The Place Where I Live
Friday, September 05, 2008
 III.9.1
First, on a personal note -
I don't get much time to send stuff off as a submission for publication, so it's always nice when something I did get time to submt is published.
I submitted some material to a new web-zine, Octopus Beak Inc., several months ago. After some problems in getting up they did finally get on line last week, using one of my poems. The zine is at
www.octopusbeakinc.com
and is really nice looking with some good stuff. You can copy and paste the url or go to the link I'll set up before this goes to post.
Moving right to the good stuff, here's what's on tap this week:
From my library
Carol Ann Duffy Carl Sandburg Stephen Dobyns Alice Walker Jack Kerouac Herman Melville Ramon Lopez Velarde Ai Richard Wilbur From friends of "Here and Now"
Alex Stolis Jane Roken Lois P. Jones Alice Folkart
And a few things from me.
Oh, other good stuff I almost forgot. I sold a couple of my photos at the Starbucks where I had them hanging, That's a first - a cool thing for me, especially since the store didn't allow any hint that the photos were for sale.

We will start this week with a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, from her book The World's Wife, published by Faber and Faber Inc. in 1999. The book looks at the "great men" of history and literature though the eyes of their spouse.
Duffy, a British poet, playwright and freelance writer, was born in Glasgow in 1955. At age sixteen, she embarked on a relationship with the thirty-nine year old poet Adrian Henri. The poem Little Red Cap from her book The World's Wife is commonly thought to be about their relationship.
She was a poetry critic for The Guardian from 1988 to 1989, and is the former editor of the poetry magazine Ambit. She is currently Professor of Contemporary Poetry and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is on the judging panel for the Manchester Poetry Prize.
Duffy was almost appointed the British Poet Laureate in 1999, but lost out on the positio. It was reported that Tony Blair was worried about having a homosexual poet laureate because of how it might play in middle England.
She later claimed that she would not have accepted the laureateship anyway, saying that she had no interest in writing poetry for the type of people that would have been bothered by her appointment.
Pygmalion's Bride
Cold, I was, like snow,like ivory. I thought He will not touch me, but he did.
He kissed my stone-cool lips. I lay still as though I'd died. He stayed. He thumbed my marbled eyes.
He spoke - blunt endearments, what he'd do and how. His words were terrible. My ears were sculpture, stone-deaf shells. I heard the sea. I drowned him out. I heard him shout.
He brought me presents, polished pebbles, little bells. I didn't blink, was dumb. He brought me pearls and necklaces and rings. He called them girly things. He ran his clammy hands along my limbs. I didn't shrink, played statue, shtum.
He let his fingers sink into my flesh, he squeezed, he pressed. I would not bruise. He looked for marks, for purple hearts, for inky stars, for smudgy clues. His nails were claws. I showed no scratch, no scrape, no scar. He propped me up on pillows, jawed all night. My heart was ice, was glass. His voice was gravel, hoarse. He talked white black.
So I changed tack, grew warm, like candle wax, kissed back, was soft, was pliable, began to moan, got hot, got wild, arched, coiled, writhed, begged for his child, and at the climax screamed my head off - all an act.
And haven't seen him since. Simple as that.
Little Red-Cap
At childhood's end, the houses petered out into playing fields, the factory, allotments kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men, the silent railway line, the hermit's caravan, till you came at last to the edge of the woods. It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.
He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw, red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth! In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,
my first. You might ask why. Here's why. Poetry. The wolf, I knew,would lead me deep into the woods, away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake, my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes
but got there, wolf's lair, better beware. Lesson one that night, breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem. I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for what little girl doesn't dearly love a wolf? Then slid from between his heavy matted paws and went in search of a living bird - white dove which flew straight, from my hands to his open mouth. One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said, licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books. Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
But then I was young - and it took ten years in the woods to tell that a mushroom stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds are the uttered thought of trees, that a graying wolf howls the same old song at the moon, year in year out, season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe
to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother's bones. I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up. Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.

