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Summer Recess
Friday, June 10, 2011 VI.6.2. It's hot as hell in Texas, and it's going to get hotter and I don't want to work much so "Here and Now" is taking a semi-summer recess with this short post. But short does not mean not good. I have good stuff this week, just less of it than usual. Among the special treats, I have several poems by a new friend, Mira Desai, from India. Mira is a new housemate on Blueline's poem-a-day forum and I've been enjoying her daily poems for more than a month now. so here she is for more to enjoy. Also a busy week with other activities. I sent my next EBook Goes Around, Comes Around to BookBaby this week. It should be on all the "shelves" of the EBook retailers by July 1st. I also began final edit on the book to follow that one, Always to the Light and made a decision on my fourth EBook of the year Road Poems that gives me direction on how to go forward with it. A busy week, but still, "Here and Now" - smaller,but not, as I said, lesser. Against Gravity Me muffin baking and other activities of the long night Luis J. Rodriguez The Bull’s Eye Inn Me Marshall Dillion is dead Mira Desai Bandra Set Medley Lights Number Lesson Of Rescues and Hunger Me night winds Kevin A. Gonzalez Cultural Scope Me how to make a German comedy From Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - the Sacred Song of the Hula Song Me understanding the business of art From Three Rivers, Ten Years Ted Kooser The Afterlife Elizabeth Libby Forcing the End Mary Oliver An Old Whorehouse Linda Pastan At Home Me retirement living Jacinto Jesus Cardona The Old Dream Oven La Coste, Texas Tongue-Tied Me sustained by the memory Lester Paldy Space Nearing Spring Me waiting breakfast for Dee  My first poem this week is by David Rivard. It's from his book, Wise Poison, published in 1996 by Graywolf Press. The book was winner of the 1996 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. Against Gravity Blue sky, ungated clouds, & on a sand-pitted highway sign the number 10 stands out - a minor footnote in a monograph on drugs, a reference instructing the reader to study my nap on the floor of a Ford Econoline summer after high school. As if rest, & only rest, were what we found ourselves made of, sometimes. Through rest is only one trait, actually, when you've been hitching between Tuscon & El Paso and gotten picked up by a van. The equally ingenious others look like tie-dye & restlessness, like rest stops & silver heather, maybe jimson, and a little lantana raising it's nippled red speckles into the scent of sagebrush rained on & drying. They got me high, three men & a woman costumed estimably in the style of out-of-work jesters, jovial people of 1971, wearing the standard issue - fusty cloches, velveteen pants, embroidered emblems, with shiny balls like car bells dangling off one or two ears. For one a self-etched tattoo, it's motto the equation ACID=BLISS framed by a multiplying finger or exploding chloroplast. For another, a Fu Manchu & fedora. A synaptic Apache snake cinching the woman's frayed macramé belt. Mirror sunglasses for all. And small mirrors, like tiny ponds, frozen pools, had been sewn on the woman's India print blouse by some Kashmiri laborer, who, if he could have looked into them, might have seen me dozing off, stoned on pan hash, bits of myself reflecting back, scattered, a tired grin from the woman's right sleeve, the puffed wrist, pale ear at the tip of a breast, nose on her stomach. And haven't I always loved being broken up & abrogated by sleep? But when I woke we had pulled off the road into a ranch. From the tape deck "Brain Salad Surgery" blared, a form of premature senility disguised as endless synthesizer riffs. For a second, in the nazz and compression of noise, still stoned, I thought they intended to kill me. An intuition so melodramatic & dumb the sight of two of the men kissing in the front seat had to wipe it away. I had never seen two men kiss & the surprise, which in another setting might have shocked, seen disgusted, my sheltered murmurous little self, somehow reassured me. The kiss implying not so much gentility as distraction. Then, out of the eddies of shades, the woman ran, having tossed off her incongruous imitation alligator heels, naked now except for purple tights, she ran & turned cartwheels three times across the yard. Gravity. Gravity. the had wanted to visit a friend who, they claimed, was connected to anti- gravity research being conducted there. Merely a windbreak occupied by an adobe shed and barn, it seemed abandoned, as if during the night the hard rains, the lightning, had chased away the enemy of gravity, & now we were to take his place.  