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Ruth Forman

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Hedgebrook BB&P | Ruth Forman | Poetry Should Ride the Bus

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Hedgebrook BB&P | Ruth Forman | Poetry Should Ride the Bus | featured on urbansuitejazz.com

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Margaret Atwood

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It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;

then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)

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It was taken some time ago. At first it seems to be a smeared print: blurred lines and grey flecks blended with the paper; then, as you scan it, you see in the left-hand corner a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree (balsam or spruce) emerging and, to the right, halfway up what ought to be a gentle slope, a small frame house.

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Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

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Li-Young Lee

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He gossips like my grandmother, this man
with my face, and I could stand
amused all afternoon
in the Hon Kee Grocery,
amid hanging meats he
chops: roast pork cut
from a hog hung
by nose and shoulders,
her entire skin burnt
crisp, flesh I know
to be sweet,
her shining
face grinning
up at ducks
dangling single file,
each pierced by black
hooks through breast, bill,
and steaming from a hole
stitched shut at the ass,
I step to the counter, recite,
and he, without even slightly
varying the rhythm of his current confession or harangue,
scribbles my order on a greasy receipt,
and chops it up quick.

Such a sorrowful Chinese face,
nomad, Gobi, Northern
in its boniness
clear from the high
warlike forehead
to the sheer edge of the jaw.
He could be my brother, but finer,
and, except for his left forearm, which is engorged,
sinewy from his daily grip and
wield of a two-pound tool,
he's delicate, narrow-
waisted, his frame
so slight a lover, some
rough other
might break it down
its smooth, oily length.
In his light-handed calligraphy
on receipts and in his
moodiness, he is
a Southerner from a river-province;
suited for scholarship, his face poised
above an open book, he'd mumble
his favorite passages.
He could be my grandfather;
come to America to get a Western education
in 1917, but too homesick to study,
he sits in the park all day, reading poems
and writing letters to his mother.

He lops the head off, chops
the neck of the duck
into six, slits
the body
open, groin
to breast, and drains
the scalding juices,
then quarters the carcass
with two fast hacks of the cleaver,
old blade that has worn
into the surface of the round
foot-thick chop-block
a scoop that cradles precisely the curved steel.

The head, flung from the body, opens
down the middle where the butcher
cleanly halved it between
the eyes, and I
see, foetal-crouched
inside the skull, the homunculus,
gray brain grainy
to eat.
Did this animal, after all, at the moment
its neck broke,
image the way his executioner
shrinks from his own death?
Is this how
I, too, recoil from my day?
See how this shape
hordes itself, see how
little it is.
See its grease on the blade.
Is this how I'll be found
when judgement is passed, when names
are called, when crimes are tallied?
This is also how I looked before I tore my mother open.
Is this how I presided over my century, is this how
I regarded the murders?
This is also how I prayed.
Was it me in the Other
I prayed to when I prayed?
This too was how I slept, clutching my wife.
Was it me in the other I loved
when I loved another?
The butcher sees me eye this delicacy.
With a finger, he picks it
out of the skull-cradle
and offers it to me.
I take it gingerly between my fingers
and suck it down.
I eat my man.

The noise the body makes
when the body meets
the soul over the soul's ocean and penumbra
is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out,
a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood
into the ear; a lover's
heart-shaped tongue;
flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes;
the butcher working
at his block and blade to marry their shapes
by violence and time;
an engine crossing,
re-crossing salt water, hauling
immigrants and the junk
of the poor. These
are the faces I love, the bodies
and scents of bodies
for which I long
in various ways, at various times,
thirteen gathered around the redwood,
happy, talkative, voracious
at day's end,
eager to eat
four kinds of meat
prepared four different ways,
numerous plates and bowls of rice and vegetables,
each made by distinct affections
and brought to table by many hands.

