I  have no plan for this  week, so  whatever comes next is next.

Here's who is unplanned with me.











I'm starting the week from my library with Gary Soto, one of my favorites. The poems are from his book Junior College, published by Chronicle Books in 1997.

Born in 1952, Soto was raised in Fresno, California. He is the author of eleven poetry collections. His father died when he was five years old and his family struggled. He did his part to help, working in the fields in the San Joaquin Valley and in factories in Fresno.

He attended Fresno City College and California State University in Fresno, where he earned his B.A. degree in English in 1974. He did graduate work in poetry writing at the University of California, Irvine, where he earned his M.F.A. in  1976.

Soto taught at University of California, Berkeley and at University of California, Riverside, where he was a Distinguished Professor.



Suspicions

I suspected some nuns raked
Their palms over their shaved heads,
A bristly feeling that tickled their skin,
Or on rainy nights unwrapped butcher paper
Where shorn hair lay like a whip.
I suspected women wanted to hit us really hard
And others wanted to peer out
The classroom window,
Oblivious to our crippled fractions,
Poor spelling, the crayoned Christ with five holes.
I suspected that if I could get through 3rd grade
I would make mother happy,
Mother with all her hair, lipstick
Herr sleeve gray from her work of peeling potatoes.
I suspected I was not right in the head
And wanted only to sit in the same chair,
Hands on the table, a pen in the right pocket
And a short pencil in my left.
I didn't want to cause problems,
Like the boy who wrote "fuck" on his arm
Or the girl who peed serenely in class.
I wanted to see the  blackboard.
I wanted to write
In my own jittery script, the Lord is with me,
Then fold this piece of paper
And wear it close to my rabbit-thump of  a heart..
I didn't talk much back then.
I suspected that I was good
Because I felt light and most of my thoughts
Were on the dead, like my father,
A four-prong twig in the ground.
Some of my thoughts were on Africa,
A thorny place
If you had to run from lions and pagans,
And some of my thoughts were on my guardian angel,
An invisible but holy shadow
that brought on barking dogs.
I walked slow for my angel to keep up,
And once muttered, "I"m here. It is me."
We were at Mass for a run-over student,
A fresh pair of eyeglasses on his studious face.
I  prayed for this boy with weight on my knees
and none on my shoulders. Lightning cracked,
Rain poured like sorrow,
And my lungs reaped
The dead boy's portion of air.


The Charity of La Senora Lara

Once I worked
For a nearly deaf vieja,
And she worked to get in my way,
Her grin chattering over my shoulders.
I raked an already raked yard,
Gathered dropped plums into a bag, swept
And hoed the life out of a flowerbed.
I roofed the doghouse with flattened  tuna cans
And beat the mites from a rug.
Later, on the lawn, we stood together
At a wobbly sprinkler throwing out cool seed
Of water. I worked two hours,
Screamed in her good ear for my pay,
And then walked home,
Musing over the value of unearned money.

She was more than loca
When I returned, weeks later, and she asked
From the porch, "Quien es?" Who are you?
Plastic fruit clacked in her  straw hat
And the autumn wind rippled her print dress
And her furry slippers. She clicked her fingers,
"You're the barber's boy, no?"
I shook my head. I was neither the barber's boy
Nor the preacher the preacher's spoiled son.
I was neither Italian or Jew,
Syrian nor Armenian. I was neither the lost lamb
Nor a stray child walking in the sandals of a gracious god.

I made a raking motion with my hands.
She giggled, remarked, "I am a woman,"
and scratched the one hair on her chin.
I gathered invisible oranges,
Shoveled a flower bed, spanked rugs on a clothesline,
And hammered boards for the rain shook from a cloud.
She shook her head, eyes clear as the zeros
Plugged through a road sign.

"You know me, senora," I screamed, "I'm your working boy."
Her smile rattled the banana and cherries on her hat.
"Mi'jo," she wept into my shoulders. "welcome home!"










Here's a little think from my first book, Seven Beats a Second.



bop shee bop

hips swaying
   bop
       shee
            bop

in sunlight streaming
   bop
       shee
             bop

through thin cotton dresses
   bop
       shee
            bop

and legs all the way up to there

   bop
       shee bop
       shee biddly biddly bop bop

   bop
       shee bop
       shee bee

too old for all this thinking
about brown-eyed girls
in skimpy summer  dresses

but damn it's hard
to stop shee bop
   shee biddly biddly
   bop
   bop









Next, I have three poems by Belle Waring, from her book  Refuge, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1990.