I wrote this little piece after watching the four days of the Democratic convention. I didn't watch the Republican event, my appetite for lies, slander and low humor being limited.
four nights
the first night
the ramparts laid
the cannon primed
the togathering begins
greetings
exchanges of talismen, totems, and charms
the second night
the queen descends her throne
lays blessing on the tribe's new champion
all are swept into the cause
the third night
hearts lifted
battle cry sounded
shouts in accents diverse and insistent
setting aside fears of the night,
of shadows and dark forces lurking
on the fourth night
the prince appears and raises his lance to the foe

Next, I have two poems from that old radical Carl Sandburg. They're from the Selected Poems collection published in 1992 by Gramercy Books. These are war poems, written during the first world war.
I don't know if Sandburg is still taught; I suspect not. He is seen as outdated in his blunt, straight-talk radicalism, red hot in an age when cool counts above all.
But he is still one of my heroes.
Murmurings In A Field Hospital
[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.]
Come to me only with playthings now... A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sun flowers... Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories Of days that never happened anywhere in the world...
No more iron cold and real to handle, Shaped for a drive straight ahead. Bring me only beautiful useless things. Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet... And at the window one day in summer Yellow of the new crock of butter Stood against the red of new climbing roses... And the world was all playthings.
Buttons
I have been watching the war map slammed up for ad- vertising in front of the newspaper office. Buttons - red and yellow buttons - blue and black but- tons - are shoved back and forth across the map.
A laughing young man, sunny with freckles, Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd, and then fixes a yellow button one inch west and follows the yellow button with a black button one inch west.
(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak along a river edge, Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in their throats.) Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing to us?

The next piece is by Alex Stolis, a friend of "Here and Now" of long standing. It is from a series Alex did on the Tarot deck.
Card VI The Lovers have second thoughts I've never seen a wounded bird in flight but have heard the sound of longing as it walks out the door. there are no words to describe the moon as it ripens on the horizon. after you go I will dye my hair again and again until its original color is forgotten every moment feels caged and quiet, the sting of penance becomes dull. magnolias remind me of our first time, a dry summer and intentions that crumbled to dust at sunset. I could leave without a trace, not even a whisper to mark my path.

Stephen Dobyns was born in 1941 in New Jersey . He was educated at Shimer College, graduated from Wayne State University, and received an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1967.
He worked as a reporter for the Detroit News and has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University.
My poem for this week is from his book Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides published by Penguin Poets in 1999.
No Tangos Tonight
Heart meets Death in a fashionable singles bar and they dance. Why so standoffish? asks Death. Why must you squeeze me so tight? asks Heart. They take a few turns about the floor. You keep trying to lead, says Death. You step on my feet, says Heart. The room is smoky and the music lout. Heart and his new partner spin round and round. Why not come home with me tonight? asks Death. Sorry, says Heart, being polite, I'm here with friends. Heart tries to keep a space between them. Too bony, he thinks, to cold. Death pats Heart on the bottom. Won't you ditch your pals for me? Heart is stubborn. I swore I'd only leave with them. Across the room, the faces of his friends blur in the smoke. It's funny how I get the last dance, says Death. But the night's still young, says Heart. He takes a peek at his watch but it's hidden within the folds of Death's dark cape. The song goes on and on. The band fades from sight. With every turn Death weighs more as Heart labors to lug him across waxy floor. Won't someone cut in? In my house, whispers Death, the lights are kept dim, the rugs are thick. We could have a ball. The rhythm swells to a calypso beat. Heart no longer feels his feet. He hardly hears what Death is murmuring in his ear, something about not having to drive a delivery truck. And why does Death keep calling him Morgan? I beg your pardon, says Heart, but Morgan's not my name. The band falls silent; the vapors begin to disappear. Death raises Heart's chin with a boy finger. I wish you had told me that before. I see by my dance card that our turn comes later. Maybe a tango or milonga. Thanks at least for a taste of pleasures yet to come. Heart is left by himself on the floor. Soon the faces of his friends emerge through the smoke. Some laugh, some are deep in thought. Heart returns to his seat. One friend buys a round of drinks, another tells a joke about a car. Still in shock, Heart grasps that he nearly threw them over for a stranger. He starts to remark: How capricious are the bonds that link us to our fate. But then a dance begins, a tango. Heart will sit it out.