Much you can gather about people from parts usually unseen. muffin baking and other activities of the long night it’s a bright and sunny Sunday morning and I’m thinking about sex now I can tell some off you are surprised that I’m thinking about sex on such a bright and sunny Sunday morning, but I don’t know why... I’m an old gent after all, a getting-on gent, a heading-for-the-last-round-up gent, a drawing-near-to-that-last-hillrise-cowboy and men in my particular chronological condition think about a lot of things, the weather, dumb-ass politicians, uncomplicated bowel movements, occasionally a poem, and sex… mostly sex cause even though we may not be getting much of it anymore , sex is still the prime concern, at least of those whose wilty whiskariser has yet to fall off, and since my whiskariser still abides I spend a lot of my thinking time thinking about sex that’s just the way it is, just ask any whiskariser-intact old man and he will confirm if he’s even the least bit honest sex beats weather and dumb-assed politicians to think about any old day… in particular, this bright and sunny Sunday morning, I’m thinking about a particular girl I once knew a long time back, in the old days when Ike was still hitting par with Mamie, a particular girl I’m remembering whose nipples were in constant confrontation the one always hard like a marble, proudly erect like a sweet dark cherry on a cream-puff pie the other lazy always lying back, holding back, small and unobtrusive… her conflicted nipples like her conflicted nature, the one ever-erect showing the wild part of her, the part always ready for the next adventure, the next sensation - touch me, kiss me, play me lightly with your teeth, she’d say lick me like a triple-dip ice cream cone - (and other such things she’d say I’m much to shy to repeat in a public forum such as this) but there was, still, the other side of her, the Betty Crocker-in-a-white- frill-apron-muffin- baker side, the nipple so slow to rise like reluctant muffins, so hard to arouse, the nipple of modesty, of consequence and restraint, of look twice before your leap, the nipple of probably shouldn’t leap at all, the nipple of banked fires and still nights and clouds slow moving against dark and starless skies… but the fire was not out, just laid low, waiting for the breeze of soft whispers to flame again, to re-ignite the stars, to push the clouds and clear the sky, the fire when it came as hot and bright as any other, only slower to rise… and it was in the conflagration that the two sides of her joined in the end confusing to me, sometimes, leaving me never knowing which of her two sides would come with me through the long night till dawn… but the truth is, while possibilities varied, there were no bad nights when sooner or later her secret identity was revealed  My next poem is by Luis J. Rodriguez and it's from his book The Concrete River. The book was published by Curbstone Press in 1991. The Bull's Eye Inn (Apologies to T. S. Eliot for the first two lines Let us go then, you and I to the Bull's Eye Inn, through the rusted iron gates into the dark and damp, stepping on saw-dusted floors gushing with ether, where my ex-wife once waited tables on weekends grinning with death. Come to where the blood, beer, and barf flowed with the bourbon washes. My ex-wife often invited me to watch over her. My job on those weekends, she explained, was to sit in a dark corner, by myslef, and keep the out-of-work mechanics, the foundrymen and sow-talking cholos from going too far - which was like blowing a balloon and trying to stop just before it burst! Dudes would buy her drinks and she brought the drinks over to me. Laid back against a plush seat, I silently toasted their generosity. I did a toast to her too, to our babies, to the blood-shot eyes of East LA nights and the midnight romps we once had, near naked, in the park. Many times in the candle -lit haze, as a disc jockey played tunes behind a chain-link barrier, the bullets came flying and beer bottles crashed on the wall behind my head. Once on the dance floor some dude smacked his old lady to the ground. Later that night she returned, firing a .22 into the bar - and missing everybody - as Little Willie G. crooned, "Sad Girl" from a turntable. Con artists congregated here, including the Earl of Lincoln Heights who once sold a house he didn't own. And boys with tattoos and scars crisscrossing skin, prowled the pool tables, passing bills, while trying to out-hustle each other as disco beats and cumbias pulled people onto the lopsided dance floor. My ex-wife danced too. I watched dudes hold her, kiss her neck, eye her behind and look down her sweaty breasts. But I also knew this was the closest I would ever get to her anymore, in that dark corner, with beer bottles rising from a table - when she needed me. Outside the Bull's Eye Inn the hurting never stopped. Outside the Bull's Eye Inn we locked into hate shrouded in the lips of love. Outside the Bull's Eye Inn we had two children who witnessed our drunken brawls - my boy once entered our room, and danced and laughed with tears in his eyes to get us to stop. But inside,beside the blaze of bar lights, she was the one who stole into my sleep, the one who fondled my fears, the one who inspired the lust of honeyed remembrance. She was the song of regret behind a sudden smile.  "Gunsmoke" was the TV event every week that wasn't to be missed. Matt Dillion was the center of the show, the center of Dodge City, and the center of TV westerns. James Arness died last week, at 88 years old. Strange to think of him as someone other than the Marshall who didn't always get his man, but who, when he failed never did it any way but honorable and manly. Marshall Dillion is dead Marshall Dillon is dead, Matt, as those of us at the Long Branch knew him... Miss Kitty crying, and as usual, never showing tears Doc, silent, lost for words as he never was before Chester and Festus in the corner drinking, facing their sorrows with beer suds on their lip all of them, gone before Matt, all of them, waiting so long to welcome him to the shadows their wait over now, all of them drifting with Matt in the sweet fog of righteous gun smoke - bad guys asleep forever under the dry sand of Boot Hill, good people all moved along, past the prairies, past the Rockies, waiting of the cusp of the Pacific for the next hero no one left alive to mourn on the dusty streets of Dodge City, Kansas  Next I have a couple of poems by, Mira Desai, a new housemate at Blueline's poem-a-day-forum "House of 30" and already a friend. Mira writes in Bombay and works in pharmaceuticals. Her translations have been featured in Words without Borders, Massachusetts Review, 91st Meridian, and elsewhere. She is a short story writer primarily, but also writes poet (and does it well in my opinion), and has contributed fiction to Reading Hour, Birmingham Arts Journal, Six Sentences, Celebrate Bandra, In focus, and others. She is a member of the IWW, the Internet WritingWworkshop. I have enjoyed Mira's poems on the Blueline for their artistry, as well as the opportunity they have given me to learn more about her country and its culture. I'm hoping in some future longer post to use one of Mria's short stories. Bandra Set Frangipani, cloud in blue sky The sea beneath - a glittering carpet One could get used to this lifestyle indolent # Chilled room Incisive suits, sharp questions The ocean generous, past the French windows I better sit with my back to the view # Old ruin of a mansion, but what a mansion Curving staircase, vast porch, balustrades What a grand place this must have been The nameplate, faded, whispers a tale # Lady of the mount I trudge uphill Long shadows under the scorching sun I genuflect my wishlist disappears Medley The amaltas are a shade paler now Waiting, still Staring intent at a cloud or two The sun burns deep humidity plasters the air monsoon, soon # all the hours at my desk addicted to air conditioning when I walk back home star pinpoints and neon lights pin up the humidity smog-haze a line races down my back # disappointment is acrid supposedly I shrug mark, attach, move elsewhere rejection veteran I whistle # Just keep moving They breathe down your back Cut in, push, Glare Fight for every inch Grunt and edge you off asphalt Genuflect to the big green one, But just keep moving Lights Special prayer day at the temple yesterday, consecration anniversary Marigold festooned Incense spiraling, lights bright in lamps, the rustle of silk Chants and intonations as voices blend, rise skywards Despite the humid, sultry day and noon Peace, an undefined contentment, a sense of place in the scheme of things A connect to hazy lifetimes The deity in jade in some memory corner Distant, but definite Or perhaps I saw this in a magazine somewhere Or not Recognition, fragmented statue in the museum Known, genuflected at I can be so strange sometimes a sense of place in the scheme of things Number Lesson Lakshmi. (Goddess of wealth, the consort of Lord Vishnu) That’s what she said her name was As we walked on, round and about Three perambulations of the colony Forced post-dinner repast A brisk march at ten Watching the lights in other people’s windows, Snatches of commercials, television shows Lakshmi. Short, polyester saree-clad Wrinkled forehead As she rushed to match step presented In South- modified Hindi Non linear, of course, A summary of her life Lakshmi. The Goddess’s name could also mean prudence, I learn A decade ago- Two young sons. Stay-at-home husband, after computer business, once robust, crashed. Stock