Poems Out Loud http://www.poemsoutloud.net en editors@poemsoutloud.net Copyright 2010 2010-02-17T15:44:48+00:00 Joy Harjo reads She Had Some Horses http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/harjo_reads_she_had_some_horses/ 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. ]]> Recommended Listening 2010-02-17T15:44:48+00:00 Dorianne Laux reads Moon in the Window http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/laux_reads_moon_in_the_window/ 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. ]]> 2010-01-29T16:23:36+00:00 Dorianne Laux reads Facts About the Moon http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/laux_reads_facts_about_the_moon/ 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. ]]> Recommended Listening 2010-01-27T21:33:36+00:00 Aaron Poochigian reads The Maiden (Virgo) http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/poochigian_reads_the_maiden/ 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 ]]> 2010-01-21T19:21:46+00:00 Elizabeth Spires reads S n a i l http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/spires_reads_snail/ 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 ]]> 2010-01-20T20:30:02+00:00 Elizabeth Spires reads You Have Flown to the Dangerous Country http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/spires_reads_you_have_flown/ 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. ]]> Recommended Listening 2010-01-20T20:11:16+00:00 Peter Constantine reads Practical Solutions http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/constantine_reads_practical_solutions/ 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. ]]> 2010-01-20T16:49:14+00:00 Peter Constantine reads Bronze Age http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/constantine_reads_bronze_age/ 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. ]]> 2010-01-13T18:40:00+00:00 Edmund Keeley reads The man from Chios called Homer said a beautiful thing http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/keeley_reads_the_man_from_chios/ 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. ]]> 2010-01-08T20:33:49+00:00 Edmund Keeley reads Ithaka http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/keeley_reads_ithaka/ 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. ]]> Recommended Listening 2010-01-08T18:22:52+00:00 Rachel Hadas reads from Helen http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/hadas_reads_from_helen/ 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. ]]> 2010-01-07T21:23:58+00:00 Rachel Hadas reads Pursue the beautiful gifts of the violet Muses http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/hadas_reads_sappho/ 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. ]]> 2010-01-07T19:59:22+00:00 Sherod Santos reads Variation on a Theme (I) http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/santos_reads_variation_on_a_theme/ 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. ]]> Recommended Listening 2009-12-21T15:07:14+00:00 Rosanna Warren reads Moment http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/warren_reads_moment/ 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." ]]> 2009-12-16T20:18:11+00:00 Rosanna Warren reads Simile http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/warren_reads_simile/ 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? ]]> 2009-12-16T18:26:04+00:00 Martin Espada reads Return http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/espada_reads_return/ 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. ]]> 2009-12-11T16:15:01+00:00 Martin Espada reads The Soldiers in the Garden http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/espada_reads_the_soldiers_in_the_garden/ 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. ]]> Recommended Listening 2009-12-11T15:39:51+00:00 Nick Laird reads The Hall of Medium Harmony http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/laird_reads_the_hall_of_medium_harmony/ In lieu of a Gideon Bible the bedside table drawer has a Lonely Planet Guide to China and a year-old Autotrader. You skim through the soft-tops, the imports, the salvage & breakers, then pick up the book. Over there they are eight hours ahead so it must be approximately dawn in the Forbidden City, where something might evade the guides already at the entrance, might glide right past the lion-dogs on guard, asleep in bronze, might fire the dew on the golden tiles, ignite each phoenix on its ridge. Light. Nine-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine rooms begin to warm under its palm. Here, in the book, is a diagram. There is the Hall of Union and Peace. The Hall of Medium Harmony. The Meridian Gate. The Imperial Library. The inner golden bridges. You fidget. You are, you admit, one of the earth's more nervous passengers. But it's different, this, a reasonable space. In the palace of an afternoon a child-king hiding in the curtain listening. For a second apart from the turn of the thing, for a second forgetting the narrative's forfeit — how nothing can outlast its loss, that solace is found, if at all, in the silence that