517 Social commentaries poems

Take this: for nothing here’s chiming, vibrating and all this vainglory and self-deprecating just goads at the tender parts, gets irritating. You’ll make no advance advocating monopoly on any vocabulary; even cacophony needs the needle to make its point properly. It’s true that you find yourself fey and bewitching, yet always you feel that the itch that you’re scratching’s soothed better by far by bravadoes of bitching. The off-pat flyting, back-biting and threnody you render and throw up, at will, won’t remedy the rot of your serenading, lute-laden wannabe. You can’t see a barrier without pushing through it; it’s a poor pearl of pathos you don’t disintuit and you now give a doing when once you’d just do it. You want my advice? Here it is: try removing the self from your argument - gluts of self-loving just pudding the gut of whatever you’re proving. That’s it on the chin and I’m sure you can take it, but that shadow you’re boxing is me, so please break it gently. Best wishes, I hope that you make it.

Each time the babies came I knew they would be gone by morning. Bright as bulbs turned out of beds, hard and full of promise. Bodies on the brink of unfolding. I could not hold them and I could not hold them long enough. It was a sin to let them in. I did not expect them to stay. I did not expect their forgiveness when I turned away.

Compiling this landmark anthology of poetry in English about dogs and musical instruments is like swimming through bricks. To date, I have only, “On the Death of Mrs. McTuesday’s Pug, Killed by a Falling Piano,” a somewhat obvious choice. True, an Aeolian harp whispers alluringly in the background of the anonymous sonnet, “The Huntsman’s Hound,” but beyond that — silence. I should resist this degrading donkey-work in favor of my own writing, wherein contentment surely lies. But A. Smith stares smugly from the reverse of the twenty pound note, and when my bank manager guffaws, small particles of saliva stream like a meteor shower through the infinity of dark space between his world and mine.

I’m not in with this mystery. Somebody steady me. Cool ocean breezes don’t make me laugh. I’m in with noisy metal little nils. A million apologies. I must have made more. You were sensitive, you needed them No you weren’t and you didn’t. In fact . . . oh forget it! In the middle of the ocean reflected with the moon, good place to show; probably no one knows you there. Your leaving, the thrown rope up to sky, climbed up for real goodbye. I realized my reason insufficient; you must have considered this. How my specific lean to you smelled like an old paper cup of funny water and you were not very thirsty. You came unbidden initially and often. A field and flickering wicks of foxes from here to there. You. Holding Hell at bay. Back to ground, I see you on the moon with your mirror catching action on the parallax. Some kind of wise guy.

First you must have unbelievable faith in water, in women dancing like hands playing harps for straw to grow stalks of fire. You must understand the year that begins with your hands tied behind your back, worship of dark totems weighed down with night birds that shift their weight & leave holes in the sky. You must know what’s behind the shadow of a treadmill— its window the moon’s reflection & silent season reaching into red sunlight hills. You must know the hard science of building walls that sway with summer storms. Locking arms to a frame of air, frame of oak rooted to ancient ground where the door’s constructed last, just wide enough for two lovers to enter on hands & knees. You must dance the weaverbird’s song for mending water & light with straw, earth, mind, bright loom of grain untortured by bushels of thorns.

Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy, the pivot of event. You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with the story’s arc: About to happen, on the verge, horizontal. You want another planet, try the moon. Try any of the eight, try Planet X. It’s out there somewhere, black with serenity. How interesting will our times become? How much more interesting can they become? A crow with something dangling from its beak flaps onto a telephone pole top, daintily, And croaks its victory to other crows and tries to keep its morsel to itself. A limp shape, leggy, stunned, drops from the black beak’s scissors like a rag. We drive past, commenting, and looking upward. A sunny morning, too cold to be nesting, Unless that is a nest the crow has seized, against the coming spring. We’ve been at this historical site before, but not in any history we remember. The present has been cloaked in cloud before, and not on any holy mountaintop. To know the stars will one day fly apart so far they can’t be seen Is almost a relief. For the future flies in one direction—toward us. And the only way to sidestep it—the only way—is headed this way, too. So, look. That woman’s got a child by the hand. She’s dragging him across the street. He’s crying and she’s shouting, but we see only dumbshow. Their breath is smoke. Will she give in and comfort him? Will he concede at last? We do not know. Their words are smoke. In a minute they’ll be somewhere else entirely. Everyone in a minute will be somewhere else entirely. As the crow flies.

The ladies men admire, I’ve heard, Would shudder at a wicked word. Their candle gives a single light; They’d rather stay at home at night. They do not keep awake till three, Nor read erotic poetry. They never sanction the impure, Nor recognize an overture. They shrink from powders and from paints ... So far, I’ve had no complaints.

Yes, I've been in Rome, at least two times, though on second thought it probably was three or maybe five. When was the last? That's easy, for I remember it exactly— at least what it was like when I first left. You mean a part of you remains in Rome? Not really, for when I was first in Rome I was truly there. That ended the second time, though I only realized it when I first left. So when you were in Rome your last time was consumed by thoughts of leaving? Not exactly. As time went on, I came around at last, thinking: obsess about leaving and nothing lasts; I'll end up never having been in Rome. Yet back then did you know just what exactly it meant to be in Rome during that time you thought about leaving, even if it was then you saw what you'd lose if you had left? Even at the time when I first left I'd no idea. But you're not saying the last you saw of Rome was your third visit, for wasn't it earlier that you felt you'd never leave Rome? No, all that happened there my second time, though to this day I feel about Rome exactly what I felt from the first. What that means exactly is hard to say, for perhaps I never left, since after all, my being there the first time didn't involve my leaving. Tell me then, at last, was it once or twice? were you really in Rome? Why certainly—I'm sure, I know I was, and on top of that you might even say I was there time and again, everything there exactly just the same, or like my last time in Rome, me feeling as if I'd never really left. But tell me now precisely, was the last you saw of Rome indeed that second time? To be exact, it happened the very first time that I saw Rome, darkness falling as I left causing me to see what simply couldn't last.

Sun slant low, chill seeps into black water. No more days of bugs and basking. Last breath, last sight of light and down I go, into the mud. Every year, here, I sink and settle, shuttered like a shed.  Inside, my eyes close, my heart slows to its winter rhythm.  Goodbye, good- bye! Remember the warmth. Remember the quickness. Remember me. Remember.

My mother—preferring the strange to the tame: Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung, Frog’s belly distended with finny young, Leaf-mold wilderness, harebell, toadstool, Odd, small snakes roving through the leaves, Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all Wild and natural!—flashed out her instinctive love, and quick, she Picked up the fluttering, bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet, And held the little horror to the mirror, where He gazed on himself, and shrieked like an old screen door far off. Depended from her pinched thumb, each wing Came clattering down like a small black shutter. Still tranquil, she began, “It’s rather sweet ...” The soft mouse body, the hard feral glint In the caught eyes. Then we saw, And recoiled: lice, pallid, yellow, Nested within the wing-pits, cozily sucked and snoozed. The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud, Swiftly, the cat, with a clean careful mouth Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop. But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor Remained, of all my mother’s tender, wounding passion For a whole wild, lost, betrayed, and secret life Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones, Whose denizens can turn upon the world With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw, To sting or soil benevolence, alien As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot. She swept to the kitchen. Turning on the tap, She washed and washed the pity from her hands.