market investments, sadly plunged. Lakshmi. She narrated her action plan (if one could call it that) In short breaths After kids protested at return-to-the-roots, They stayed put in the metropolis; Transplanted to a decent-enough local school Tiny apartment bought, rented out Farmland back home in the Deccan streamlined Supervised, visited, fussed over regular income, cash flow 4 of them folded into a one room apartment TV switched off in the crucial years, class 10 and 12 and all the intervening years No pocket money for Coffee Day, only a train/ bus pass And home-made tiffin for lunch hour But money enough for classes they’d require. Now that’s done; one son enroute computer engineering another medical college, only question is where In that half hour I learned more about finance Than in decades. Of Rescues and Hunger This morning my friend mailed me a link to a NYT story A child rescued from a Calcutta brothel A team of investigators swooped down Bells, whistles and all, boots thudding up the staircase Which was all very fine. Noble even. One among the many many In this land of the deprived And vast numbers of the hungry gaping chasms divide the haves and have-nots (and so we have karma) life stories push them back again and again to the brink except on the surface nothing changes so I wonder what fate awaits these little girls education, good homes? Or back again, if not now, later. A vast array of exploitation choices in this historical land So it makes sense that the first lump of clay for the image of the Mother Goddess Every radiant and reverberating puja time Is from the courtyard of a slut We all have our life stories And not all shoes fit to walk a mile in.  I enjoy sitting on my back patio at night before going to bed. Even after these triple digit days, the night winds blow in at eight or nine and cool down the night. For now, that is. In a month or so, the night winds will stop and it'll still be in the high eighties at midnight. So we enjoy while we can. night winds night-winds blow in about eight and if it’s going to be a good night they stay, cool the air with fresh breeze and clean smells that blow away city-stale stink if not the wind will pass on through, leaving us in a hour or so with dead air, hot and humid, a blanket across fresh island dreams ~~~ good times come like spring winds that lift the gloom of summer’s hot, still nights stay with us as long as our luck holds then, blow away again, bringing relief to some others’ dark night, teaching us the futility of high expectations; teaching us the humility due those who think fresh winds blow only for them, for the deserving, a pleasure earned, not randomly dealt with fate’s dark humor ~~~ midnight symphony, chimes and wood block percussion mark the passage of brisk night-wind, the outside dog, asleep on his patio bed, dreams of running into the wind, stirs, yelps a soft dream-bark and returns to the chase ~~~ I stand in the dark under trees rustling with sweet night breezes, under a silver dollar moon, its soft reflected light faintly shadowing on the ground the weaving pattern of branches dancing in the wind and were I not large and clumsy and unfit for the purity of this pristine night I would dance in my own ungainly way with the wind ~~~ the sun rises with it’s own bright day-warm winds… morning… summer day begins... cool night another dream denied  Here's a poem by Kevin A. Gonzalez, from Hotel America, Volume 5, Issue 1, Fall 2006, a periodical of the Department of English at Ohio State University, with funding from the Ohio Arts Council. At the time of publication, Gonzalez was a graduate fellow at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. His poems and stories had appeared in numerous magazines and journals, as well as in the anthologies Best New Poets 2005 and Best New American Voices 2006. Cultural Scope After her grandmother said you were portable & you replied, No, I'm Puerto Rican, your girlfriend kicked you under the table. You have this tendency to mishear old people because they're often right & remind you of desquamation. She was right. You wre born in a nasty little stripmall. You've come from a place where it's prohibited to discuss politics at bars to a placde where it is legal to shoot cats on the street. On the way, you stopped in Pittsburgh. You've studied the anatomy of exit signs in the largest & most prestigious lecture halls. You've waited at Greyhound terminals where voices emptied into each other like tiny rivers, straying a delta of accents. Always, as currents merged & co0unterposed, you thought, Now this is the true voice of a nation. Once you answered a payphone at Dulles & a woman asked what you knew about Jesus. This is how quick the mood can change when you're portable. The only