follows each footstep let fall on the black lacquer floor of the now, of the here, where you are, in the sunlight, blinking, abroad. ]]> 2009-11-20T19:43:38+00:00 Nick Laird reads Light Pollution http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/laird_reads_light_pollution/ You're the patron saint of elsewhere, jet-lagged and drinking apple juice, eyeing, from the sixth-floor window, a kidney-shaped swimming pool the very shade of Hockney blue. I know the left-hand view of life, I think, and it's as if I have, of late, forgotten something in the night — I wake alone and freezing, still keeping to my side. Each evening tidal night rolls in and the atmosphere is granted a depth of field by satellites, the hammock moon, aircraft sinking into Heathrow. Above the light pollution, among the drift of stars tonight there might be other traffic — migrations of heron and crane, their spectral skeins convergent symbols, arrow, weather systems, white flotillas bearing steadily towards their summer feeding. A million flapping sheets! Who knows how they know? The aids to navigation might be memory and landmarks, or the brightest constellations. Perhaps some iron in the blood detects magnetic north. I wish one carried you some token, some Post-it note or ticket, some particular to document this instant of self-pity — His Orphic Loneliness, with Dog. Advances? None miraculous, though the deadness of the house will mean your coming home may seem an anticlimax somehow, and a trespass. ]]> Recommended Listening 2009-11-20T18:15:34+00:00 Beth Ann Fennelly reads Asked for a Happy Memory of Her Father, She Recalls Wrigley Field http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/fennelly_reads_asked_for_a_happy_memory/ His drinking was different in sunshine, as if it couldn't be bad. Sudden, manic, he swung into a laugh, bought me two ice creams, said One for each hand. Half the hot inning I licked Good Humor running down wrists. My bird-mother earlier, packing my pockets with sun block, has hopped her warning: Be careful. So, pinned between his knees, I held his Old Style in both hands while he streaked the sun block on my cheeks and slurred My little Indian princess. Home run: the hairy necks of men in front jumped up, thighs torn from gummy green bleachers to join the violent scramble. Father held me close and said Be careful, be careful. But why should I be full of care with his thick arm circling my shoulders, with a high smiling sun, like a home run, in the upper right-hand corner of the sky? ]]> Recommended Listening 2009-11-18T20:40:25+00:00 Thomas Lynch reads No Prisoners http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/lynch_reads_no_prisoners/ Odds are the poor man was trying to please her because her pleasure would have pleasured him, adding as it would have to his image of himself as a latter-day Man of Steel, able as always to leap tall buildings and off of whose chest the bullets would bounce, his five bypasses notwithstanding, nor withstanding how his heart had grown flimsy with hard loving and bereavement. Or maybe it was the Marine Lance Corporal in the snapshot of himself in the South Pacific he kept in the corner of the bathroom mirror: barechested in khakis and boondockers with Billy Swinford Smith from Paris, Kentucky, posing as always for the girls back home; the ready and willing eighteen-year-old who went from right tackle with St. Francis DeSalles to light machine gunner with the Corps and came home skinny and malarial later to marry the redheaded girl of his dreams who had written him daily through the war, beginning her letters with My Darling Edward and closing with All My Love Always, Rose. We found those letters, years later, in a drawer and tried to imagine them both young again, dancing to Dorsey and Glenn Miller tunes under the stars at the Walled Lake Pavilion before they had any idea of us. "Six sons," he'd laugh, "enough for pallbearers! And girls enough to keep us in old age." So when our mother took to her bed with cancer, it was, of course, the girls who tended her while my brothers and I sat with him downstairs, being brave for each other. When she died he knelt by her bedside sobbing, "Rosie, my darling, what will I do without you?" And grieved his grief like Joe DiMaggio who never missed a game and took a rose to place in the vase at her graveside daily then came home to sit in his chair and weep, those first nights without her thereby replacing as the worst in his life a night in '44 on Walt's Ridge in Cape Glouster, New Britain, when he and elements of the Fifth Marines survived nine Bonzai charges. The Japanese foot soldiers kept screaming, kept coming, blind into the crossfire of light machine guns that he and Billy and Donald Crescent Coe kept up all night, aiming just below the voices. In the morning he crawled out of his hole to poke his bayonet among the dead for any signs of life and souvenirs. Whatever he found, he took no prisoners and always said he wondered after that how many men he'd killed, how he'd survived. He'd try to make some sense of all of it, but if he did, he never told us what it was. And