This is a poem I wrote last week. It was the end of a very long and hard day and I was dead tired and trying to get to sleep early. The piece started to unreel in my head and I had to get up and finish it before sleep would come.
and this is why
when i woke up at 5:55 this morning, i...
wait, this story requires a little bit of set up
important it is first to know that i am a head-west feet-east sleeper, that is, i sleep better if my head is oriented to the west and my feet are oriented to the east
that explains why i was sleeping at the foot of my bed
important also it is to know that, at a hair over six feet tall i used to be tall, though no longer, because people younger than me got fed better than me so they got taller than me, (my brother, for example is six three and his son is six five - all fed better than me and i try not to resent it)
anyway, i sleep on an old bed, the bed my father was born on it's probably 110-120 years old, an important fact since it was built back when i was still tall or would have been had i been around in 1880 or 1890
that explains why i sleep on a pillow half hung over the end of the bed
finally also important it is to know that my cat often sleeps with me, actually more on top of me than with me
and that explains why, when i woke up at 5:55 this morning with a cat hat, the cat, that is, sleeping on the top half of the pillow on top of my head which she had pushed to the bottom half of the pillow, i was not surprised
but i was a bit surprised, though not as much as the cat, when i lifted my head from the bottom half of the pillow causing the cat on the top half of the pillow and the pillow itself to fall off the bed and drop to the floor
and that's what happened at 5:55 this morning and it's also the reason my cat has ignored me all day
not a big story, perhaps, but a funny start to what has been a very tough day otherwise

I have a poem now by Alice Walker from her book Once: Poems by Alice Walker, published in 1968 by Harvest/HBJ. This was her first published poetry collection.
Walker was born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth child of sharecroppers.
After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta on full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred up north to Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, graduating in 1965. Continuing the activism that she participated in during her college years, Walker returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights, and children's programs in Mississippi.
Walker's first book of poetry was written while she was still a senior at Sarah Lawrence. She took a brief sabbatical from writing when she was in Mississippi working in the civil rights movement, then resumed her writing career when she joined Ms. magazine as an editor before moving to northern California in the late 1970s.
In addition to her collected short stories and poetry, Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published in 1970. In 1976, Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published. The novel dealt with activist workers in the South during the civil rights movement, and closely paralleled some of Walker's own experiences.
In 1982, Walker published The Color Purple, her best known work. She has written several other novels since and has published a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and other work.
Hymn
I well remember A time when "Amazing Grace" was All the rage In the South. "Happy" black mothers arguing Agreement with Illiterate sweating preachers Hemming and hawing blessedness Meekness Inheritance of earth, e.g. Mississippi cotton fields?
And in the North Roy Hamilton singing "What is America to me?" Such a good question From a nice slum in North Philly.
My God! the songs and the people and the lives Started here - Weaned on "happy" tears black fingers clutching black teats On black Baptist benches - Some mother's troubles that everybody's Seen And nobody wants to see.
I can remember the rocking of The church And embarrassment At my mother's shouts Like it was all - "her happiness" - Going to kill her. My father's snores Punctuating eulogies His loud singing Into fluffy grey caskets A sleepy tear In his eye.
Amazing Grace How sweet the sound That saved a wretch Like me I once was lost But now I'm found Was blind But now I see.
Mahalia Jackson,Clara Ward,Fats Waller, Ray Charles Sitting here embarrassed with me Watching the birth Hearing the cries Bearing witness To the Child, Music.

Here's a nice summery poem by our friend Jane Roken that I want to use before summer slips away.
Jane is Norwegian, living in Denmark, on the interface between the hedgerows and the barley fields. She has been writing poetry, on and off, since she was five, starting under the combined inspiration of the Salvation Army and Calypso music. Now sixty, she has been working in many different trades, but says she has not yet decided what she wants to be when she grows up.
Wild Strawberries
Wild strawberries... pick them on a sunny hillside among harebells, clover and sweet-scented grasses - the forest on your right, its canopy jingling with bird calls and dragonflies jewel the air - the pasture on your left where dark-eyed cows graze, fueled by content, courted by glittering flies.
Wild strawberries... pick them in the fragrant field, thread them like beads on a stalk of grass, remember, timothy is best.
Wild strawberries... pick them while the sun nuzzles the nape of your neck.
Wild strawberries... they're yours, too. Come.