Waring is the author of two poetry collection, Refuge, which won the 1989 Associated Writing Program's Award, and Dark Blond, which won the Larry Levis Prize in 1998.

She was born in Virginia in 1951 and holds degrees in nursing and English. She received her M.F.A in Creative Writing at Vermont College and, at the time this book was published, was on the Field Faculty of the Vermont College M.F.A.  Program, while also working as a registered nurse.


 What Hurts

is waking up flung cold across
the bed,  right where  I left myself, these eyes
spooked, like my father's after a binge.
Just what the hell is he doing in my face?
I don't booze. I'm not like him.
But that scared and blowzy stare
I recognize after this stark dream of looking
for Max, my hopeless ex, world without end.
some nights my father spent stripped in a cell
to sober up. I  learned to sleep in my clothes.
Sentry. Night watch. Mother by a sickbed.
Doctor on call. No surprise. Ready for
a shit storm. Praying for a cool sunrise.


Children Must Have Manners

Not morals. Manners. Grist for the guests.
They suck up the Scotch. Daddy
rattles my school  report under their snouts.
See. I'm his prize piggie.
But soon as they exit,
he slaps my fat face
'cause I dropped a whole fifth.
Twelve years old.
They praise must have gone
to my head, Daddy says.

"Pig," he spits.
But when company's here,
pig's to smile till it splits.
One jangled day I'll forget
this face. Show up for breakfast
pig scrapped to the bone.
Nights, alone with my face,
I peel it away, wring out the grin,
rinse it in pilfered rosewater.
While I sleep, let it work its roots.


Morley Asks, What Are You Thinking?

I'm frankly shocked to be this
content. I remember  one
precedent:  loose
in Nana's garden,
I danced with the irises,
mauve and yellow. That  scent.
Now the rascal-cat moon
grins until  it coals down west,
and Morley gathers me
up in his garden arms,
safe in the swallowing dark.











Another new poem  from last week.











Now I have  some short poems by my friend and housemate at Blueline's "House of Thirty," Lana Wiltshire. It's a pleasure to read Wilt's poems at the forum, especially her minimals, which are masterful.



change of scene

an approaching storm
slashes the velvet night
its fiery fingers
shards of rain like silver nails
even the wild turkeys hide

untitled

white tulips dying
beside blooming pink roses
time embracing death


stormy

cold rain
—the final gasp
of a timid winter—
as springtime’s softly growing buds
drink deep


at the precipice

waiting
for that moment just before the wind lifts
your heart and you stretch out your wings
to fly


to dream…

to write
perchance to read
to dream instead of work
and let the words wake up slowly
mornings


last hurrah

waving in the wind
bolstered by yesterday’s rain
faded red tulips


bento box goodbye 

at Sushi Cafe
California rolls and wine sunshine memories
clearer than old photographs
all packed and ready to go 


sing

even the silence seems too loud after you’ve gone
but then one small note
– freesia or some sweet lily –
brings the full orchestra of spring











A day for an old-timer round-up.












Next , I  have a couple of poems  by the1960s  Russian  "rock star" of poetry,  both in  Russia, and for a while,  the United States, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, from the collection The Face Behind the Face published  in Great Britain  in 1979  by Marion  Boyars Publishers  Ltd.

The poems in the book were published by Arthur Boyars  and Simon Fanklin.



The Ringing of the  Earth

A kind of ringing once dinned though  my head
and  right round the city of Moscow everything
Double,then  trebled and resounded:
Tramcars, sparrows, lampposts -
And something,summoned up within me,
A pure uncoiling, went completely wild;

The ringing crashed careering  down  on me
As if onto  a savage stallion,
And  striking  my ribs with its sharp  heels
The ringing called me to the sky-blue gap,
right were the town glutted itself  on  pasties,
Tore everything to shreds, but in a kindly way.

The ringing knew things I  didn't know  myself.
It was as much at home in the pure  sky
As  in the trash of out-of-town  ravines.
The ringing was  coloured music without words,
Blending  egg-yolks of church cupolas
With  red-clothed  slurping splashing out of flags.

