before I can be ever so slightly satisfied with myself.

 

And so at that moment the sun collapses into the river,
the crabs are spilled, the net, the fly, the collecting storm
plunge through a canvas of reds and yellows and blues
into the still, cool, clouded poem my life has written.

 

I'm the old white-bearded geezer they find,
floating face-down, two guys in a rented skiff,
with beer and sub sandwiches and Saturday off,
who on Sunday read about themselves in the Boston Globe,

 

and at night tell their wives about it in Worcester,
and on Monday their buddies down at the station-house.
So the rumor of Donald Baker's death ripples
into the neighborhoods where he was born and grew up.

 

It passes 14 Reed Street, riding no-hands on a blue bicycle,
and Red Logan's mother peers through her parlor curtains,
saying: all that expensive college education.
It rings a doorbell at 282 Chandler Street,

 

and Alice Crowe's father takes his pipe out of his mouth,
saying: a good thing you married the dentist.
And for about ten seconds the streets light up
with the glances and ball games and arguments nobody remembers.

 

Now the tide turns, a cold stream flooding in
from Nantucket Sound nudges the body upriver,
and the majestic voyage begins, through the grief
of sister and daughters and wife, across the promotion,

 

with tenure, of junior colleagues, beyond Life Insurance
and Supplemental Retirement Annuity, to a Free
Government Marker and Eternal Care in the plot
in Pine Grove Cemetery behind the Tastee Freeze on Route 28.

 

My friends, there's a lot of dignity here.
Those oaks are rooted in great-aunts and great-uncles,
that headstone shadows the secrets of my mother's bed,
and my father's electrons waver forever in this loam.

 

It is March 26th. I am in it with all my heart.
I must try to become more skilled than I am before I die.
For the titles of a thousand unwritten lives
are circling overhead on the gray sails of the gulls.