thing about which every doctrine seems to agree is that existence is a type or another of thunder. Theoretically, all children are born with a piece of cloth on their hands. In some countries they use them as gags, & in the rest of the world they wear them as blindfolds, Puerto Rico is so proud of its gift shops, it makes you sick. Even the grains of sand the sea throws up have flags pinned on their chests. Commonwealth implies something valuable exists to be shared, but when spoken out loud, the word is nothing more than a plea: Come on wealth! Come on, wealth! There really is no polite way to say you do not wish to subscribe. Wisconsin is like the all-you-can-eat buffet of your drams where you're allergic to everything. This is the type of place where you'll always end up when it is a million red suitcases what streams through your veins. O how quick the tone can change when you're portable! In high school, you lied about having read Dante to impress literature girls from the UPR & now you lie about having read Dante because you fear for the life of your fellowship, & later, it is possible your girlfriend might leave you when she finds out you lied about Dante - that is,if she doesn't leave you for ripping on her grandmother's squamus. She was right. You're as portable as the Energizer Bunny, the pink Buddha of Youth, whom you follow into any circle of hell. As for Jesus, you know his life was shaped like a dumbbell because all the weight in the middle is missing. As a schoolboy, his arm was full of helium. Then, his hair grew long & pure, like the sponges that slither up the windshields at the Octopus Car Wash here in Wisconsin.Always,there has been a backpack stropped to your heart, & asking, Where are you from? has not been unlike asking, What is this poem about? No matter where you are, a nail clipping of light will laze in the sky & the full moon will glow somewhere else. In Puerto Rico, someone bites his tongue off at a bat. In Wisconsin, someone polishes the barrel of a nine before going out to hunt tabbies. Fuck the moon. Sometimes the world is one giant bathyscaphe. So what. If every night of your life you hop in a cab, you're bound to see ever flag ever made hung from a mirror.  Stayed up late. Since I get up early, I suffer until the afternoon when there is time for a nap. how to make a German comedy groggy this morning... stayed up late last night - watched a German movie on the International Movie pay-per-view channel talk-talk sex- sex that’s the way it went long intervals of talk (dubbed) then long intervals of sex (explicit) talksextalksextalksex and more talksex pretty boring after a while, but I paid $3.99 for the movie and wanted to get my money’s worth, wanted to see the whole thing, wanted to find out whatever it was about was about, so watched it on triple-speed, made the talk-parts tolerable, made the sex-parts funny, people like rabbits, hippity hop, bumptity bump, flickity fuck… look, I thought to myself, I made a German comedy  Poetry in it first roots was not something to be read quietly in a library, but performed as a song or chant, often with musical accompaniment of some sort and sometimes with dance. The closer you get to the root of a particular cultures poetry the more you see continuation of the first traditions. I have a very interesting book that explores the roots of Hawaian literature. The book is Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - the Sacred Songs of the Hula. The material in the book, published in 1909 by the Smithsonian Institution as "Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethonology, no. 38," was collected and translated by Nathaniel B. Emerson. His notes and historical and cultural influences are included in the book. The piece I've selected from the book is a mele, or song, usually a love song. Its hula was perform by two rows of dancers, the author reports, "ranged in parallel rows, moving forward with accompaniment of gestures until the head of each row had reached the limit in that direction, and then, turning outward to right and left, countermarched in the same manner to the point of starting and so continued. They kept step and timed their gestures and movements to the music of the bamboo nose-flute,the ohe. One observer claimed that the player of the nose-flute both played and chanted the words of the song at the same time. Though the nose-flute is a very simple instrument very simply played, the author express doubts that to do both of these things at the same time was possible. Whatever - here's the song. But, before the song, I should express my gratitude to 'Ilima Stern a fellow poet and friend from Hawaii who recommended the book to me and who is active in working to preserve Hawaii's ancient dance and literary traditions, and who performs hula herself. Song Come up to the wildwood, come; Let us visit Wal-kini, And gaze on Pihana-ka-lani, Its birds of plumage so fine; Be comrade to Hale-lehua, Soul-mateto Kau'Kahi-alil. O, Kaili, Kaili! Kaili, leaf of the koa, Graceful as leaf of the koa, Granddaughter of goddess, whose name is he breath of love, Darling of blooming Lehua My lady rides with the gray foam, On the surge that enthralls the desire I pine for the sylph robed in gauze, Who rides on the surf Maka-iwa - Aye, cynosure thou of all hearts, in all of sacred Wailua. Forlorn and soul-empty the house; You pleasure on the beach Ali-o; Your love is there in the wildwood.  