The ringing imagined verses for me
Out of rough husks of sunflower  seeds
Crunched underfoot on station platforms;
And answering I rang out to the earth's  ringing,
And linesfrushed from the tunnel of my throat
Like railway carriages, crammed with ringing.

And there was no more me - only the ringing.
It  chose me as its  incarnation,
But dropped me - started to look for someone  younger.
And, as you  loved me for that borrowed ringing,
You ceased to be. The ringing created you,
And you died  in the ringing when it ended.


Memento

Like a reminder  of this life
Of trams, sun, sparrows,
And the flighty uncontrolledness
Of streams leaping like  thermometers,
And because ducks are quacking somewhere
Above the crackling of the last, paper-thin ice,
And because children are crying bitterly
(Remember children's lives are so sweet)
And because in the drunken, shimmering starlight
The new moon whoops it up,
And a stocking crackles a bit at the knee,
Gold in itself and tinged by the sun,
Like a reminder of life,
And because I was madly mistaken
In thinking that my life was over,
Like a reminder of life, -
You entered into me on stockinged feet.
You entered - neither too late nor too early -
At exactly the  right time, as my very own,
And with a smile, uprooted me
From memories, as from a grave.
And I,once again whirling among
The painted horses, gladly exchange,
For one reminder of life,
All  its  memories.










Another new from last week,  supermoon night coinciding with a  wet and welcome storm.
















Here are three poems from the collection Three Mennonite Poets, something  from each of the three.


The first of three is Jean Janzen, born in Saskatchewan in 1933, her father, a school teacher who became a Pastor, moved her family to Minnesota in 1939. She grew up in that state and in Kansas.

She graduated from Fresno Pacific Cllege with a BA in English and received her Masters in English-Creative Writing from California State University-Fresno.

In addition to her work as a poet, she teaches piano and is a minister of worship with her  church.


Ionian Sea

Here in the sand
we  can feel it,
how our feet dissolve
in the warm,lapping waves,
how even marble
disintegrates.

Looking into your eyes,
blue and lambent,
I fail to imagine
the death stare, yet
I know that with one gasp
you could slip away
as easily as a fish,
and I would stand here
alone wearing this tight
wedding band given
in ignorance
like so much that is given,
the sculptor surprised
at what his chiseling
gives back, and no way
to unlock it.

One block  at a time,
this moment,  the sandpipers
racing in and out.


Pastorale

Dawn over farmland,
over the endless blanket
of new wheat. Gray-green
distances. The rounded hills
like hips and shoulders
of giants asleep.
the highway curves past
farm kitchens where families
lean over plates of eggs,  listening
to news and prices and assassinations.

Morning grows bolder now.
Flick of oriole, the grackle's
green wing. The fields
shine and sway. Jeremiah,
arthritic and groaning, turning
in his damp bed to take
the warmth of the sun.


Next from the collection is Yorifumi Yaguchi, a Japanese poet born in 1932.

He graduated from Tohoku Gakuin University with a B.A. in English, from International Christian University with an M.A. in Education, and from Goshen Biblical Seminary with a B.D. in theology.

He spent one year as American Council  of Learned Societies visiting Scholar at the State University of New York, Buffalo and taught a semester at Shenyang China. At the time the book was published he was professor of American poetry in the literature department of Hokusei Gakuen College.


A

withered leaf
hanging on a twig
heavy as the earth


Words

Leave them there
in the darkness
as they have been
from the beginning.
It's their silences
that speak to us
and not
the combined sounds.


Many Winds

Many winds
swarm to
a wounded word,
picking at it
like  vultures
until it becomes
a white bone,
half-buried in the
sand, and sharpens
into  a razor.


A Rescued Vietnamese Boy

For  days we did not ear or  drink.
Babies sucked withered breasts,
feebly crying,  while  my brother suddenly
burst into laughter and jumped into the sea...

Then one dawn we found a big fishing boat,
a Japanese one, near us,  and we waved
and shouted , "Tasukete!,"* the word
Japanese salesmen taught us before the liberation...
But the boat, pretending not to notice us,
quickly went away and we were again floating
without any country to return to or to go to
and my family died one after another...

*"Save  us!"


Gravestones

I caught some words,
which were raging hard
in my hands to flee away,
     but finally I  pinned them
     down on a sheet of paper.