My next poems are by Jack Kerouac, from his book Mexico City Blues (242 Choruses), a Grove Press reprint from the book originally published in 1959.
I can't think of anything to say about Kerouac that anyone reading these poem isn't likely to already know.
57th Chorus
Green goof balls, Blue Heavens. Sodium amythol, Sleeping compound.
Thirty of em To commit suicide - Lethal dose is 30 to 50 Times the therapeutic dose, The therapeutic dose is une - Take to thirty to be safe - or else praps forty be better - If you take too many You throw em up - You gotta let alone Your stomach, if you threw it right down you would throw it up then, in lethal powder form Better to eat the capsules Swallow about six at a time, Take em with cold water, Till you get about 35 in ya And then lay down on your back
58th Chorus
All about goofballs, all about morphine, so I read all about it, that's what it said, "Lethal dose is 30 times the Therapeutic dose"
Very painful death, morphine or heroin; never Try to kill yourself with heroin or morphine: It's a very painful death.
Doctor gave me a mainline shot O H grain - Jesus I thought the whole building was falling on me - went on my knees, awake, lines come under my eye I looked like a madman In 15 minutes I begin to straighten up a little bit Says, "Jesus Bill I thought you was dead A goner, the way you looked When you're standin there"
59th Chorus
Then I always managed to get my weekly check on Monday, Pay my rent, get my laundry out, always have enough Junk to last a coupla days
Have to buy a couple needles tomorrow, feels like Shovin a nail in me
Just like shovin a nail in me Goddamn - (cough) -
For the first time in my life I pinched the skin and pushed the needle in And the skin pinched together And the needle stuck right out And I shot in and out, Goofed half my whole shot On the floor - Took another one - Nothing a junkey likes better Than sittin quietly with a new shot And knows tomorrow's plenty more

It's fair to say that for the past couple of years, my writing has been mostly about recapturing memory, something I'm not all that happy about, because it's hard for me to see how anyone else could be interested.
But then, I'm not into second-guessing myself. This is what I'm doing now, and, for better or worse, its keeping me entertained, so I guess I'll keep doing it until I do something else.
I just hope I'm bringing a couple of you along with me.
rejoining our story in progress
27 years old in 1971, i finally graduated from college 9 years from when i started
after using my last GI Bill check to pay off the friendly grocer who had been holding my hot checks, i enjoyed total assets of one Bachelor of Arts degree (Sociology & English), a tank of cheap gas, and 35 cents, 36 if you count the lucky penny i found in the parking lot while walking back to my car
i went where one goes with 36 cents, a tank of cheap gas, and a Bachelors Degree of limited immediate applicability to any employment likely to greatly increase my fortune -
i went home to the only place i knew where i was likely to eat free for at least a couple of weeks
it turned out i had misunderstood the benevolence of my father and within three days of arriving to the welcoming arms of family i had a temporary job delivering frozen chickens for a company owned by the parents of an old girlfriend i wanted very much never to see again
and within two days of that job's ending i was back to driving a taxi, 2 am to 2 pm 7 days a week for a 33% commission which, more than once, amounted to $3 in earnings for a 12-hour day
i had a few more jobs like that, offering little pay but a lot of material for a couple of good poems, until, eventually, rescued from literary exploration i found a temporary job lasting 30 years and 10,000 neckties
......
this personal history came to mind two weeks ago when i attended a college graduation featuring graduates who will probably, by the time i finish this poem, be employed and earning 3 times what i made in the best of those 30 years
so it was and so it is for this late-blooming pre-boomer born to early or born to late it doesn't seem to make a big difference when comes closer the judgment at the end

Now, for something more than a little different, a poem by Herman Melville from Good Poems for Hard Times collected by Garrison Keillor.
A couple of weeks ago I used a couple of poems from Poets Against the War, both website and book. This Melville piece would have made the book, no doubt.
The College Colonel
He rides at their head; A crutch by his saddle just slants in view. One slung arm is in splints you see, Yet he guides his strong steed - how coldly, too.
He brings his regiment home - Not as they filed two years before, But a remnant half-tattered, and battered, and worn Like castaway sailors, who - stunned By the surf's loud roar, Their mates dragged back and seen no more Again and again breast the surge And at last crawl, spent, to shore.
A still rigidity and pale - An Indian aloofness lines his brow; He has lived a thousand years compressed in battle's pains and prayers, Marches and watches slow.
There are welcoming shouts, and flags; Old men off hat to the Boy Wreaths from gay balconies fall at his feet, But to him - there comes alloy. It is not that a leg is lost, It is not that an arm is maimed, It is not that the fever has racked - Self he has long disclaimed.
But all through the Seven Days' Fight, And deep in the Wilderness grim, And in the field-hospital tent, And Petersburg crater, and dim Lean brooding in Libby, there came - Ah heaven - what truth to him.

