Poems Out Loud

James Longenbach reads The Iron Key

2010-08-31T16:44:51+00:00

Mrs. Hunter is the only name I have for her,
A rich old woman who engaged my father, a painter,
To document her collection of keys.
Photographs she considered vulgar.

She lived in a mansard carriage house, painted black.
While my father made paintings of the keys
I made drawings of the house—
The Chinese parasol in a backlit case,
A sheikh's robe draped across the dining room table, under glass.

I added things that should have been there, a harpsichord.
I deleted what seemed mysteriously out of place.
Once, after I fell against my father's palette,
He had to scrub the paint from my hair.

Not to make things was idleness.
The house contained things to be made.
Not raw material: material that bore
Heavily the impression of having been used, worn,
Made previously into other things—

Like the house itself, once a place for horses,
Now the visible confirmation of what I knew by instinct
But had never seen: that only strange things could be beautiful.
McNamara, Westmoreland—outside the war was on.
Her house was where I lived in my mind.

For a time, I thought I'd be a painter too.
Then I thought perhaps a musician.
When I first saw San Simeone Piccolo
Floating across the Grand Canal,
I stepped into my mind.
I bought Mrs. Hunter a key.

Major Jackson reads On Removing the Wedding Band

2010-08-16T15:44:29+00:00

As though undreaming the mountain
from the sea or tweezering hands from
a watch, a quick-fix change of regimes:
a democracy lost to a monarchy, an empty sudden
village, and elsewhere the wedding party lining up
like a lost tribe of refugees. As though a reverse
whisper of vows into a pageant of elegant ears
when the heat in the O cooled its "till death do us,"
and the storm inside seething below
the flowers, gowns, and cake, its own Institution.

Major Jackson reads Forecast

2010-08-13T15:39:39+00:00

Whichever way our shoulders move, there's joy.
Make a soft hollow noise. We've our own hourglass
and no one else to blame. I thought of our lives, 
caressing ruins through half-opened windows.
I hear our prayers rising. I sing to you, now,
like scented candles, your ferocious wolf.
I no longer want this weather on my breath
or the many recognizable texts of our celestial holes.
A ceiling fan turns above. The arson is in us.
This is the year I'll contemplate the fire-fangled sky.

Michael Burkard reads The Eyeglasses

2010-06-08T18:50:34+00:00

I examined my father's eyeglasses late one Friday morning. I had to climb
to the bureau-top from a chair to do this. And I managed to drop the
eyeglasses and they broke. My father was to leave for a business trip that
very day, and the breaking brought on a confusion. I pushed them under the
bed—not well, not hidden. And I don't know if the punishment was for
breaking them or for hiding them or both. And I don't know if I broke them
intentionally or not, if I dropped them through memory to the floor so that
my father would not depart again. I tried pretending in my memory for 
years that my father himself broke his own eyeglasses, that he himself
dropped them in order to prevent himself from leaving, and that I was
merely a necessary pawn in this. And how could I forgive him this—for
who would want to take a train to a foreign city only to leave his family
far away? To leave a son who was the unknowing double of the older son,
to leave a daughter whose room's high window looked out at the tree, the
moon, and the man who lived atop the telephone pole a street away.
Whose room was a wonderful stillness we each visited but in which we
never stayed. And a wife, a mother to three who would care of us as
much from sleep as from waking. Whose sister Dorothy lived with us
from the sea and lantern light of Nova Scotia though she was far,
far away. 

     What could he see with eyeglasses in a foreign city anyway, away from
us? What multitude of faces and voices could alter the longing of our loss
and tenderness? Were we tender? And if so, when? Whose version is as
valid as my sister's room, or her quiet witnessing of major and minor light?

Julie Sheehan reads Interruption by Singapore Sling

2010-05-12T19:12:08+00:00

My daughter is falling, is falling from catalpas,
from monkey bars, piano benches, is falling
in barbeque pits at playdates, St. Patrick's Day parties,
she's falling out of bed, she's sleeping and flung.