There they were writing,
groaning in their death agony,
under pins of letters,
     but gradually their wings stopped convulsing
     and they were changed into gravestones. 


A Woman

naked
is lying
deep
in the grass
on a mountain
with the red
full
moon 
between her
thighs


The last of  my three Mennonite poets from the collection is David Waltner-Toews.

Born in Manitoba in 1048 to Russian-born Mennonite parents, Waltner-Toews was educated first as a writer, then as a veterinarian and most recently as an epidemiologist. At the time the book was  published, he  was working as a veterinary epidemiologist in Indonesia, while continuing to write essays, poetry and fiction,..


Sweeping

the snow  was expected
we were  not prepared
for the blizzard

the trees like stiff  brooms
quivered
against gray clouds
compulsively tidying
the sky
like trees we stood
out in the swirling
snow
sweeping
sweeping


Friday Night

Friday night sits in the closet
all week long     head in hands
waiting for the week to be  over
He hopes no one  has to be at work
this Saturday     He  hopes
the day was okay and is glad
when the children go to bed early
He hopes everybody isn't
too tired
He hopes they will  be able to find him
here     hiding behind the bathrobes
He hears the closet  door open
Clearing his throat
he straightens his color
Someone is reaching
for the hanger in front  of him
He grins     foolishly










I have this feeling that this week a lot of my poems have some kind of  weather connection. (I may have already said that or will say it later - I lose track.)

So keeping the flow going, if there is such, here's a vaguely weather related poem from my 2005 book, Seven Beats a Second.



weather report

its supposed to snow
in the hill country tonight,
and now, near midnight,
clouds are banked high
in that direction, swirls
of clouds, mixed grey
and white and black,
reflected in the city lights,
they look like polished granite
     piled
     helter-skelter
against a black felt sky...

it won't snow here,
but it's cool enough,
and little above freezing,
with a strong north wind
that stings my face
with icy drizzle...

wet days, cold nights
it's like winters years ago,
cycles and cycles,
     weather cycles
     life cycles
     death cycles, too,
          I guess,
they always come in threes
it's said and it seems to be true...

I used to think my life
was lived In five year cycles,
and for a long time
it seemed to run that way,
     with changes regular
          as clock work
          every fifth year

but now it seems
the pattern is broken
and my life is a lull
even as time races past

     I feel disconnected
     from that flow
and I begin to wonder
if this is how life
     winds down,
     like being sunk
in plush leather seats
of a fast moving car

the world rushes by,
a blur of passing life
and I want nothing more
     than to stop,
     to walk again,
     to live again
not behind glass
as the world passes,
but on my own feet,
     to control again,
     like before
when I was the one
who set the pace
and direction
I would live it...

the night is chill
     and wet
but it will not snow
for the snow cycle
is done and now
the night is just cold
     and I am cold
     in it









Next, I have  several  poems by Joshua Clover, from his book Madonna anno domini,  published by Louisiana State University Press and winner of the 1996 Walt  Whitman Award of The Academy of American  Poets.

Born in 1962 in Berkeley, California, Clover is a poet, critic, journalist and author. He has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize.

A graduate of Boston University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Clover is a Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis, and was the distinguished Holloway poet-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002-2003.



Ouro Preto

A woman in a blue shirt,,  resinous cafezinho, low sandstone buildings
     circling the plaza:
from this a whole country can be unfolded.
Eliz. is a model of no extra blah-blah.
The losing of art isn't hard too, and it's  all there is:
Lota de Macedo Soares, the day opens out like a tiny atlas-flower!


Orchid

Seen in the south of that country's south, near the wavefront of total
war: indolent orchid, window box auto-de-fe, the year's acedia. The
flower  was not  about anything & nobody in the house to watch -  not
the simplest thing,  12  hours  of sun,  summer's cool closure. I see you are
curious so  let me tell you it was not a museum but a house.  Flower in
the flowerbow,  ear in the air's cyan arc,  mantic green  wire. Almost  fall
& cool between the mountains & the master war - walking, walking...
because I am  not history I can return "at will" to the house like a
museum - the clothed idea of it, each of us passing, minds delinquent
panic-bulbs, the flower about nothing (we are not attached to the
beginning or to the end, divining nothing, the autumn out there beyond
the museum-house still we could not come to the boundary of the funny
war,  secret heliotropes, orchid in the orchid box. God in abeyance -