I struggle with my illusions sometimes, and sometimes I just give up and go with it. understanding the business of art final draft read-through of the next eBook today off to the publisher by Friday up and available to buy by July 1st… then the next book, edit complete this weekend then to Paraguay for final proof on the retailers’ shelves by October 1st… next up the last book of the year - the road poems issue: how do you make a book out of three good poems, long poems, but still, do you pad the book with lesser poems just to publish the good ones? ePublishing revelation! cost of publication cheap whether three poems or three hundred solution: apply the Wal-Mart volume theory of retail merchandising - publish a three-poem book sell it for a buck ninety-eight hire street-corner sign-wavers to work the streets of America Poetry sale today! Almost-free poetry today! remembering to beef-up security for crowd control as poetry-readers gather on opening day, large women in sweatpants stampeding in a crush to the cheap-poetry bin , crashing the gates of eCommerce … forward! forward! poets - the business of art is now explained ~~~ now explain to your wife why losing money for the Muse seemed such a good idea at the time or charge it off to coffee price increases at Starbucks - she'll never know the difference  Next, I have four poets from Three Rivers, Ten Years, a collection of poems from the Three Rivers Poetry Journel, edited by Gerald Costanzo, founding editor of the journal and later editor of the Carnegie-Mellon University Press Poetry Series. The collection was published by the Carnegie-Mellon University Press in 1983. The first poet is Ted Kooser. Kooser was born in Ames, Iowa in 1939. He received his B.A. from Iowa State and his M.A. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of ten collections of poetry, as well as fiction and non-fiction. His honors include two NEA fellowships in poetry, a Pushcart Prize, the Stanley Kunitz Prize from Columbia, and a Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council. He was the 13th Poet Laureate of the United States. He is a visiting professor in the English department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Afterlife It will be February there, a foreign-language newspaper rolling along the dock in an icy wind, a few old winos wiping their eyes over a barrel of fire; down the new streets, mad women shaking rats from their mops on each stoop, and odd, twisted children playing with matches and knives. Then, behind us, trombones: the horns of the tugs turning our great gray ship back into the mist. The next poem from the anthology is Elizabeth Libbey . Libby is author of three books of poetry, all published by the Carnegie-Mellon University Press, and has taught at Trinity College since 1987. Forcing the End The story has been going on so long, I want now to turn the page until I'm a girl in her swing. pushed higher, swung out, tucked at the knees, forcing the rafters of her house to collapse. On her fact the lips don't move: some things are told by breathing. While you sleep, she just keeps swinging. There's no star, no deep water she's welcome to The third poem is by Mary Oliver. Oliver was born in 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio. As a teenager, she lived briefly in the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, where she helped Millay's family sort through the papers the poet left behind. In the mid-1950s, Oliver attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, though she did not receive a degree. Her honors include an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. She currently lives in Massachusetts. An Old Whorehouse We climbed through a broken window, walked through every room. Out of business for years, the mattresses held only rainwater, and one woman's black shoe. Downstairs spiders had wrapped up the crystal chandelier. A cracked cup lay in the sink. But we were fourteen, and no way dust could hide the expected glamour from us, or teach us anything. We whispered, we imagined. It would be years before we'd learn