Brothers and sisters by blood and design,
who sit in separate bodies of varied shapes,
we constitute a many-membered
body of love.
In a world of shapes
of my desires, each one here
is a shape of one of my desires, and each
is known to me and dear by virtue
of each one's unique corruption
of those texts, the face, the body:
that jut jaw
to gnash tendon;
that wide nose to meet the blows
a face like that invites;
those long eyes closing on the seen;
those thick lips
to suck the meat of animals
or recite 300 poems of the T'ang;
these teeth to bite my monosyllables;
these cheekbones to make
those syllables sing the soul.
Puffed or sunken
according to the life,
dark or light according
to the birth, straight
or humped, whole, manqué, quasi, each pleases, verging
on utter grotesquery.
All are beautiful by variety.
The soul too
is a debasement
of a text, but, thus, it
acquires salience, although a
human salience, but
inimitable, and, hence, memorable.
God is the text.
The soul is a corruption
and a mnemonic.

A bright moment,
I hold up an old head
from the sea and admire the haughty
down-curved mouth
that seems to disdain
all the eyes are blind to,
including me, the eater.
Whole unto itself, complete
without me, yet its
shape complements the shape of my mind.
I take it as text and evidence
of the world's love for me,
and I feel urged to utterance,
urged to read the body of the world, urged
to say it
in human terms,
my reading a kind of eating, my eating
a kind of reading,
my saying a diminishment, my noise
a love-in-answer.
What is it in me would
devour the world to utter it?
What is it in me will not let
the world be, would eat
not just this fish,
but the one who killed it,
the butcher who cleaned it.
I would eat the way he
squats, the way he
reaches into the plastic tubs
and pulls out a fish, clubs it, takes it
to the sink, guts it, drops it on the weighing pan.
I would eat that thrash
and plunge of the watery body
in the water, that liquid violence
between the man's hands,
I would eat
the gutless twitching on the scales,
three pounds of dumb
nerve and pulse, I would eat it all
to utter it.
The deaths at the sinks, those bodies prepared
for eating, I would eat,
and the standing deaths
at the counters, in the aisles,
the walking deaths in the streets,
the death-far-from-home, the death-
in-a-strange-land, these Chinatown
deaths, these American deaths.
I would devour this race to sing it,
this race that according to Emerson
managed to preserve to a hair for three or four thousand years the ugliest features in the world. I would eat these features, eat the last three or four thousand years, every hair. And I would eat Emerson, his transparent soul, his soporific transcendence. I would eat this head, glazed in pepper-speckled sauce, the cooked eyes opaque in their sockets. I bring it to my mouth and-- the way I was taught, the way I've watched others before me do-- with a stiff tongue lick out the cheek-meat and the meat over the armored jaw, my eating, its sensual, salient nowness, punctuating the void from which such hunger springs and to which it proceeds. And what is this I excavate with my mouth? What is this plated, ribbed, hinged architecture, thiscarp head, but one more articulation of a single nothing severally manifested? What is my eating, rapt as it is, but another shape of going, my immaculate expiration? O, nothing is so steadfast it won't go the way the body goes. The body goes. The body's grave, so serious in its dying, arduous as martyrs in that task and as glorious. It goes empty always and announces its going by spasms and groans, farts and sweats. What I thought were the arms achingcleave, were the knees trembling leave. What I thought were the muscles insistingresist, persist, exist, were the pores hissingmist and waste. What I thought was the body hummingreside, reside, was the body sighingrevise, revise. O, the murderous deletions, the keening down to nothing, the cleaving. All of the body's revisions end in death. All of the body's revisions end. Bodies eating bodies, heads eating heads, we are nothing eating nothing, and though we feast, are filled, overfilled, we go famished. We gang the doors of death. That is, out deaths are fed that we may continue our daily dying, our bodies going down, while the plates-soon-empty are passed around, that true direction of our true prayers, while the butcher spells his message, manifold, in the mortal air. He coaxes, cleaves, brings change before our very eyes, and at every moment of our being. As we eat we're eaten. Else what is this violence, this salt, this passion, this heaven? I thought the soul an airy thing. I did not know the soul is cleaved so that the soul might be restored. Live wood hewn, its sap springs from a sticky wound. No seed, no egg has he whose business calls for an axe. In the trade of my soul's shaping, he traffics in hews and hacks. No easy thing, violence. One of its names? Change. Change resides in the embrace of the effaced and the effacer, in the covenant of the opened and the opener; the axe accomplishes it on the soul's axis. What then may I do but cleave to what cleaves me. I kiss the blade and eat my meat. I thank the wielder and receive, while terror spirits my change, sorrow also. The terror the butcher scripts in the unhealed air, the sorrow of his Shang dynasty face, African face with slit eyes. He is my sister, this beautiful Bedouin, this Shulamite, keeper of sabbaths, diviner of holy texts, this dark dancer, this Jew, this Asian, this one with the Cambodian face, Vietnamese face, this Chinese I daily face, this immigrant, this man with my own face.