What startles, that paisley rugs and asphalt alike
could volunteer her embrace? In flight from infant
dread, a Moro reflex plays her six years
obsessively. Her arms parachute open,

but where down should be is gravity's unbroken
surface, and off to Dr. Grace go humerus,
clavicle, carpals. The parts add up to spirit
lemon-laced and cordial: a sling for heartbreak

palpated, not to be healed of shrapnel and flack
no jacket dissuades. My daughter is falling back
into her Good Girl routine, a junior drill team
officer doing her backover port spin best

with a sequined rifle. Outside weather's clear,
but trauma embeds itself like fractured bone,
cracked ice, lightning deep in a Homer seascape.
She's falling into reverie, slinging Together

with cherry Get Back into a gulf you'd call hope
if it hadn't been drained long ago, and not by her.
She's just a falling daughter, floating brandy
shot at high velocity, stone in a Singapore sling.

Julie Sheehan reads Brandy Stinger

2010-05-06T16:12:20+00:00

You young ones wouldn't know where to begin
with all the strappy contraptions trussing up us old birds.
Girdles! Lord, where do you buy those catastrophizing things anymore!
Back then courtships were long, honeybunch; they had to be
just to figure out the clothes, not to mention getting them off. Yes,
I'll have one more and that's it. But at least you knew how to dress
then, and which aisle was lingerie and which was men's briefs!
I stopped trying to shop in 1975, when my husband died. Now, child,
it's too confusing. You can't tell a lawyer from a rap star.
Just look at the shoes the girls wear! Deadweights! Back in Texas
we used to tie things like that to sacks of doomed puppies, why,
every time I see such shoes I think the poor girl's liable to drown.
Though I do confess, the ones we wore may have been a little unkind,
expecting your foot to assume a triangular formation to which it did not
                  naturally incline,
but they got you where you wanted to go: married,
however unstably, but secure, knowing you'd both totter on.
All right one more, and that's final. I don't envy you
your loose fits, your quick change.

Greg Glazner reads A Fine, Clean Gloss

2010-05-03T18:24:53+00:00

So: the synthesizer's solo is a Valium
for the backed-up road on Monday morning,
heat already visible and the sky already gone,
motorcyclists gliding at fifty miles an hour
between stalled cars, the hair blown
free from their shoulders, and a crow,
lowflying, turning east below the sun,
the sheen rejected off its back like mercury,
spilling into the concrete reservoir of waterstriders
standing on nothing but the shine,
such a fortune of surfaces, such painless
glazings on the air.
                               What else but a fine,
clean gloss could carry you through the week
as it sears you free of features—the little family,
smiling, framed in silver beyond the horror
of an office telephone, still farther on
the 4th Street mailboxes, the lawns this spring growing
irreproachable as artificial turf,
                                                 and the horizon
of antennas, where you can almost see yourself
released like newsprint burned to ash
into Friday's violet tiredness, refined
of every striving but the need to glide.

Kimiko Hahn reads Cope’s Rule

2010-04-06T14:44:00+00:00

According to Edward Drinker Cope,
nineteenth-century paleontologist, fossil records show

lineages become larger over millennia

indicating that bigger is more successful.
Though later scientists offered further support for Cope's rule,

from mammals to corals,

paleontologists in the last century challenged such evidence.
Gould, in particular, was dismissive

of such a psychological artifact.

Current more rigorous studies suggest
the results are plain to see:

being big provides a big advantage. And yet,
the study continues

Why isn't Cope's rule more of a rule?

Laws of physics reveal that insects
cannot grow to the size of Tyrannosaurus rex

because their exoskeleton cannot support
heavy loads of body mass. Furthermore, a small rat

is probably better adapted to a certain niche.
There is also the issue of surviving mass extinction

though not everything can get small enough quick enough.
I am already small so that isn't a personal concern;

still, each consecutive husband has gotten larger
though I'm not sure why or what that reveals

except it's easier for Harold to reach for stuff on the top shelf
rather than watch me, at fifty, climb on the kitchen counter,

though last weekend he bought, for us both, a step ladder

ruling out vulgar advantage.

Kimiko Hahn reads On Being Coy

2010-04-06T14:22:03+00:00

Many fish in the murky ocean caves
of Mexico, Brazil, Croatia, and Oman

have no eyes
though in the streams outside—

clear as a frat bar in '75—

other males zip around and nip the females

to test chemical signals
and harass

with so much sex

that the females often cease to exist.
Better off

with a slower, blind suitor

I say—then think of Marvell's rough strife—
which I adore.