how effortlessly sin blooms, then softens, like any bed of flowers. And finally, from the anthology, this last poem by Linda Pastan. Born in 1932, Pastan was raised in New York City but has lived for most of her life in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. In her senior year at Radcliffe College, Pastan won the Mademoiselle poetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Immediately following graduation, however, she decided to give up writing poetry in order to concentrate on raising her family. In the 19709's, after ten years at home, her husband urged her to return to poetry. Her many awards and honors include the Dylan Thomas award, a Pushcart Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in 2003. Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for 20 years. She is the author of over twelve books of poetry and essays. At Home The secret strangers in my house help with the dishes, smile for the camera. When the pictures are developed there is no one there. They nod vaguely when I question turning my sound down low. At the table they break, break my bread. I never guess it is the loaf of exile.  My house is like a retirement home for tired and senile animals, a deaf dog, a blind cat, and another dog that's just plain stupid. That's the one we don't usually talk about. retirement living Kitty Pride, old as the hills, five and a half months dead according to what the Vet said six months ago (if you’re going to bury her at home, he said, you should start digging soon…) but she abides still sleeps mostly visits here litter box when the need arises cries when she wants to be fed cries when she can’t find her water cries when she wanders into a corner and can’t find her way out cries when she wants someone to hold and stroke her cries in her sleep, mouse dreams tormenting ~~~ Reba world’s oldest dog arthritis in her hips and deaf as the proverbial post responds to a high whistle and gesture come…stay… outside… and I’ll back follows me around, trying to gather with her eyes all the secret things she used to hear watches me intent on every movement every expression talking to her as I work so that even though she cannot hear she will see my lips move and know I still think of her know she is still my best pal forever  I've always had special pleasure in reading poetry by Jacinto Jesus Cardona, poems about people and places I knew growing up and living most of my life in South Texas. Born in Palacios, Texas, Cardona grew up in Alice, the "Hub of South Texas" according to its Chamber of Commerce literature. For sure, it was hub of the South Texas oil business, until the oil bust of the late 1980's from which it is only now recovering. At the time of publication, Cardona taught English at Palo Alto College and at the Trinity University Upward Bound Program in San Antonio. More recently he taught English at a San Antonio high school attended by one of my nieces. The poems I selected for this week are from his book, Pan Dulce, published in 1998 by Chile Verde Press. The Old Dream Oven Father is the number one small town fry cook, walking home from the late shift at the Palace Grill on Highway 281, escorted by a line of cats, stray cats, smelling the salmon croquettes, the jumbo shrimp that slept in the Gulf just last night. Father is the number one small town fry cook, coming home on callused feet, lugging a bucket full of day old doughnuts. But on cold December mornings, he rises early,rolls up a newspaper, strikes a match and lights the old dream oven. He's going to make pancakes, he is going to make the perfect pancake, he is going after the big one, the one that always gets away, the ultimate pancake. Without a mixer he whips up the batter. Just like a hall of fame kitchen jock, he cannot stop. He makes stacks and stacks of pancakes. Despierten! ya 'stan listos los pancakes! Come and get'em. They're going like hotcakes. La Coste, Texas for Don Hurd Deep in La Coste, Texas, two poets looking for lost love close the bar with two Lone Stars and cross the street over to the lyrical ooze of a Tex-Mex squeeze box, witnessing la raza cosmica wiping dust devil dust, swaying hard labor hips to classic conjunto hits, polkas, boleros,y huapangos on the VFW concrete floor while the proverbial young girl in the romantic red dress marvels at the cumbia poetics of the local crazy who seldom speaks but keeps on dancing like waves of summer heat. Tongue-Tied The fry cook takes a day off to entice his tongue-tied child with a ride through a booming downtown. The silent son imbibes sights and sounds, but like a leafless mesquite afraid of a late frost, he refuses to speak. A waitress at the Five Cent Seat tries to bribe the tongue-tied child with LifeSavers, but nothing provokes his stubborn vocal cords. The fry cook's compadre jokes that it must be the hum of indio blood. Maybe the tickle of a buzzing chicharra on the child's lips will do the trick. The fry cook shakes his head and drives away like a raindrop in a drought.  