El Periferico, or Sleep

A man throws ten thousand shovels of gravel at a window  screen
propped inside a wheelbarrow so only the powder
passes into the wheelbarrow and the gray rocks fall to the ground.
You musta died once to live like this.
Yeah he says I died once and I had lost my ear
so I was looking for it in a field and the stars were like a seiner's net
and then they were like a system of nerves
and then they were like a sieve I came through
that right back into this country and got a job and married
the woman the first two things
she said to me in that fiery field holding in her hands
my ear were how this country is full
only of pilgrims and residue and her name is Beatiz ending
like light ends with a z











Here's a bit from last week, refugee for fifty year old memories.










Next from my library, I have a poem by Shulamis Yelin, from her book, Seeded in Sinai, published in 1975 by Reconstructionist Press.

Yelin was born in Montreal in 1913. Her parents had emigrated from Chernobyl three years earlier." As a poet and educator, she had a great influence. In 1963 she won the LaMed Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. She died, still in Montreal in 2002.



Yom Kippur Morning '73

The dead surround me, my beloved dead
this awesome break of day:
My Mother, smiling,
piles her clothes in an orderly array
on moving elt to fiery furnace;
my sister, young and lovely,
soft and solemn-faced, embraces me;
and wise and gentle,
calling me by pet-name to his  open arms,
my husband smiles.
Death himself,
in pin-stripe  suit,
with jaded ear-ring
dangling from his long left  ear,
calls me, snaps his fingers,
telling time
on sundial darkened by his shade.

My head is lit with charred memorial lamps,
singles, sixes and six million,
flickering in the dawn,
and I, in whom there's little faith
in life beyond the grave,
plead their intercession:
Sing me a better tomorrow.
Oh, the portents of this aweful day!









Another poem from Seven Beats a Second, another kind of storm.



storm warning

gray and white gulls
swirl overhead
thick
like a cloud,
blown in the wind
like smoke
from a cane field fire

the shipyard
across the bay
is hidden
by black clouds
of rain
lying across the water
like crepe on a coffin

lightning
arcs between the clouds
and thunder echos
against the bluff

I hear you in the driveway,
slamming the car door
with a crack
like a rifle in the dark








Next I have  Coleman Barks, with three of the shorter poems from his book, Gourd Seed. The book was published in 1993 by Maypop Books.



A Hard Cuss for Gourd Seed

Out the sack and in the hand,
little dry nuthin's bird-turd,
him just lay there thinkin'
I'm a big guckin' man.

You're a stupid rotten tooth.
Be like yo daddy,  little
peter-in-the-wind. I spit
and thumb you in and hump

once to make you jump.
Bump up, jumpkin bumpkin,
you got this one sombitchin' chance
to  be a gourd, or feed for the ants.


Ornamental Decisions

Where to sit in the sun
is the only true question,
when not going to teach,
along with how not to feel paranoid
they'll find out and fire me.

Under pear-trees full-white nearly hiding
the red and blue university
postal kiosk, I choose
this bench and this new-heat
on my face, instead of talking
the history of my fear
thus far. Petal-sky overall.

I know who planted these, my friend
in the Law School, Milner's
wife, June. June and Mr. Forsyth's
forsythia, they bolster  my floral resolve
to write letters in the sun and become
a man resembling an Asian flower opening,
with a curved knife in the center.


Or

We sit here trying to tell or sing
each other something truthful or tinged
with beauty or joy or some other empty,
full word that hasn't  been ruined
by being overstamped, the die

blurred, before some fading thirst
we have or have had poisons through
the water, or the very ground pulling through
good corn on the cob chomped on the back
stoop with sips of red wine, settles

enough micro-sediment somewhere,
the brain or the marrow, to make us
not any longer care, or recognize,
what in words or otherwise is
beautiful and/or true.










I wrote the first version of this next poem in 1969 while waiting for my clothes to dry at a laundromat, responding to the sights and sounds of a very large storm right on the edge of breaking. A similar storm last night, menacing in the distance, like watching your fifth grade bully coming down the hall toward you, reminded me of this poem and the similar  story it told.

I've rewritten the poem many times (I never throw  anything away), never making it any better than it was to start. This latest version,  which is an improvement, is still just a rest stop. Lots  of work to be done, before it's done.