Now, here's a poem by Lois P. Jones, a friend of "Here and Now."
Lois has been published in The California Quarterly, Kyoto Journal, Prism Review and others as well as anthologies, ezines and internationally in Argentina and Japan. She co-edited A Chaos of Angels (Word Walker Press, 2007) with Alice Pero as well as completed work on a documentary of Argentina's wine industry. She is the recipient of IBPC's first prize honor for February 2008. You can find her as co-host at Monday's monthly poetry reading in Pacific Palisades, California and hear her as a frequent guest host on 90.7 KPFK's Poet's Cafe. She is the Associate Poetry Editor of Kyoto Journal.
This week she presents us with a found poem based on the PBS documentary, The Lobotomist. In presenting this to us, she explains that Lobotomy, in a modified form, is still done in rare cases at hospitals around the world, and that Thorazine, one of the first drugs administered after the use of lobotomy tapered off was touted as the first "chemical lobotomy" and the precursor to today's psychotropics.
An Absence of Suffering
I. Patient is Evaluated - October 26, 1960
Twelve-year-old Howard Dully is evasive and objects to going to bed. He does a good deal of daydreaming. He turns the room lights on when there's sunlight outside. He hates to wash and puts on a sweater on the hottest days. He goes without an undershirt on chilly ones. I would not wish Howard on anybody. Mrs. Dully said it was up to her husband. I would have to talk to him and make it stick.
II. The Patient
After mother died, step-mother said I was unruly, defiant.
The doctor said that I was getting tests.
And I was not to now what they were doing.
I didn't know until three weeks afterward.
I don't remember that time after I woke up.
What had I had done to deserve this? Something was taken from me.
I wasted my whole life on this, my whole life
III. The Doctor
You won't feel this. One tap of my unsterilized ice picks. One tap under the violet petals of your lids. Here the skull is thin enough to transmit light. It can be perforated easily with a sharp instrument. The instrument upon removal appears clear and shiny. Mental illness is a defect somewhere in the brain. I will be the one to find it.

Ramon Lopez Velarde left few poems behind at his death in 1921, but during his life his work had been recognized to the point where he was considered Mexico's "national poet." Born in Jerez, Zacatecas in 1888, Velarde retained his love of rural Mexico, wrote frequently of that life and became known as the "poet of the provinces."
My poem for today is from Song of the Heart, Selected Verse, a collection of his work published by The University of Texas Press in 1995. It is a bilingual book, in Spanish with English translations by Margaret Sayers Peden.
Wet Earth
Wet earth,liquid afternoons when rain whispers and girls grow limp beneath the drumming of raindrops on the roof...
Wet earth, redolent afternoons when misanthropic desires rise through lewd solitudes of air and, there, are wed with Noah's farthest dove as persistent lightning crashes through murky clouds...
Wet afternoons in peasants' clothes when I recognize that I am made of clay, because in its summer weeping, beneath the auspices of the half-light, the soul turns to liquid upon the nails of its cross...
Afternoons when the telephone rings for those artful, languid naiads who step from their bath to love, to spread the conceit of their hair across the bed and babble - with perfidy, and gain - moist and yearning monosyllables that echo rain upon the windowpanes...
Afternoons like a submersed chamber with its bed and basin; afternoons when a young girl ages before the flameless brazier of her hearth, awaiting a suitor who will bring a glowing coal... afternoons when the angels descend to plow straight furrows in edifying fallow fields... afternoons of prayer and Easter candles... afternoons when cloudbursts induce me to kindle each and any shivering girl with the opportune ember... afternoons when, all volition oxidized, I feel I am a camphor-scented acolyte: one part swordfish and one part Sr. Isidore laborer...