now he is dying of heartache and desire. Six months into his mourning he became an object of pursuit among the single set of widows and divorcées hereabouts; the hero of a joke his cronies tell that always ends But what a way to go! Last night, mistaking breathlessness for afterglow, a woman nearly finished him with love and barely made it to the hospital where they thumped his chest and ordered oxygen. The Fifth Marines are off to war again. He watches CNN in ICU while Leathernecks dig trenches in the sand. The president says "No More Vietnams." The doctors tell him "Easy Does It, Ed— six weeks, six months, who knows. It's up to you. Avoid excitement, stimulation, sex with any but familiar partners." He tells them "War is Hell. It takes no prisoners. A man must have something worth dying for." The Persian skies are bright with bombs and fire. My father's sleep is watched by monitors that beep and blink—his sore heart beating, still. I wonder if he dreams of soldiers killed in action—Japanese, Iraqis, old Marines who died for flags and causes, but in the end, among their souvenirs, we only find old snapshots of their wives and women friends. ]]> Recommended Listening 2009-11-18T17:44:37+00:00 Lisa Williams reads Jellyfish http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/williams_reads_jellyfish/ Movement means closure, a thrust from where you are, that gelid other plane, your bell-like head with wordless aperture emptying, emptying, the pleats of your innards, a shallow accordion. Your tendrils trail neon lit cities of cells —you, pellucid ferry, invisibly carried spun dome like the ghost of some merry-go-round. And we who don't float with such unconscious ease think it terror to rise from our notions of land, rock, and ownership, can't ride a bottomless plain, colored thrust in our sails, in the lax, placid matter that holds, not from falls (for you too fill your head so your gossamer motors move onward) but holds your shape firm. Even you, if you never once moved, if you didn't take in the first place where you are, fold around that cold present then push out, with liquid momentum (like knowledge) from flushed, chambered cells, would ascend nowhere new. In the planktonic dark, a touch is the world, the devouring of touch motion's guidance. Your emptied bell head tolls the thrust, the sole luminous effort—clear life thinking's lost! ]]> 2009-10-19T19:43:03+00:00 Lisa Williams reads Geometry http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/williams_reads_geometry/ I made myself a circle, then a square. I made a box too small for him to open and then a portal which, from anywhere, displayed the magnitude of my affection. Once full of pliant roundnesses and curves, his private tapestry, I made a skin tight as a drum, impervious to pain and drew this on as if to stop an army, then turned into a blossom on a plain, rose-like and fragrant, luring him to come and nestle in. I threw the flower at him crumpled in a ball. It hit the floor and there I was: plain angry red, a sphere as foreign to his faculties as Mars. In every way I wanted him to care. I made myself a circle, then a square. ]]> Recommended Listening 2009-10-19T19:16:58+00:00 Marilyn Chin reads Blues on Yellow http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/marilyn_chin_reads_blues_on_yellow/ The canary died in the gold mine, her dreams got lost in the sieve. The canary died in the gold mine, her dreams got lost in the sieve. Her husband the crow killed under the railroad, the spokes hath shorn his wings. Something's cookin' in Chin's kitchen, ten thousand yellow-bellied sapsuckers baked in a pie. Something's cookin' in Chin's kitchen, ten thousand yellow-bellied sapsuckers baked in a pie. Something's cookin in Chin's kitchen, die die yellow bird, die die. O crack an egg on the griddle, yellow will ooze into white. O crack an egg on the griddle, yellow will ooze into white. Run, run, sweet little Puritan, yellow will ooze into white. If you cut my yellow wrists, I'll teach my yellow toes to write. If you cut my yellow wrists, I'll teach my yellow toes to write. If you cut my yellow fists, I'll teach my yellow feet to fight. Do not be afraid to perish, my mother, Buddha's compassion is nigh. Do not be afraid to perish, my mother, our boat will sail tonight. Your babies will reach the promised land, the stars will be their guide. I am so mellow yellow, mellow yellow, Buddha sings in my veins. I am so mellow yellow, mellow yellow, Buddha sings in my veins. O take me to the land of the unreborn, there's no life on earth without pain. ]]> 2009-10-05T17:09:13+00:00 Dana Goodyear reads Oasis http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/goodyear_reads_oasis/ We found (like the deserting) spacious calm, drank a pair of Arnold Palmers underneath a palm. Went for massage and mud, lacquer, love, overheated minerals, a stimulating rub. Then—as if it could be used, as if for art— I placed a grain of doubt in your open-pored heart, and watched what had been small dilate and everything else evaporate. ]]> Recommended Listening 2009-09-11T14:50:04+00:00 April Bernard reads Heimatlos http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/bernard_reads_heimatlos/