See—a little coyness can work
to cloud the current.

Those black lizard boots instead of mules—
that Manhattan tourist spot.

He's twenty-five. I'm forty.
He demands one thing—well, two: my feet.

See what I mean?
Little has changed in the carpe diem
or the simmering transparent stream.

Sandra Beasley reads Love Poem for Los Angeles

2010-03-16T17:14:35+00:00

Two hundred years ago, we set out west one
oath at a time, a long game of Telephone: You

are our strangest echo, the promise of Great American
Self-Storage. Los Angeles, I love your red-and-white

strip joints, your car dealerships, your Bob Hope Hall
of Patriotism. I love the graze of your fingernails,

your slow sparklers of palm trees, your buildings silver
and inscrutable, this constant haze as if a battle just

ended and your bloodied asking Did we win? Did we win?
Los Angeles, take off your sunglasses, roll your window

down; I like it when you let your hair whip into knots.
Los Angeles, even your salads glisten with fish and

though I know you dream of living forever, cancer
looks good on you. Los Angeles, I love the ways

you misunderstand me: Jew for blue, erosion for ocean.
I am rushing your Russians, I am cold for your gold.

When I tell you I'm married, all you say is I do.
When I say Don't get hurt you hear Flirt harder.

Sandra Beasley reads Another Failed Poem About the Greeks

2010-03-16T16:41:35+00:00

His sword dripped blood. His helmet gleamed.
He dragged a Gorgon's head behind him.

As first dates go, this was problematic.
He itched and fidgeted. He said Could I

save something for you? But I was all out
of maidens bound to rocks. So I took him

on a roller coaster, wedging in next to 
his breastplated body in the little car.

He put his arm around me, as the Greeks do.
On the first dip he laughed. On the first drop

he clutched my shoulder and screamed like
a catamite. When we racheted to a full stop

he said Again. We went on the Scrambler,
the Apple Turnover, the Log Flume.

We went on the Pirate Ship three times,
swooshing forward, back, upside down,

and he cried Aera! waving his sword,
until the operator asked him to please keep

all swords inside the car. He was a good sport,
letting the drachmas fall out of his pockets;

sparing the girl who spilled punch on his shield;
waving as I rode the carousel's hippogriff

though it was a slow ride, and I made him
hold my purse. On the way home

he said We should do this again sometime,
though we both knew it would never happen

since he was Greek, of course, and dead,
and somewhere a maiden rattled in her chains.

Karen Van Dyck reads Penelope Says

2010-03-15T15:53:06+00:00

A poem by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (1939—)
trans. by Karen Van Dyck

And your absence teaches me
what art could not
                 —Daniel Weissbort

I wasn't weaving, I wasn't knitting
I was writing something
erasing and being erased
under the weight of the word
because perfect expression is blocked
when the inside is pressured by pain.
And while absence is the theme of my life
—absence from life—
tears and the natural suffering
of the deprived body
appear on the page.

I erase, I tear up, I stifle
the living cries
"Where are you, come, I'm waiting for you
this spring is not like other springs"
and I begin again in the morning
with new birds and white sheets
drying in the sun.
You will never be here
to water the flowers
the old ceiling dripping
under the weight of the rain
with my personality
dissolving into yours
quietly, autumn-like…
Your choice heart
—choice because I have chosen it—
will always be elsewhere
and I will cut
with words
the threads that bind me
to the particular man
I long for
until Odysseus becomes the symbol of Nostalgia
sailing the seas of every mind.
Each day
I passionately forget you
that you may be washed of the sins
of fragrance and sweetness
and finally all clean
enter immortality.
It is a hard and thankless job.
My only reward is that I understand
in the end what human presence is
what absence is
or how the self functions
in such desolation, in so much time
how nothing can stop tomorrow
the body keeps remaking itself
rising and falling on the bed
as if axed down
sometimes sick, sometimes in love
hoping that what it loses in touch
it gains in essence.

Karen Van Dyck reads Ode to Coffee

2010-03-15T15:28:44+00:00

A poem by Georgios Souris (1852—1919)
trans. by Karen Van Dyck

Oh, my heavy sweet coffee
alone
or with friends
each sip of you
comes with a lofty idea.