I wrote this the other night after a near-encounter at one of my coffee shops.
a tough decision
the woman at the table next to me looks just like Sandra Bullock
i looooove Sandra Bullock
Maybe i should just ask her, "are you Sandra Bullock?"
maybe she is; maybe she isn't
what's the harm in asking?
if she isn't well, i'd be embarrassed but that's not such a big deal
the kind of life i've led, a double left-footed hick from the sticks
i've been embarrassed many times
like the time i was about 6 years old and i followed
my cousin, both of us just out of the bath naked, down the hall in his house
into a room full of people i didn't know
or the time when i was about 15
and 2 girls i liked were yelling at me
from about half a block away
but i couldn't understand them and yelled back, "What?"
and they yelled again and i yelled "What?" again
and that happened about five times before i realized they were talking to someone in an alcove closer to them
that i couldn't see
not me
and despite the fact that i remember these incidents and a thousand other little embarrassments
even though they happened 112 years ago doesn't mean I've been scarred by them
not permanently anyway
so what's the big deal
i ask her if she's Sandra Bullock and she says no and i'm embarrassed and that's the end of it
another in a long list of embarrassments that haven't scarred me,
not permanently anyway
but what if i ask her and it turns out she is Sandra Bullock
i ask her "are you Sandra Bullock" and she says, yes,
and calls that tough-looking guy she married over and tells him to kick my ass for stalking her
- you know who i'm talking about, the one with long hair and a beard and tattoos all over his body and a mean look in his eye -
so i look ahead and see only two possible outcomes to my simple query as to the woman's identity
embarrassment or an ass-kicking
a tough decision averted when i notice that the woman who looks exactly like Sandra Bullock has already finished her White Chocolate Raspberry Mocha Kiss and left the building

Florence Anthony, born in 1947 in Albany, Texas, legally changed her name to Ai, which means "love" in Japanese.
Describing herself as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, Ai grew up in Tucson, Las Vegas and San Francisco. She majored in Japanese at the University of Arizona and immersed herself in Buddhism.
Ai holds an M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine and currently teaches at Oklahoma State University at Stillwater.
She is the author of Dread (2003), Vice (1999), which won the National Book Award for Poetry, Greed (1993), Fate (1991), Sin (1986), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation Killing Floor (1979), which was the 1978 Lamont Poetry Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Cruelty (1973).
She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and various universities, and has been a frequent reader-performer of her work.
This poem is from her 1999 book, Vice.
The Priest's Confession
1 I didn't say mass this morning. I stood in the bell tower and watched Rosamund, the orphan, chase butterflies, her laughter rising, slamming into me, while the almond scent of her body wrapped around my neck like a noose. Let me go, I told her once, you'll have to let me go, but she held on. She was twelve. She annoyed me, lying in her little bed - Tell me a story, Father, Father, I can't sleep. I miss my mother. Can I sleep with you? I carried her into my room - the crucifix, the bare white walls. While she slept, she threw the covers back. Her cotton grown was wedged above her thighs. I nearly touched her. I prayed for deliverance, but none came. Later, I broke my rosary. The huge, black wooden beads clattered to the floor like ovoid marbles, and I in my black robe, a bead on God's own broken rosary, also rolled there on the floor in a kind of ecstasy. I remembered how when I was six Lizabeta, the witch, blessed me, rocking in her ladder back chair, while I drank pig's blood and ate it smeared across a slice of bread. She said, Eat, Emilio, eat. Hell is only as far as your next breath and heaven unimaginably distant. Gate after gate stands between you and God, so why not meet the devil instead? He at least has time for people. When she died, the villagers burned her house.
I lay my hand on the bell. Sometimes when I ring this, I feel I'll fragment, then reassemble and I'll be some other thing - a club to beat, a stick to heave at something: between the act and the actor there can be no separateness. That is Gnostic. Heresy.
Lord, I crave things, Rosamund's bird's nest of hair barely covered by her drawers. I want to know that you love me, that the screams of men, as loud as any trumpet, have brought down the gates of stone between us.
2 The next four years, Rosamund's breasts grew and grew in secret like two evil thoughts. I made her confess to me and one night, she swooned, she fell against me and I laid her down. I bent her legs this way and that. I pressed my face between them to smell "Our Lady's Rose" and finally, I wanted to eat them. I bit down, her hair was like thorns, my mouth bled, but I didn't stop. She was so quiet, then suddenly she cried out and sat up; her face, a hazy flame, moved closer and closer to mine, until our lips touched. I called her woman then because I knew what it meant. But I call you god, the Father, and you're a stranger to me.
3 I pull the thick rope from the rafter and roll it up. I thought I'd use this today, that I'd kick off the needlepoint footstool and swing our over the churchyard as if it were the blue and weary Earth, that as I flew out into space, I'd lose my skin, my bones to the sound of one bell ringing in the empty sky. Your voice, Lord. Instead I hear Rosamund's laughter, sometimes her screams, and behind them, my name, calling from the roots of trees, flowers, plants, from the navel of Lucifer from which all that is living grows and ascends toward you, a journey not home, not back to the source of things, but away from it, toward a harsh, purifying light that keeps nothing whole - while my sweet, dark Kyries became the wine of water and I drank you. I married you, not with my imperfect body, but with my perfect soul. Yet, I know I'd have climbed and climbed through the seven heavens and found each empty.
I lean from the bell tower. It's twilight; smoke is beginning to gray the sky. Rosamund has gone inside to wait for me. She's loosened her hair and unbuttoned her blouse the way I like, set table and prayed, as I do - one more night. Lamb stew, salty butter. I'm the hard, black bread on the water. Lord, come walk with me.