aria from Annalissa Beagle's The Ice God
Don't ask me if I have a home unless you want to see the fjord open across my face, the water that cuts into the land as if looking for a place to cease and be safe from tides. Don't ask me if I have a home if you can't bear to hear of the years of wandering, the false starts, the tender song that shuddered with the knowledge of the second verse's sigh. And don't ask me if I have a home unless you've seen the place for me, a kitchen window where the sun sits, and a plate of yellow and blue. Don't ask me if I have a home because the homeless veer like a flock across a field, panicked sideways at the failing light that sends them southward, to the end of seasons. ]]> 2009-09-01T15:43:52+00:00 A. Van Jordan reads The Structure of Scientific Revolutions http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/jordan_reads_the_structure_of_scientific_revolutions/ I place the trombone back on its stand, after attempting "Summertime" in C major. Childhood memories of band camp and lessons stream to my embouchure, hands and gut, after the ringing in my head has passed, and the notes settle, it seems, at my feet; I linger on a photograph of my family: my parents, brothers and nephew. I suppose I stare off into it, longer than I mean to, thinking of my father, dead eight months now. The color image blurs a bit on this print, not recalling his smile as I recall it in memory. And, also, the camera didn't know this would be his last photo, so the occassion was captured with people moving like apparitions in the background more than the spirit of the man in the midst of it all. Even with digital cameras, there's still a pointillist dotting flesh on the faces of my family. I shake my head to clear the trance and turn on the television. First, news of a woman raped; the pundits keep the stress on "alleged." I think of all the women who are watching TV now. I turn the channel to a rerun of CSI. All this technology, yet we still can't prove rape. What's the use of suspending disbelief? I turn the TV off and sit back down to the horn, but it's still next to the photo. This time I notice my father's hand at rest on my nephew's shoulder. My nephew might be practicing his cello as I sit in front of this brass, which turns to folk art in my hands. I don't really play anymore, you know. I once thought music would be my life. And it's simply too easy to try to play and say, That's enough, to easy to say, At least my nephew plays strings. Nothing changes that easily. It's in the way the mouthpiece refuses to kiss me back, how the ceiling fan whirs in the room, yet humidity hangs in the air. A need builds in me only after struggle builds around me, a mythical ether challenging this horn with its song stuck in its throat: memory, the present moment and all the notes falling between them, struggling to get out. ]]> 2009-08-27T20:10:57+00:00 B. H. Fairchild reads Frieda Pushnik http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/fairchild_reads_frieda_pushnik/
"Little Frieda Pushnik, the Armless, Legless Girl Wonder," who spent years as a touring attraction for Ripley's Believe It or Not and Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey… —"Obituraries," Los Angeles Times
These are the faces I love. Adrift with wonder, big-eyed as infants and famished for that strangeness in the world they haven't known since early childhood, they are monsters of innocence who gladly shoulder the burden of the blessed, the unbroken, the beautiful, the lost. They should be walking on their lovely knees like pilgrims to that shrine in Guadalupe, where I failed to draw a crowd. I might even be their weird little saint, though God knows I've wanted everything they've wanted, and more, of course. When we toured Texas, west from San Antonio, those tiny cow towns flung like pearls from the broken necklace of the Rio Grande, I looked out on a near-infinity of rangeland and far blue mountains, avatars of emptiness, minor gods of that vast and impossibly pure nothing to whom I spoke my little stillborn, ritual prayer. I'm not on those posters they paste all over town, those silent orgies of secondary colors—jade, burnt orange, purple—each one a shrieking anthem to the exotic: Bengal tigers, ubiquitous as alley cats, raw with not inhuman but superhuman beauty, demonic spider monkeys, absurdly buxom dancers clad in gossamer, and spiritual gray elephants, trunks raised like arms to Allah. Franciscan murals of plentitude, brute vitality ripe with the fruit of eros, the faint blush of sin, and I am not there. Rather, my role is the unadvertised, secret, wholly unexpected thrill you find within. A discovery. Irresistible, like sex. So here I am. The crowd leaks in—halting, unsure, a bit like mourners at a funeral but without the grief. And there is always something damp, interior, and, well, sticky about them, cotton-candy souls that smear the bad air, funky, bleak. All, quite forgettable, except for three. A woman, middle-aged, plain and unwrinkled as her Salvation Army uniform, bland