Joy Harjo reads She Had Some Horses

2010-02-17T15:44:16+00:00

Editor's note: Interested in more poetry read by Joy Harjo? Check out this 
video. If you're a fan of Joy Harjo's, be sure to look at She Had Some Horses, 
Harjo's classic book of poetry. And, while you're here, why not subscribe 
to Poems Out Loud if you enjoy poetry?

*      *      *

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of the sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with eyes of trains.
She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses

She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their
bodies shown and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet
in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.
She had horses who cried in their beer.
She had horses who spit at male queens who made
them afraid of themselves.
She had horses who said they weren't afraid.
She had horses who lied.
She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped
bare of their tongues.

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, "horse."
She had horses who called themselves, "spirit," and kept
their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who
carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her
bed at night and prayed.

She had some horses

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

Dorianne Laux reads Moon in the Window

2010-01-29T16:23:36+00:00

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Dorianne Laux reads Facts About the Moon

2010-01-27T21:33:36+00:00

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you're like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What's a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don't tell me
what I already know, that it won't happen
for a long time. I don't care. I'm afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don't deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we've done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who's lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who's murdered and raped, a mother
can't help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can't not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she's only
romanticizing, that she's conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters, and then you can't help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

Aaron Poochigian reads The Maiden (Virgo)

2010-01-21T19:21:46+00:00

An excerpt from Phaenomena by Aratus (ca. 315—240 BCE)
trans. by Aaron Poochigian

Aratus explains why the goddess Justice departed from the
world and how to identify her (as the constellation Virgo) in
the Northern Sky.

A Maiden clutches golden ears of corn.
Whether, as poets rumor, she was born
The daughter of Astraeus, primal source
Of stars, or some god else, I pray her course
Above us bring no evil. Some maintain
She used to walk earth and did not disdain
To meet the tribes of mortals face to face.
Though born divine, she joined the human race.
Her name was Justice then; through every street,
Through all the markets where we mortals meet,
She propogated what was fair and right.
Humans had never heard the hiss of spite,
The bellow of quarrel and the cry of war.
The wicked sea churned at a distance; oar
And sail had never shipped our livelihood.
Cows, ploughs and Justice, giver of the good
And queen of peoples, furnished everything.
So long as land alone was nourishing
The Golden Race, she only lived on land.
Though later stooping low to hold the hand
Of the Silver children, she still walked the earth
Yearning for ways and men of greater worth.
From twilit foothills she would steal alone
And chasten humans in a harsher tone.
While gawkers hunkered on a mountainside
She would give speeches from the peak, deride
Their baser stock and swear that, come what may,
She would no longer help them when the prey:
"What trash your golden fathers have begotten!
O, your descendents shall be still more rotten—
Burdens of blood and war shall bow their backs,
Conscience shall crush them." She retraced her tracks
Down to the foothills when she had her say,
And all the people watched her walk away.
When they were dead, a fiercer brazen race
Inherited—the first men to unbrace
Cows from a ploughshare so that they might gorge
On flesh instead of grain, the first to forge
Marauders' trouble-making scimitars.
Justice turned misanthrope and joined the stars.
She still resides in heaven where at night
The Maiden wheels above us mortals, right
Beside the prominent Ploughman.
                                                      Wings carried her
To heaven—atop her right wing, Vintager
Is borne along, a star shedding a glare
Bright as the star which follows the Great Bear.
The Maiden is ill-omened stars that circle near her.
Using these stars, however, one can plot
The contours of her figure, dot by dot,
For all her stars show plainly to the eye.
There's one before her toes, one on her thigh,
And one beneath the backside of her knee.
Anonymous, they all wheel separately.



Note to the reader: After The Iliad and The Odyssey, Aratus'
Phaenomena was the most widely read poem in the ancient world.
Aaron Poochigian's full translation of The Phaenomena will be
available from Johns Hopkins University Press in May 2010.
» Pre-Order

Elizabeth Spires reads S n a i l

2010-01-20T20:30:02+00:00

I watch you     traverse     the long green table
your trail slick & shiny     then pluck you up
& hold you     wet & glistening     in my open hand

You are a dusky brown     your mottled shell attached
by a wrinkled skinlike mantle     to the rest of you

Touched     your eyes     on long tentacles
retract     & you have to shorter lower tentacles
that feel the ground in front of you     first one
then the other     up & down     carefully they touch the ground

Like someone     feeling her way along     a pitch-black-corridor
with no way of knowing     where she is going
like me     perhaps

Your radula     spiked & ragged black mouthhole
tears up & chews     chalk & lettuce     that is all
you need     chalk & lettuce!