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He gossips like my grandmother, this man with my face, and I could stand amused all afternoon in the Hon Kee Grocery, amid hanging meats he chops: roast pork cut from a hog hung by nose and shoulders, her entire skin burnt crisp, flesh I know to be sweet, her

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Nikki Grimes

https://geigerenglish.weebly.com/uploads/8/7/6/8/87689660/commonlit_jabari-unmasked_student.pdf

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Teri Ellen Cross Davis

A few months after dad left
the divorce still pending, my mother
drives home on an unspectacular
Cleveland light, looks at me

and says, Let's drive to Akron.We're
cuddled in her tiny black Chevy Spectrum,
a stick she taught herself to drive
because it was the cheapest on the lot.

Prince's Batman soundtrack plays
in the cassette player. Akron.
Neither of us had ever been there.
It was just the place you drove past to get

home. Prince croons Vicki Waiting.
We sing along to the open night, probing
the wound of the road, hugging tight to Highway 77.
When we reach Akron, its lit spires bathe us

in a strange orange glow. The bricked sidewalks
spill out in quiet perfection. Our satisfaction
surrounds us, hanging thick in the closeness of the car.
The cassette clicks, flips, and side B begins.

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Mary Oliver

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Mary Oliver reads "Wild Geese" for On Being

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Aimee Nezhukumatahil

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Flour on the floor makes my sandals

slip and I tumble into your arms.

Too hot to bake this morning but

blueberries begged me to fold them

into moist muffins. Sticks of rhubarb

plotted a whole pie. The windows

are blown open and a thickfruit tang

sneaks through the wire screen

and into the home of the scowly lady

who lives next door. Yesterday, a man

in the city was rescued from his apartment

which was filled with a thousand rats.

Something about being angry because

his pet python refused to eat. He let the bloom

of fur rise, rise over the little gnarly blue rug,

over the coffee table, the kitchen countertops

and pip through each cabinet, snip

at the stumpy bags of sugar,

the cylinders of salt. Our kitchen is a riot

of pots, wooden spoons, melted butter.

So be it. Maybe all this baking will quiet

the angry voices next door, if only

for a brief whiff. I want our summers

to always be like this-a kitchen wrecked

with love, a table overflowing with baked goods

warming the already warm air. After all the pots

are stacked, the goodies cooled, and all the counters

wiped clean-let us never be rescued from this mess.

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Baked Goods by Aimee Nezhukumatathil | Poetry Foundation

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Flour on the floor makes my sandals slip and I tumble into your arms. Too hot to bake this morning but blueberries begged me to fold them into moist muffins. Sticks of rhubarb plotted a whole pie. The windows are blown open and a thickfruit tang sneaks through the wire screen and into the home of the scowly lady who lives next door.

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“Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)

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“Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)

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Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

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Amanda Gorman

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WATCH: Amanda Gorman reads inauguration poem, 'The Hill We Climb'

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Arthur Sze

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the mind severs the pain:

you don't remember flying off a motorcycle,

But a woman stabbed in her apartment,

by a prowler searching for

will never forget her startled shriek

blood soaking into the floor.

The quotidian violence of the world

is like a full moon rising over the Ortiz mountains;

its pull is everywhere.