Here's a poem from our very good friend from Hawaii Alice Folkart.
Known in Hawaii for her blossoming hula talent, she is equally well known by readers of "Here and Now" as a terrific poet. There's something special about this poem, in addition to being especially good, but I'll let you figure it out. I'll admit that I was so into the poem as I read it that I didn't notice it until someone pointed it out to me. That's good!
Xanadu is all yours
Anagrams bother me, confuse the issue, distract everyone.
Find the answer, and give your opinion. Haven't you learned anything?
In case you hadn't noticed, joggers run the world. Kite flyers can see all, fields and felons.
Leaping lizards keep in shape.
Must you just stare at me like that? No one can do anything for you. Open your eyes instead of your mouth. Put on your costume and mask, and quit quarreling with every other guy.
Remember that day when we ran away?
Stand by your guns. Take your medicine and lump it. Undulate in some kind of dance.
Victory can be yours, if you have enough quarters.
When you're ready... Xanadu is waiting. Yes, it's all yours. Zoom in and take a closer look.

Born in New York City in 1921, Richard Wilbur was the second named Poet Laureate of the United States (after Robert Penn Warren) and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942 and then served in the United States Army from 1943 until 1945 during World War II. After the Army and graduate school at Harvard University, Wilbur taught at Wesleyan University for two decades and at Smith College for another decade.
The next poem is from Wilbur's book Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems 1943-2004, published Harcourt in 2004.
A Grasshopper
But for a brief Moment, a poised minute, He paused on the chicory-leaf; Yet within it
The sprung perch Had time to absorb the shock, Narrow its pitch and lurch, Cease to rock.
A quiet spread Over the neighbor ground; No flower swayed its head For yards around;
The wind shrank Away with a swallowed hiss; Caught in a widening blank Parenthesis,
Cry upon cry Faltered and faded out; Everything seemed to die. Oh, without doubt
Peace like plague Had gone to the world's verge, But that an aimless, vague Grasshopper-urge
Leapt him aloft, giving the leaf a kick, Starting the grasses' soft Chase and tick,
So that the sleeping Crickets resumed their chimes, And all things wakened, keeping Their several times.
In gay release The whole field did what it did, Peaceful now that its peace Lay busily hid.

To finish off the week, here's a little character thing I did several weeks ago. I don't think I've used it here since I wrote it.
rainbow shoes
red shoes one day blue shoes the next green shoes yellow orange and purple shoes too
the bonny-eyed girl with rainbow shoes always wears a golden smile
invites you with a sparkle of a laugh to join in the bright happy day no matter what the hue of your shoe

That's it for this week. Time to saddle up and move on. Until next week, remember, all the material presented on this blog remains the property of its creators. The blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz.
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How did you do the pictures this week?
or who drew them?
Allen an excellent issue. Love Jane's Strawberry's, your Sandra Bullock and Wet Earth. Thanks for having me over for dinner.
Lois
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