Category: Poetry

mine and others

LA poem

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

sunsetI spent the weekend in LA, drinking expensive cappuccino and eating elegant treats with potato starch utensils. LA can be so over the top, it makes Berkeley look sort of down-at-the heels provincial.

In any case, I came across this in an anthology of LA poetry:

OK, L.A., You Win

I give,
No need to ratchet up the color
in that bright spot where the sun set.
Sunset. I saw how you silhouetted
that single palm against the sky.
Your hot-pink cirrus to lavender stratus
works every time. The surge
from melon to apricot to deepest
salmon? Unnecessary.

This long day I’ve stayed
at the windows, house-sitting
in Echo Park, a hillside overlooking
a wide boulevard: morning’s
dazzle, pools of afternoon sun
the cat and I laze in, you
withdrawing the warmth
slowly. No star yet, but
I know it’s coming. Shamelessly,
you’ll hang a high white moon
bright enough
to make a life by.

Cathie Sandstrom

from Coiled Serpent

The hornworm’s summer

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

hornwormIf you’ve ever raised tomatoes, you’re likely to have seen these guys. Usually, you first see a bunch of black detritus under your ravaged plants. They merge so perfectly into the tomato leaves, that it takes awhile to find them.  Stanley Kunitz was a renowned gardener as well as a poet, and wrote a  Hornworm poem in two parts, Summer and Autumn.  Here’s the summer part:

Hornworm:
Summer Reverie

Here in caterpillar country
I learned how to survive
by pretending to be a dragon. Continue reading “The hornworm’s summer” →

Spring is sprung

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

E.-E.-Cummings-150x150I was in high school when I first discovered e.e. cummings. I thought he was terrific. He is terrific, even though though his methods are no longer novel, and his work can seem a little too precious…still, it comes from a time when queer had nothing to do with sexuality, smoking was cool, and verbal playfulness was new.

in Just-

in Just-
spring          when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far          and             wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles
far
and
wee

.

e.e. cummings

Managing grief

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

bridgeI’ve been reading Paradise Drive, a book of sonnets by Becky Foust. I heard her read this one the other day–she said she had taken the words from the elegy of a woman she knew who committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. She rearranged and fractured them. The disjointed result gives a sense of abandonment.

Anastrophe Elegy

Not the woman we all knew. No.
Never would have done she, like this a thing.
How could someone, her, like that ever do?
Knew we the girl: hurdler varsity,
date cute. Sport good. Track quit who Continue reading “Managing grief” →

Mark Strand on Monday

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

man-with-camelHere’s a poem by Mark Strand that deals with that old question of does the tree falling in the forest make a sound if no one is there to hear it–or more specifically the relation of the listener to the event itself.

Man and Camel

On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me— Continue reading “Mark Strand on Monday” →

For an election year

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

david youngJust got back from a week in Hawaii–a vacation spot that’s NOT overrated–that luscious warm ocean. It was a week without news for me, such a luxury. Now the papers blare again each morning.

Here’s a poem from another vacation, another election year. I love the turn it takes at the end.

Poem for Adlai Stevenson and Yellow Jackets

It’s summer, 1956, in Maine, a camp resort
on Belgrade Lakes, and I am cleaning fish,
part of my job, along with luggage, firewood,
Sunday ice cream, waking everyone
by jogging around the island every morning
swinging a rattle I hold in front of me
to break the nightly spider threads.
Adlai Stevenson is being nominated,
but won’t, again, beat Eisenhower,
sad fact I’m half aware of, steeped as I am
in Russian novels, bathing in the tea-
brown lake, startling a deer and chasing it by canoe
as it swims from the island to the mainland. Continue reading “For an election year” →

Cavafy

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

cavafyPoetry has the ability to transcend time, as this short lyric by Constantine Cavafy, a Greek poet who died in 1938.

Walls

Without consideration,without pity, without shame,
they have built big and high walls around me.

And now I sit here despairing.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.
Ah, why didn’t I observe them when they were building the walls?

But I never heard the noise or the sound of the builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me out of the world.

C. P. Cavafy
Translated by Rae Dalven

A very different grandmother from me

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

In this loving, quirky tribute, my favorite line is “she believed in heaven / as I beleive in wing nuts.”

An incidental report on my grandmother’s divinity

My grandmother had fourteen children,
56 grandchildren, 57 great and one
great-great and a packet
of coffee in her coffin and a love

for the church that anyway had the roof
tarred on the day of her funeral.
She was 87 and weighed
82 pounds and one of her children

asked where the will was and another
did the stations of the cross
for the first time in 32
years, a journey familiar as breath. Continue reading “A very different grandmother from me” →

Another Insane Devotion

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

At the beginning of a book by the same name that I haven’t read, I found this poem by Gerald Stern, now in his nineties.  He came and read to a full house last year in the Bay Area:

Another Insane Devotion

This was gruesome—fighting over a ham sandwich
with one of the tiny cats of Rome, he leaped
on my arm and half hung on to the food and half
hung on my shirt and coat. I tore it apart
and let him have his portion, I think I lifted him Continue reading “Another Insane Devotion” →

Who?

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

tennysonAt a craft talk at Squaw Valley one year, Bob Hass said something like this: No one can say whose work will last. Alfred Lord Tennyson was the most famous poet of his day. But who reads him now? The important thing is to wrestle with our own demons, to get that struggle into our work. As for its worth, that’s not up to any of us to know.

I don’t read Tennyson either, although I did love the strong, almost irresistible music of his work when I was first reading poems. And many of his lines remain in my memory.  So here is a poem of his, and afterwards, a poem of mine on a very similar theme. Not that I equate my work with his, but because the work itself is all there is, and we are all struggling to get it down on the page, famous or not.

Break, Break, Break

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me. Continue reading “Who?” →

Ada Limón

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

limonI first heard Ada Limón read at San Francisco Litquake’s World Series of Poetry. I found her work alive and intriguing.

Here’s sample from her latest book:

The Last Move

It was only months when I felt like I had been
washing the dishes forever.

Hardwood planks under the feet, a cord to the sky.
What is it to go to a We from an I?

Each time he left for an errand, the walls
would squeeze me in. I cried over the nonexistent bathmat, wet floor of him,
how south we were, far away in the outskirts.

(All the new bugs.)

I put my apron on as a joke and waltzed around carrying
a zucchini like a child.

This is Kentucky, not New York, and I am not important. Continue reading “Ada Limón” →