It's helpful sometimes to look back to your roots. sustained by the memory I was a tree before and before that a flower wide-reaching and blue shifting ever in the wind and before that a wind-born weevil in a loaf of bread at the day-old bread store on the corner of Madison and Monroe and before that a grain of wheat that made the flour that made the bread that my weevil-self dined on and before that tiny gem of wheat I was the rich soil that grew the wheat from a small seed embedded in my worm-crawling loam and before I was the womb of earth I was a nitrogen bubble that fell from an exploding star to prepare the womb that grew the wheat that made the flour that feed the weevil that hatched from an egg in the shelter of the blue overhanging flower that grew first beneath the tree that was me before the me of this old man so tired so tired sustained by the memory that once I was a star  For my last poems from my library this week, I have these two by Lester Paldy, from his book Wildflowers at Babi Ya. The book was published by Night Heron Press in 1994. The poet is Distinguished Service Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he has taught since 1967, with occasional leaves to serve on the US arms control delegations in Geneva and at the UN. He published his first book of poetry, for an okay free woman, in 1992. Spaces The holly tree beside the house is a small galaxy now glowing with bright red planets whirling in green spaces where purple finches glide in like keen-eyed astronauts from other worlds staying just long enough to explore for a time bobbing and dipping in bold delight until they wing off on new missions carrying samples for companions leaving only the sounds of the wind and sea whistling through our spinning constellation. Nearing Spring The nearing spring calls softly with wing beats sounding against the morning silence broken by a robin's song, and the screech owl's night whirring under the waning moon. The nearing spring rises slowly in the first blades of daffodils piercing the hard earth, the myrtle sprouting along the path, and the buds swelling on the bittersweet spread across the windward dunes. The nearing spring comes quietly with pond ice darkening, mergansers going north, and flounder easing over the saltcreek bottom when the tide comes in. The nearing spring moves surely in lengthening days, harbor ice drifting seaward, and the sunset's northward shift, all the old signs that seem to us forever new.  No fires in Texas yet as big and bad as the one in Arizona, but the potential is all around us. That, plus, I never pass up a chance to mention Chuck Berry in a poem. waiting breakfast for Dee waiting breakfast for Dee would like to do a poem before she gets here but she’s close and I’m stuck in poetry neutral, poking my Muse, trying to get her out of her Saturday morning snooze, revving her like she was the old ’49 Chevy I had back when, slippery transmission making it sound like I was rounding the far turn at the Indianapolis Brickyard while only moving like a three-legged turtle with arthritic hips, (and about as ugly, too) but, that’s another story… the story this morning, big fire! brush fire, I’m guessing, three large fire trucks heading west on I-10 toward the hills, then, fifteen minutes later three more trucks, police, two ambulances… the hills all around desert parch, brittle-dry spring grass a devil’s inferno, waiting for the next spark, our yard at home, under third stage rationing, just as bad, a tiny patch of carpet grass in the back yard that I water every night, in the dark, when no one can see me, saving this tiny patch from which a new yard can grow if it ever rains again, like that tunnel in the Rocky Mountains where the 73,248 most important people in the country will hide out, waiting for the radiation to subside, emerge probably a hundred thousand years from now as mole-men, translucent white, blind in the sun, singing rock and roll songs from 1957, bringing, at last, along with their shrunken testicles, good music back to the good old U.S.A. cockroaches and Chuck Berry survivors of the flood proving there’s both a bad side and a good side to every apocalypse, proving that there are some things even God can’t kill… I see no smoke to the west, so likely, if there’s fires in the hills, it’s heading the other direction not likely to be anything to interfere with my morning biscuits and gravy and here comes Dee so I guess I’ll just have to write my poem later  |
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