Lorena

Remember the news article about Lorena Bobbitt?  1989!  Lucille Clifton wrote this about it. It needs no explication:

Lorena

            Woman cuts off husband ‘s penis,
                later throws it from car window.
.                                -News Report

it lay in my palm soft and trembled
as a new bird and i thought about
authority and how it always insisted
on itself, how it was master
of the man, how it measured him, never
was ignored or denied, and how it promised
there would be sweetness if it was obeyed
just like the saints do, like the angels
and i opened the window and held out my
uncupped hand; i swear to god
i thought it could fly

Lucille Clifton

There’s a new edition of her collected poems out, definitely worth it!

Take me out to the ballgame

Today, after a year of shutdown, Larry’s senior softball team finally gets to play.  Here he is in his championship hat. Yay!

To celebrate, a long poem by B.H. Fairchild, that master of the long poem:

Body and Soul

Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs,
our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling
the facts but mauling the truth, and my friend’s father begins
to lay out with the slow ease of a blues ballad a story
about sandlot baseball in Commerce, Oklahoma decades ago.
These were men’s teams, grown men, some in their thirties
and forties who worked together in zinc mines or on oil rigs,
sweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar music
whanging in their ears, little white rent houses to return to
where their wives complained about money and broken Kenmores
and then said the hell with it and sang Body and Soul
in the bathtub and later that evening with the kids asleep
lay in bed stroking their husband’s wrist tattoo and smoking
Chesterfields from a fresh pack until everything was O.K.
Well, you get the idea. Life goes on, the next day is Sunday,
another ball game, and the other team shows up one man short.

They say, we’re one man short, but can we use this boy,
he’s only fifteen years old, and at least he’ll make a game.
They take a look at the kid, muscular and kind of knowing
the way he holds his glove, with the shoulders loose,
the thick neck, but then with that boy’s face under
a clump of angelic blonde hair, and say, oh, hell, sure,
let’s play ball. So it all begins, the men loosening up,
joking about the fat catcher’s sex life, it’s so bad
last night he had to hump his wife, that sort of thing,
pairing off into little games of catch that heat up into
throwing matches, the smack of the fungo bat, lazy jogging
into right field, big smiles and arcs of tobacco juice,
and the talk that gives a cool, easy feeling to the air,
talk among men normally silent, normally brittle and a little
angry with the empty promise of their lives. But they chatter
and say rock and fire, babe, easy out, and go right ahead
and pitch to the boy, but nothing fancy, just hard fastballs
right around the belt, and the kid takes the first two
but on the third pops the bat around so quick and sure
that they pause a moment before turning around to watch
the ball still rising and finally dropping far beyond
the abandoned tractor that marks left field. Holy shit.
They’re pretty quiet watching him round the bases,
but then, what the hell, the kid knows how to hit a ball,
so what, let’s play some goddamned baseball here.
And so it goes. The next time up, the boy gets a look
at a very nifty low curve, then a slider, and the next one
is the curve again, and he sends it over the Allis Chalmers,
high and big and sweet. The left field just stands there, frozen.
As if this isn’t enough, the next time up he bats left-handed.
They can’t believe it, and the pitcher, a tall, mean-faced
man from Okarche who just doesn’t give a shit anyway
because his wife ran off two years ago leaving him with
three little ones and a rusted-out Dodge with a cracked block,
leans in hard, looking at the fat catcher like he was the sonofabitch
who ran off with his wife, leans in and throws something
out of the dark, green hell of forbidden fastballs, something
that comes in at the knees and then leaps viciously towards
the kid’s elbow. He swings exactly the way he did right-handed
and they all turn like a chorus line toward deep right field
where the ball loses itself in sagebrush and the sad burnt
dust of dustbowl Oklahoma. It is something to see.

But why make a long story long: runs pile up on both sides,
the boy comes around five times, and five times the pitcher
is cursing both God and His mother as his chew of tobacco sours
into something resembling horse piss, and a ragged and bruised
Spalding baseball disappears into the far horizon. Goodnight,
Irene. They have lost the game and some painful side bets
and they have been suckered. And it means nothing to them
though it should to you when they are told the boy’s name is
Mickey Mantle. And that’s the story, and those are the facts.
But the facts are not the truth. I think, though, as I scan
the faces of these old men now lost in the innings of their youth,
it lying there in the weeds behind that Allis Chalmers
just waiting for the obvious question to be asked: why, oh
why in hell didn’t they just throw around the kid, walk him,
after he hit the third homer? Anybody would have,
especially nine men with disappointed wives and dirty socks
and diminishing expectations for whom winning at anything
meant everything. Men who knew how to play the game,
who had talent when the other team had nothing except this ringer
who without a pitch to hit was meaningless, and they could go home
with their little two-dollar side bets and stride into the house
singing If You’ve Got the Money, Honey, I’ve Got the Time
with a bottle of Southern Comfort under their arms and grab
Dixie or May Ella up and dance across the gray linoleum
as if it were V-Day all over again. But they did not
And they did not because they were men, and this was a boy.
And they did not because sometimes after making love,
after smoking their Chesterfields in the cool silence and
listening to the big bands on the radio that sounded so glamorous,
so distant, they glanced over at their wives and noticed the lines
growing heavier around the eyes and mouth, felt what their wives
felt: that Les Brown and Glenn Miller and all those dancing couples
and in fact all possibility of human gaiety and light-heartedness
were as far away and unreachable as Times Square or the Avalon
ballroom. They did not because of the gray linoleum lying there
in the half-dark, the free calendar from the local mortuary
that said one day was pretty much like another, the work gloves
looped over the doorknob like dead squirrels. And they did not
because they had gone through a depression and a war that had left
them with the idea that being a man in the eyes of their fathers
and everyone else had cost them just too goddamn much to lay it
at the feet of a fifteen year-old-boy. And so they did not walk him,
and lost, but at least had some ragged remnant of themselves
to take back home. But there is one thing more, though it is not
a fact. When I see my friend’s father staring hard into the bottomless
well of home plate as Mantle’s fifth homer heads toward Arkansas,
I know that this man with the half-orphaned children and
worthless Dodge has also encountered for the first and possibly
only time the vast gap between talent and genius, has seen
as few have in the harsh light of an Oklahoma Sunday, the blonde
and blue-eyed bringer of truth, who will not easily be forgiven.