For you there is no fight     or flight
startled     you contract into your shell & wait
for Danger to tire     & walk away

A slow-going-forward     a staying-very-still     that is you
speechless creation that leaves me     finally     speechless

Sometimes     I cannot     bear the world
the beauty & perfection of a snail     created
by the same Creator     who created     me

But we are different     you are lowly & humble
you have grace & compression     whereas     I am awkward
& huge     & not humble     forgive me

Do you see me?     is the world seen
from your wary waving eye stalks     a perfect circle?
you see ahead of     & behind you     a thing
I cannot do     do you too     feel terror?

I     monster that I am     bow down before you

Elizabeth Spires reads You Have Flown to the Dangerous Country

2010-01-20T20:11:16+00:00

You have flown to the dangerous country,
how easily you have left this life behind,
this street, this quiet city street,
where letters arrive each day dependably,
where trees make a canopy in summer,
and winter, it is winter now, possesses a cold clarity.

But in the place where you are there is heat,
there is hunger, and the trees have been cut down,
and dogs, there must be dogs, slink out of the night's
blackness, teeth bared, and the sound of drumming penetrates
your sleep even when there are no drums. And slowly,
you begin to forget the words we are used to saying here,
they speak another language there, a language that has no place
for words like snow and safety, a language I will never know
because I have never been to the dangerous country,
                                                             and I do not think I will go.

I think of a tear in a curtain, a jagged man-high tear,
that you step through easily, without a glance backward,
because you are drawn to the dangerous country,
to the need and the want and the hunger,
and to something more that I cannot name.
I feel such a distance, such an unreality,
when I think of you in the dangerous country,
with the heat and the dust and the dogs,
the drums and the knives, the nightmares and the screams.

But I tell myself there must be birds and flowers,
rare flame-colored exotica surrounding tiny pastel houses
that a child might draw, there must be children flying kites,
running along a curving shore where watercolor waves
wash up in shades of ultramarine, there must be
painters painting paintings of it all, and laughter
and singing, because people laugh and sing everywhere,
                                                      O tell me that they sing.

Do the people there, do they ever ask you
what it is you mean by winter and by snow,
by safety and by silence? Do you try to explain?
And then I begin to wonder what it is to be safe,
do I feel safe here, and is there safety anywhere,
as I move through the rooms of this house, drawing the curtains,
the street so quiet now, and twilight coming on.

Peter Constantine reads Practical Solutions

2010-01-20T16:49:14+00:00

A poem by Dinos Siotis (1944—)
trans. by Peter Constantine

Perhaps the Barbarians
were not as brutal after
all as they are described

in the chronicles of history,
even if they drank the tears of
Greek and Romans in cupfuls,

even if they shared their caves
and huts with beasts and reptiles
they did not perfume

their sturdy bodies as did
the youths of Sidon, they
did not sing and did not

dance, with soiled faces
they worshipped the dust
of their war cries and

lay down upon the stones
after yesterday's battle, they
did not know how to write

or read—it was others
who set fire to the library
of Alexandria—

they were seeking practical solutions:
to become good hunters,
to gather in groups, so that their

wives and children would
have food to eat, and if
the civilized were also to

be included among their prey
barbarians were not to blame,
they were driven there because

their cold climates had repelled
them and they wanted to know the
sea: that too was a practical solution.

Peter Constantine reads Bronze Age

2010-01-13T18:40:00+00:00

A poem by Yannis Kondos
trans. by Peter Constantine

The excavations proved your mornings
ill-omened. The earth kept the footprints.
Calculations showed five men. One of them,
the strongest, wore golden sandals.
It was he who broke down the door, and the servant girls
scattered. You had just dipped your foot
in the cistern, your first bath of the day.
Your shrieks and the steam
still show on the walls.
Everything else is lost:
the curses, the attempted explanations,
your nurse's pleas,
the frightened flight of the dove.
The knives were found, the blood,
the hair in his grasp,
the rumbling and the debris of the earthquake
that struck at the moment of the carnage.

