Posts for 'Poem of the Day' Category

The phone ringing stops everything and the cold voice
draws a body in white chalk—
says your son has been at the precinct since last night.

Before you leave the house, you've smoked four cigarettes
and as you drive, smoke
drifts into your eyes.
The house lights were already on and his bedroom door

a sliver of light that crossed you
when
your foot pushed it open. His absence was a question:
the Newports left unopened in your purse for years. For a moment

you almost expected to find him,
his voice barely above a whisper. The television
hummed;
it made the door an invite—but he is gone,

and you see yesterday's clothes on the floor,
books, video games and sneakers
on the bed, under the bed. He is not on the bed,

phone to his ear as usual—the door is still open.
It's Sunday and there's
no reason for his absence. Against the shadows,
hints of your laughter:

his first word was "no,"
a picture with Orioles cap on big enough
for his father,
and his face etched with red tracings of Kool-Aid.

He needs to know
you expected him home, and why smoke from a Newport
leaves the taste of metal
in your mouth.

I sensed the knife in your past,
its sharp edge shanked from the canyon stream—
a silver trickle between the book jacket,
nihízaad peeled open inside a diabetic mouth.

The waters of my clans
flash-flooded—
I fell from the white of its eyes—
our fathers had no children to name their own,
no baby's cry to place between argument and arguments.

The commercial flashed a blue path
across the lakes of our veins,
the bluest glint, a rock in the ear
told our tongues entwined

that I was reaching for the cornfield inside you,
that I was longing to outlive this compass
pointing toward my skull
gauzed inside this long terrible whisper

damp in a desert canyon,
whitewashed by the ache of fog lights
reaching to unravel            my combed hair.

I wanted out, believed I had the right!

Back to the body thrust.
Like the people in New Orleans in their attics

flooded almost to the top,

no tool to break through
to the open night, not enough strength to swim

down through the house.

The aortic valve shot, surgery impossible,
scar-thickened heart rim's barrier (from the radiation)

better than the ribs to keep them out.

Inside, the heart beating too fast,
trying to get the blood flow up, my heart!

But one beat's labored, the other slurred,

everything sliding
even as it's scrambling

up the wet clay bank.

A very good war poem for ya, by a Hampstead resident. The dryness, tension, danger in Afghanistan captured in a few lines, through a soldier’s eyes.It starts with sand-
Rock, mud
saturate dry air.

Glass cracks and webs.
Steel snaps.
Shards fire into reeds.

Fingers drop to
triggers.
rifles scan as

The pulse penetrates
armor,
Funneling past parched lips

Through stiff chests,
further
Deep into stomachs

Flooding muscle
marrow.
Discharging to legs, toes.

Running in the veins,
always with the blood.

It kept coming several days in a row
landing on the same bush of wild rose.
It strolled among rooks
like a newcomer from the underworld.
We didn't know its name then,
so we checked in the Atlas of Birds.
When we identified it at last
between twitters and thrushes,
it flew off and never came back.
Its hollow name, a title to glory,
hung on a branch like a snowflake.

I have nothing to recant, I am just
the decanter. You, the just destroyer,
have in faith become the role, recalling
for those gathered the noble fallen
with a prayer to his-grace-above-fire,
("Turn me, I'm burnt on that side")
St. Lawrence. Well done, I applaud.
And you: Well executed.

This is it. Not much else to await
when our fates touch: I've nowhere to be
but eternity, you've nothing to catch
but the thatch. Dry on dry,
we keep our wits about us ...
no one to meet but our match

Other men remember the false gardens
of love, and the days they were in love
or thought they were in love, and others
the books they read as children, books that marked
their lives forever, though they couldn't know
in those days how the real world operates.
And all of them take comfort in this way
and even grow enthusiastic when
they realize that memory can shape
itself at will and provide the things
that love and books and gardens can't provide.
I remember what I didn't undertake:
more than anything, the spring campaigns.

You brush leaves from a stranger
sleeping beside your gate

and welcome him to your estate,
with its sunny fields and barns.

He admires your bins of wing nuts,
your fine linens and deep well.

You show off your net strung between trees
for capturing sunlight, your ponds and goldfish.

In the storeroom, you offer him dates and grain,
purified water, buckwheat, and dry ginger.

Take what you need. Rest.
The stranger answers: Follow me.

I will show you where the trail begins
to the encampment of souls in the forest.

You follow him across muddy fields,
past the ox swishing its tail, tethered to a tree,

past the pond where stocked fish peer through surface clouds.
At the forest edge, you push through brambles and ivy.

You stuff your ears with moss to mute the abacus of trees
and press through spindly pines into thick woods.

Everywhere God goads you with green ignorance.
The souls of trees shout, Speak! Speak!

One of the moon's thirty names will save you.
You forget your hunger, the Names of God, the alef-beit.

The cabinet of love has only two doors,
in and out. There are four rooms.
In the first, screw top bottles and foil strips
hold brilliantly coloured answers.
The second holds something French
to do with herbs and truffle.
The third has the memory of childhood
and here, last of all, like mica, like mercury,
lies the present. It is a muscle. It is meat.

I make my pancakes from scratch,
mind you

but the decorative arts in general
leave me cold

Consequently I know
very little of the world.

That's the way they greet me—
that's the way they have always

greeted me:
a fire in the eyes

and dedication
to the experience
in the moment.