Poetry Thursday: Barbara Ras

You Can't Have It All
by Barbara Ras















But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old
finger

on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look

of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite

every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,

you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,

though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam

that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys

until you realize foam's twin is blood.

You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,

so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,

glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting
pettiness,

never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you

all roads narrow at the border.

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,

and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave

where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,

but you can have the words forgive and forget hold
hands

as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be
grateful

for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia,
grateful

for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels

sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,

for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,

the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot
sand.

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,

at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping

of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd

but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,

how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,

until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,

and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind

as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,

you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond

of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas

your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.

There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,

it will always whisper, you can't have it all,

but there is this.



From Bite Every Sorrow by Barbara Ras, published by Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Copyright © 1997 by Barbara Ras. Reprinted for educational and personal purposes only.

[image via diversitas.org]

Fiction Mid-Week: Richard McCann

Richard McCann has been a teacher and mentor to me off and on since the mid-1990s (we will draw a discreet veil over the precise year, now, as we creep 2010-ward).

He's an extraordinarily gentle and ethical teacher, using humor and compassion to draw the best and most deeply felt work out of his students.

It is hard to describe with any accuracy what it feels like to be in his presence, but the best I can do is to say that one feels deeply regarded, deeply seen and cherished.

In fact, it was probably one moment like that which caused me to enroll in the MFA program at American University a few years ago. After being out of touch for some years, Richard and I sat facing one another before we started our meeting, ostensibly to discuss where and whether I should attend a master's program. Before anything else happened, he put out his hands and said, "Now. Let me look at you."

Richard McCann looks, really looks, like no one else I know. This excerpt from Mother of Sorrows, just out in paperback, will say more than I can.

Poetry Thursday: William Shakespeare

From Richard II
Act III, Scene ii:

...For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings!
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed --
All murdered; for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humored thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pinBores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence. Throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief,
Need friends. Subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?

[image: legs of Ozymandias, in a desert all right, but not where you might think)

Monday again. Whoop De Doo.

You know, I'm getting too old for this.


[image via Queer Music Heritage]

Poetry Thursday: Stanley Kunitz

He died on May 14. He had lived to see 100. And made good use of every year.


The Layers

by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.

Fiction Mid-Week: Grace Paley

In all her everyday glory,

here.

Some Slightly Bigger Disturbances of Man

Well, it's Tuesday, and that means it's a day for hardhitting news at the truth hurts.

Not for the faint of heart.





[link via stumbleupon. Title of this post is an homage to Grace Paley]

good morning

[via Tactile Symbols Database, Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired]

Happy Mother's Day

Poetry Thursday: Sarah Browning

Oh dear.

This week I had my head so far up between the rounded portions of the anatomy located on the posterior of the pelvic region that I narrowly missed missing Poetry Thursday by 10 minutes.

That is too close for comfort.

Equally close--and infinitely more comforting--is the presence now in the blogosphere of my geographic near-neighbor Sarah Browning. Check out her young blog and offer praise.

So here goes.

THE FULLNESS, THE BEES

The spring I could not walk
my husband parked me ten long steps
from an apple tree, the baby sleeping
oblivious to what he had cost me.

I climbed from the car
and stumbled my way across
the scrabby lawn to stand
under the fullness, the bees.
I had to find a branch to hold
so I could live in that white
and test it with the pain
that had taken over my body.

I have feared so much pleasure--
a face full of lilacs, something
as petty as an apple tree.

I had watched the spring
from my chair by the glass door--
watched and wanted and now,
this tree, indifferent, white
like a promise, mistake, a walker--
what the spring knows.

More of Sarah's work is here.

hiatus haiku

more than usual,
life finds me preoccupied.
sorry, my readers.

Poetry Thursday: Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson just won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for her volume Late Wife, published by LSU Press.

I saw her read last year--or was it the year before?--at American University, and she was wonderful.

Stuart was with me. And Claudia Emerson's new husband (whose late first wife gave the book its poignant title) was with her.

And it was interesting, being and seeing that mirror image: me, a woman widowed, in the audience with the divorced man she now loves, attending the reading of poems by a woman, divorced, who loves a widowed man.

Homecoming

Claudia Emerson

The camera is trained on the door, no one
in the frame, only the dog sleeping. And then
finally, I see this was to surprise you,
filming your arrival, the dog's delight. Only now,
six years distant, can this seem scripted, meant:
the long, blank minutes she waited, absent
but there — behind the lens — as though she directs
me to notice the motion of her chest
in the rise and fall of the frame, and hear

to understand the one cough, nothing, the clearing
of her throat. Then, at last, you come home
to look into the camera she holds,
and past her into me — invisible, unimagined
other who joins her in seeing through our
transience the lasting of desire.

Fiction Mid-Week: Say It Like You Meme It

Another Wednesday, another story.

This one with a likeably Dada twist:

1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open it to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Copy it onto your blog/journal along with these instructions

So. From Albert Camus's The Plague:

"The Prefect had done as they wished, but as usual they were groping, more or less, in the dark."

[meme via John and in turn via blogos]

42, and other disappointing answers

"Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied."

Douglas Adams

[via Faisal.com, and with a shout-out to Rarity]

The Value of Absence

It's May Day, and today we face an important question: what if immigrant workers disappeared for a day?

Activists for immigrant rights are counting on today's "Uno de Mayo" boycott to be a curious handmaiden to the Mexican Day of Independence coming at the end of this week. But whereas Cinco de Mayo has devolved from a day of Mexican (then Latin-American) pride and solidarity, to a polyglot Magaritafest, activist Nativo Lopez told an interviewer, U.S. attitudes toward immigrants have galvanized the May 1 action:

"I have observed that the current protests are the cumulative effect of years of bashing and denigrating immigrants generally, and Mexicans and Latinos in particular. But most poignantly, HR 4437 -- the Sensenbrenner legislation -- proposes to eliminate all social space within which undocumented immigrants could accommodate themselves, work, survive and provide for their families."

Social space is the primary reason that immigrant-rights groups of all kinds, though primarily Hispanic-rights groups, encourage physical absence today. If you plan to go about your business--or if, like me, you're not a recent immigrant and your absence would prove nothing--you can wear white to show solidarity.

The Right's response has been largely dismissive. But news agencies in hotspots like California and Texas are predicting the impact will be felt even if the protest is only partly successful.

I predict otherwise. I think the most dramatic impact will be felt where Americans don't believe there are many immigrant workers. In the Heartland, the Badlands, and the hinterlands.

(Sorry, Sioux City readers, but it's true).

Hey! I don't have any Sioux City readers! But if I did they'd boycott.

Anyways. Absence as protest has a long and proud history, on May 1 and otherwise.

So.

On a lighter note, Aristophanes was the first to discover the dramatic properties of absence.

So make America beg today.