After thousands of years,
the classification, the dull glass cases, conservation,
the museum, people strolling past.

Edmund Keeley reads The man from Chios called Homer said a beautiful thing

2010-01-08T20:33:49+00:00

A poem by Semonides of Amorgos
trans. by Edmund Keeley

The man from Chios called Homer said a beautiful thing:
              "The generations of men are like the leaves of a tree."
Few mortals who've heard this take it to heart:
              all men carry the hope rooted in their youth.
While mortals are still living in youth's lovely flowering,
              light-headed, their hearts cling to many vain things:
they won't grow old, they'll never die,
              and being healthy, why give sickness a moment's thought?
Fools to think that way, they don't yet know
              how quickly time moves for mortals, how short the young days.
But since you know this now that your end is near,
              treat yourself entirely to what good things there are.

Edmund Keeley reads Ithaka

2010-01-08T18:22:31+00:00

A poem by C. P. Cavafy
trans. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard:

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy find things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Rachel Hadas reads from Helen

2010-01-07T21:23:58+00:00

A section from "Helen" by Euripedes
trans. by Rachel Hadas:

The Chorus laments Helen's destiny and the tragedy of war.

CHORUS

Nightingale high in a tree so green,
come and sing me a song of pain,
a song for Helen and all the men
slaughtered when Greeks destroyed the town,
a song for Paris' rapid flight
and the fateful wedding night,
a song of sword and spear and shield
and heroes sent to the underworld.
Widows wailed and cut their hair
in silent houses—no men were there.

Divine or not divine
or something in between:
what mortal man
after long scrutiny
of the mind of god
could undertake to see
and then come back
and somehow make it plain,
all he had understood—
with what impossible luck
leaping the mortal gap?

A song for the swan who was Helen's sire,
having come to Leda with his desire.
So Helen is the child of Zeus,
yet they attack her all through Greece:
Unjust! Faithless!
Godless! Traitress!

But I can see
no clarity
anywhere among mankind.
Only the mind
of god, I find,
is clear, is free.

And why, oh why do heroes try
to prove their excellence in war?
As if a spear could guard a man
from the onslaught of life's pain.
Strife will be with us forever
if blood is the criterion,
from our cities vanish never,
just as it ruined Priam's town,
Helen, discord over you.
Once it still could be
cured, this malady
of hatred, violence, war—
no more, no more.
Disaster's bolt has struck;
the city walls burn black.
And why, we wonder. Why?
There is no answer. Only misery.

Rachel Hadas reads Pursue the beautiful gifts of the violet Muses

2010-01-07T19:59:22+00:00

A poem by Sappho trans. by Diane Rayor:

Pursue the beautiful gifts of the violet Muses,
you children, and the high, song-loving lyre.

My skin was soft before, but now old age
claims it; my hair's gone from black to white.

My spirit has grown heavy; knees can't hold me,
though once they could dance, light as fawns.

I often groan, but what can I do?
Being an ageless human is not possible.

For they say rosy-armed Dawn in love
went to the ends of earth holding Tithonos,

beautiful and young, but in time grey old age
seized him too, even with an immortal wife.

Sherod Santos reads Variation on a Theme (I)

2009-12-21T15:07:14+00:00

1. The Pier
What she said was not what she meant to say.

As they side-stepped past
the rotting patches of giant kelp
the tide dragged up on the strand,

she held his hand, she admired
the fine-boned features of his face,
she studied the overlapping
shadows they cast.

He seemed less distant than preoccupied
(or was he simply shy?),
and his narrowing slightly cross-eyed stare
would rarely hold
on hers.

Nevertheless, two years younger,
she followed him into the shadows of the pier.
The joint, the condom,
the in not out of the body thing,
she'd heard about them
from the other girls.

But once they went their separate ways,
she was surprised to find
the throb of whatever she felt inside
was no bigger than a bottle fly.


2. Film Noir
A mist had settled over everything.

It was after ten, almost eleven.
A smudgy lamplight overran the curbs
where leaves had started
to gather as well.