as oatmeal but with this heavy, leaden sorrow pulling at her eyelids and the corners of her mouth. Front row four times, weeping, weeping constantly, then looking up, lips moving in a silent prayer, I think, and blotting tears with a kind of practiced, automatic movement somehow suggesting that the sorrow is her own and I'm her mirror now, the little well of suffering from which she drinks. A minister once told me to embrace my sorrow. To hell with that, I said, embrace your own. And then there was that nice young woman, Arbus, who came and talked, talked brilliantly, took hours setting up the shot, then said, I'm very sorry, and just walked away. The way the sunlight plunges through the opening at the top around the center tent pole like a spotlight cutting through the smutty air, and it fell on him, the third, a boy of maybe sixteen, hardly grown, sitting in the fourth row, not too far but not too close, red hair flaring numinous, ears big as hands, gray eyes that nailed themselves to mine. My mother, I remember, looked at me that way. And a smile not quite a smile. He came twice. And that second time, just before I thanked the crowd, I'm so glad you could drop by, please tell your friends, his hand rose—floated, really—to his chest. It was a wave. The slightest, shyest wave good-bye, hello (and what's the difference, anyway) as if he knew me, truly knew me, as if, someday, he might return. His eyes. His hair, as vivid as the turbans on those elephants. In the posters where I'm not. That day the crowd seemed to slither out, to ooze, I thought, like reptiles—sluggish, sleek, gut-hungry for the pleasures of the world, the prize, the magic number, the winning shot, the doll from the rifle booth, the girl he gives it to, the snow cone dripping, the popcorn dyed with all the colors of the rainbow, the rainbow, the sky it crowns, and whatever lies beyond, the One, perhaps, we're told, enthroned there who in love or rage or spasm of inscrutable desire made that teeming, oozing, devouring throng borne now into the midway's sunlight, that vanished and forever silent God to whom I say again my little prayer: let me be one of them. ]]> 2009-08-25T17:30:10+00:00 Kim Addonizio reads You Were http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/addonizio_reads_you_were/ the bride of gin, bride of men you followed home & let fuck you only to discover that they already had a woman, a woman who would never know what you had done with her man, never know what a shit she was married to, you were enamored of impulse, tearing flower heads from sidewalk squares that had converted from cement to soil. How pure your longing to be anything other than yourself. How difficult to extricate the stem, to hold only the scattering, brooding petals & how you longed for that stem. Little former whore, self-you-have-almost-outgrown, think of Clytia, pining for Apollo, her whole face turned toward an idea of heaven. Think of the faces turned toward you now, as you recite from the myth you have made, all of them listening to you. Of all flowers: you. ]]> Recommended Listening 2009-08-24T17:22:28+00:00 Rita Dove reads Ludwig van Beethoven’s Return to Vienna http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/rita_dove_reads_ludwig_van_beethovens_return_to_vienna/
Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me… —The Heiligenstadt Testament
Three miles from my adopted city lies a village where I came to peace. The world there was a calm place, even the great Danube no more than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape by a girl's careless hand. Into this stillness I had been ordered to recover. The hills were gold with late summer; my rooms were two, plus a small kitchen, situated upstairs in the back of a cottage at the end of the Herrengasse. From my window I could see onto the courtyard where a linden tree twined skyward— leafy umbilicus canted toward light, warped in the very act of yearning— and I would feed on the sun as if that alone would dismantle the silence around me. At first I raged. Then music raged in me, rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough to ease the roiling. I would stop to light a lamp, and whatever I'd missed— larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherd's home-toward-evening song—rushed in, and I would rage again. I am by nature a conflagration; I would rather leap than sit and be looked at. So when my proud city spread her gypsy skirts, I reentered, burning towards her greater, constant light. Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly—I tell you, every tenderness I have ever known has been nothing but thwarted violence, an ache so permanent and deep, the lightest touch awakens it…It is impossible to care enough. I have returned with a second Symphony and 15 Piano Variations which I've named Prometheus, after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god who knew the worst sin is to take what cannot be given back. I smile and bow, and the world is loud. And though I dare not lean in to shout Can't you see that I'm deaf?— I also cannot stop listening. ]]> 2009-03-18T21:47:56+00:00