But let me live a life of violent surprise

and startled joy. I want to

thrust a purple iris into your hand,

give you a sudden embrace.

I want to live as Wang Hsi-chih lived

writing characters in gold ink on black silk-

but to live the splendor now.

2 Deprived of sleep, she hallucinated

and, believing she had sold the genetic

research on carp, signed a confession.

Picking psilocybin mushrooms in the mountains

of Veracruz, I hear tin cowbells

in the slow rain, see men wasted on pulque

sitting under palm trees. Is it

so hard to see things as they truly are:

a route marked in red ink on a map,

the shadows of apricot leaves thrown

in wind and sun on a wall? It is

easy to imagine a desert full of agaves

and golden barrel cactus, red earth, a red sun.

But to truly live one must see things

as they are, as they might become:

a wrench is not a fingerprint

on a stolen car, nor baling wire

the undertow of the ocean. I may hallucinate,

but see the men in drenched clothes

as men who saw and saw and refuse to see.

3 Think of being a judge or architect

or trombonist, and do not worry whether

thinking so makes it so. I overhear

two men talking in another room;

I cannot transcribe the conversation

word for word, but know if they are

vexed or depressed, joyful or nostalgic.

An elm leaf floats on a pond.

Look, a child wants to be a cardiologist

then a cartographer, but wanting so

does not make it so. It is not

a question of copying out the Heart Sutra

in your own blood on an alabaster wall.

It is not a question of grief or joy.

But as a fetus grows and grows,

as the autumn moon ripens the grapes,

greed and cruelty and hunger for power

ripen us, enable us to grieve, act,

laugh, shriek, see, see it all as

the water on which the elm leaf floats.

4 Write out the memories of your life

in red-gold disappearing ink, so that it all

dies, no lives. Each word you speak

dies, no lives. Is it all

at once in the mind? I once stepped

on a sea urchin, used a needle to dig out

the purple spines; blood soaked my hands.

But one spine was left, and I carried

it a thousand miles. I saw then

the olive leaves die on the branch,

saw dogs tear flesh off a sheep's corpse.

To live at all is to grieve;

but, once, to have it all at once

is to see a shooting star: shooting star

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Shooting Star by Arthur Sze | Poetry Foundation

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the mind severs the pain: you don't remember flying off a motorcycle, But a woman stabbed in her apartment, by a prowler searching for will never forget her startled shriek blood soaking into the floor. The quotidian violence of the world is like a full moon rising over the Ortiz mountains; its pull is everywhere.

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William Carlos Williams

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

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Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

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Audre Lorde

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Audre Lorde, "Coal" from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1997 by Audre Lorde. Reprinted with the permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., www.nortonpoets.com.

Source: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997)

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Audre Lorde, "Coal" from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1997 by Audre Lorde. Reprinted with the permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., www.nortonpoets.com. Source: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997)

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Wilfred Owen

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Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen: Read by Christopher Eccleston | Remembering World War 1 | C4

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Margaret Atwood

you fit into me

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye

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Willie Perdomo

It was Dre who once said,
You lose something every day

Your mind on the way to the store
The floor on the way to your mind
Your mind on your way to the clinic
The clinic on the way to one more

The mad in the way of your kind
The lyrics to your favorite song
The cure on the way to the camp
The finish on your way to the line

Your nickel in the way of a dime
The short to your favorite long
The loss on the way to the find
The skin that was yours to bare

The crown that was yours to wear
The floor you were forced to clean
The game that was yours to fair
The face you were pushed to mean

It was Dre who once said,
You lose something every day

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I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom but carries

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,

and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose

from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,

I love you directly without problems or pride:

I love you like this because I don't know any other way to love,

except in this form in which I am not nor are you,

so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,

so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

Pablo Neruda, "One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII" from The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, edited by Mark Eisner. Copyright © 2004 City Lights Books.

Source: The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (City Lights Books, 2004)

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One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII by Pablo Neruda | Poetry Foundation

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I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,