Some young people
prowling the neighborhood
were afraid that nothing would happen tonight,
just as nothing
had happened the night before.

Although it was cold,
the boys wore cutoff sweatshirts,
and the girls,
more comfortably dressed for the weather,
kept laughing at things the boys said.

A car turned onto Millbrook Road,
dimmed and then extinguished its lights
before rolling to a stop in the leaves.

When the young people passed,
they banged on the hood with their fists—
the boys, not the girls,
though the girls were amused by this as well—
and frightened the man inside.

Or did they?

The car door opened.
The man stepped out and,
as killers do in Hollywood films,
slipped a hand inside his coat.

And then, in a quiet, almost whisper
of a voice, he said something
none of them could hear,
though how he said it
was the thing he said.

Without looking back,
the young people kept on walking,
though faster now,
kicking up leaves as they went.

And when they were finally
far enough away they were sure
the man couldn't hear,
one boy turned and shouted back
"Oh yeah motherfucker,
we're really scared."

And that was that.
One of the girls drew closer to the boy
who'd said those words,
another drew farther away.

Rosanna Warren reads Moment

2009-12-16T20:18:11+00:00

When you turned to me—you in bed, still sleepwarm, against
                                                                                            the pillows,
I across the room, skirt zipped, stockings on—
and you asked, so quietly,

"Was that a truthful answer?"

and outside our narrow third-storey window
the Norway maple was poking odd thumbs into the sky
and a skim milk early morning light leaked down the street,
down front porch steps, around grimed collars of snowbanks,
and the oval Victorian mirror of my dresser
reflected all that, with odd angles of rooflines, gutters, chimneys
                                               jutting into its peripheral vision,

your question cut
like a knife so sharpened it
  slices clean and the surprised flesh doesn't know for a moment
                                                                                        how to bleed,

and I answered, after a pause
in which the strangeness felt like a form of love,

"No."

Rosanna Warren reads Simile

2009-12-16T18:26:04+00:00

As when her friend, the crack Austrian skier, in the story
she often told us, had to face
his first Olympic ski jump and, from
the starting ramp over the chute that plunged
so vertiginously its bottom lip
disappeared from view, gazed
on a horizon of Alps that swam and dandled around him
like toy boats in a bathtub, and he could not
for all his iron determination,
training and courage
ungrip his fingers from the railings of the starting gate, so that
his teammates had to join in prying
up, finger by finger, his hands
to free him, so

facing death, my
mother gripped the bedrails but still
stared straight ahead—and
who was it, finally,
who loosened
her hands?

Martin Espada reads Return

2009-12-11T16:15:01+00:00

245 Wortman Avenue
East New York, Brooklyn

Forty years ago, I bled in this hallway.
Half-light dimmed the brick
like the angel of public housing.
That night I called and listened at every door:
In 1966, there was a war on television.

Blood leaked on the floor like oil from the engine of me.
Blood rushed through a crack in my scalp;
blood foamed in both hands; blood ruined my shoes.
The boy who fired the can off my head in the street
pumped what blood he could into his fleeing legs.
I banged on every door for help, spreading a plague
of bloody fingerprints all the way home to apartment 14F.

Forty years later, I stand in the hallway.
The dim angel of public housing is too exhausted
to welcome me. My hand presses
against the door at apartment 14F
like an octopus stuck to a aquarium glass;
blood drums behind my ears.
Listen to every door: There is a war on television.

Martin Espada reads The Soldiers in the Garden

2009-12-11T15:39:51+00:00

Isla Negra, Chile, September 1973

After the coup,
the soldiers appeared
in Neruda's garden one night,
raising lanterns to interrogate the trees,
cursing at the rocks that tripped them.
From the bedroom window
they could have been
the conquistadores of drowned galleons,
back from the sea to finish
plundering the coast.

The poet was dying;
cancer flashed through his body
and left him rolling in the bed to kill the flames.
Still, when the lieutenant stormed upstairs,
Neruda faced him and said:
There is only one danger for you here: poetry.
The lieutenant brought his helmet to his chest,
apologized to señor Neruda
and squeezed himself back down the stairs.
The lanterns dissolved one by one from the trees.

For thirty years
we have been searching
for another incantation
to make the solders
vanish from the garden.