B. H. Fairchild

Late, again…

The days seem to slip by in the most astonishing way, perhaps because of the absence of events. This poem seems to speak at least in part to a way to measure the time, as the distance between point A and point B. It came to me via the Writer’s Almanac:

What Love Cannot Do

It cannot save itself when it expires
like a tire’s slow leak. It cannot bring back
the greediness of youth
             mouth on mouth,
             skin on skin, that gnawing,
             that longing you carried
until the next time
and then there is no next time.
You never see it coming but always see it leaving.
It waits by the door, bags packed,
full of stones from your life.
             What it can do is mark
the distance between Point A and Point B,
which feels like a galaxy,                       
             every star you ever wished upon
             imploding before your eyes.

January Gill O’Neil

Capitalism

I often wonder when I hear screeds against capitalism and its manifold injustices, whether people think this system was invented and foisted upon us. It seems to me it evolved as species evolved, and that it should adjust in the same way.  In any case, I love the title and the movement of this poem by Alan Dugan. Our stables could certainly use cleaning:

Marxist Analysis of the Fifth Labor of Hercules

The Augean stables were so full of horseshit
that the Augean nobles came to laugh at Hercules
when he was told to muck them out by hand.
They hoped to see him filthy on his knees,
all asshole and elbows going fast for years.
Instead he wrenched a river from its bed upstream
and set wild water roaring through the place
and washed it all away, all
the horseshit, and I mean all
the horseshit – the horseshit, the horses,
the stables, and the nobles too,
standing around ready to bugger Him,
Hercules, Wrestler of Rivers. Conclusion:
Revolting conditions elicit revolutionary solutions.

Alan Dugan

Poem and more poetry

I love that expression “a day late and a dollar early” although I’m not quite sure what it means. In any case, I’m a day late with today’s Monday poem because I’ve been helping with the book launch for the Community of Writers 50th Anniversary poetry anthology, Why to These Rocks.

That event will be a virtual reading on March 11, with Forrest Gander, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Greg Pardlo, Evie Shockley and others, each reading a poem from the anthology. I’ll be emcee. It will be live on March 11 at 6:30 pm and  you can register here. I think it will be an extraordinary event.

In any case, I am including a poem here that didn’t make it into the anthology, but one that I think captures some of the spirit of the Community:

Temblago

When Galway gets up to pee in the night he finds Temblago,
an imaginary place somewhere in France
that doesn’t exist anymore, a small country, rocky,
whose people, also called Temblago, are so
tenacious, the word has come to mean holding fast,
the way a piton clings to rock. When I get up,
I find one more mosquito bite in the soft indentation
of the inner arm. David says that insects are fantastic
that their name, “in sections” derives from how they are made,
many tiny sections, how even the tiniest insect, even a mite
has the same organs we do: a mouth, an anus,
reproductive organs, a digestive tract. We should think
about that instead of swatting it. He shows us an antlion,
a mysterious, armadillo-like bug with the miniature claws
of a dust-colored lobster, how it digs holes in the friable floor
of the forest, the grains at the exact angle of repose,
so when an ant falls in, it can’t scramble out; its frantic
legs alert the antlion who grabs it and devours it.
He demonstrates, dropping a carpenter ant into a thumb-sized depression.
We see the antlion’s claws grab hold. David scoops up
the tiny antlion and it’s prey, lets the ant go,
and holds the antlion in his palm, before dropping it
back in its hole. Antlions have a hard time, he says,
their metabolism is slow and very few ants
fall into their holes. They reproduce painfully slowly,
they turn have their chitonous into gossamer.
So I think about being nicer to insects, but still
I swatted the one that landed on me in the hammock,
just when my eyes were beginning to close, because
it was starting to suck my blood and that really seemed
like an act of insect aggression. Brenda says
she’s been trying to pin Bob down
about the wildflower walk, and I think
what that must be like, trying to pin Bob down, Continue reading “Poem and more poetry”