theonesaboutstayingalive

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

The River

Yes, we’ll gather by the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river. They say it runs by the throne of God. This is where God invented fish. Wherever, but then God’s throne is as wide as the universe. If you’re attentive you’ll see the throne’s borders in the stars. We’re on this side and when you get to the other side we don’t know what will happen if anything. If nothing happens we won’t know it, I said once. Is that cynical? No, nothing is nothing, not upsetting just nothing. Then again maybe we’ll be cast at the speed of light through the universe to God’s throne. His hair is bounteous. All the 5,000 birds on earth were created there. The firstborn cranes, herons, hawks, at the back so as not to frighten the little ones. Even now they remember this divine habitat. Shall we gather at the river, this beautiful river? We’ll sing with the warblers perched on his eyelashes.

- Jim Harrison

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

A Story That Could Be True by William Stafford

If you were exchanged in the cradle and your real mother died without ever telling the story then no one knows your name, and somewhere in the world your father is lost and needs you but you are far away.

He can never find how true you are, how ready. When the great wind comes and the robberies of the rain you stand on the corner shivering. The people who go by— you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs any day in your mind, “Who are you really, wanderer?”— and the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is: “Maybe I’m a king.”

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

Litany

You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine. You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker, and the marsh birds suddenly in flight. However, you are not the wind in the orchard, the plums on the counter, or the house of cards. And you are certainly not the pine-scented air. There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air. It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge, maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head, but you are not even close to being the field of cornflowers at dusk. And a quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boathouse. It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof. I also happen to be the shooting star, the evening paper blowing down an alley and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table. I am also the moon in the trees and the blind woman’s tea cup. But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife. You are still the bread and the knife. You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine. - Billy Collins

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

To Dorothy

Marvin Bell

You are not beautiful, exactly. You are beautiful, inexactly. You let a weed grow by the mulberry and a mulberry grow by the house. So close, in the personal quiet of a windy night, it brushes the wall and sweeps away the day till we sleep.

A child said it, and it seemed true: “Things that are lost are all equal.” But it isn’t true. If I lost you, the air wouldn’t move, nor the tree grow. Someone would pull the weed, my flower. The quiet wouldn’t be yours. If I lost you, I’d have to ask the grass to let me sleep.

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

Psalm and Lament Donald Justice The clocks are sorry, the clocks are very sad. One stops, one goes on striking the wrong hours. And the grass burns terribly in the sun, The grass turns yellow secretly at the roots. Now suddenly the yard chairs look empty, the sky looks empty, The sky looks vast and empty. Out on Red Road the traffic continues; everything continues. Nor does memory sleep; it goes on. Out spring the butterflies of recollection, And I think that for the first time I understand The beautiful ordinary light of this patio And even perhaps the dark rich earth of a heart. (The bedclothes, they say, had been pulled down. I will not describe it. I do not want to describe it. No, but the sheets were drenched and twisted. They were the very handkerchiefs of grief.) Let summer come now with its schoolboy trumpets and fountains. But the years are gone, the years are finally over. And there is only This long desolation of flower-bordered sidewalks That runs to the corner, turns, and goes on, That disappears and goes on Into the black oblivion of a neighborhood and a world Without billboards or yesterdays. Sometimes a sad moon comes and waters the roof tiles. But the years are gone. There are no more years.

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

TORTURE by Raymond Carver

You are falling in love again. This time it is a South American general's daughter. You want to be stretched on the rack again. You want to hear awful things said to you and to admit these things are true. You want to have unspeakable acts committed against your person, things nice people don't talk about in classrooms. You want to tell everything you know on Simon Bolivar, on Jorge Luis Borges, on yourself most of all. You want to implicate everyone in this! Even when it's four o'clock in the morning and the lights are burning still - those lights that have been burning night and day in your eyes and brain for two weeks - and you are dying for a smoke and a lemonade, but she won't turn off the lights that woman with the green eyes and little ways about her, even when you want to be her gaucho. Dance with me, you imagine hearing her say as you reach for the empty beaker of water. Dance with me, she says again and no mistake. She picks this minute to ask you, hombre, to get up and dance with her in the nude. No, you don't have the strength of a fallen leaf, not the strength of a little reed basket battered by waves on Lake Titicaca. But you bound out of bed just the same, amigo, you dance across wide open spaces.

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

STEPS by Frank O’Hara

How funny you are today New York like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days (I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still accepts me foolish and free all I want is a room up there and you in it and even the traffic halt so thick is a way for people to rub up against each other and when their surgical appliances lock they stay together for the rest of the day (what a day) I go by to check a slide and I say that painting's not so blue where's Lana Turner she's out eating and Garbo's backstage at the Met everyone's taking their coat off so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers and the park's full of dancers with their tights and shoes in little bags who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y why not the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won and in a sense we're all winning we're alive the apartment was vacated by a gay couple who moved to the country for fun they moved a day too soon even the stabbings are helping the population explosion though in the wrong country and all those liars have left the UN the Seagram Building's no longer rivalled in interest not that we need liquor (we just like it) and the little box is out on the sidewalk next to the delicatessen so the old man can sit on it and drink beer and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day while the sun is still shining oh god it's wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

Morning by Frank O'Hara

I've got to tell you how I love you always I think of it on grey mornings with death in my mouth the tea is never hot enough then and the cigarette dry the maroon robe chills me I need you and look out the window at the noiseless snow At night on the dock the buses glow like clouds and I am lonely thinking of flutes I miss you always when I go to the beach the sand is wet with tears that seem mine although I never weep and hold you in my heart with a very real humor you'd be proud of the parking lot is crowded and I stand rattling my keys the car is empty as a bicycle what are you doing now where did you eat your lunch and were there lots of anchovies it is difficult to think of you without me in the sentence you depress me when you are alone Last night the stars were numerous and today snow is their calling card I'll not be cordial there is nothing that distracts me music is only a crossword puzzle do you know how it is when you are the only passenger if there is a place further from me I beg you do not go

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

why do you stay up so late? by marvin bell.

Late at night, I no longer speak for effect. I speak the truth without the niceties. I am hundreds of years old but do not know how many hundreds. The person I was does not know me. The young poets, with their reenactments of the senses, are asleep. I am myself asleep at the outer reaches. I have lain down in the snow without stepping outside. I am frozen on the white page. Then it happens, a spark somewhere, a light through the ice. The snow melts, there appear fields threaded with grain. The blue moon blue sky returns, that heralded night. How earthly the convenience of time. I am possible. I have in me the last unanswered question. Yes, there are walls, and water stains on the ceiling. Yes, there is energy running through the wires. And yes, I grow colder as I write of the sun rising. This is not the story, the skin paling and a body folded over a table. If I die here they will say I died writing. Never mind the long day that now shrinks backward. I crumple the light and toss it into the wastebasket. I pull down the moon and place it in a drawer. A bitter wind of new winter drags the dew eastward. I dig in my heels.

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

A Car in the Field by William Neumire

The season is blank; bearded face scraped to flesh. Black vines and branches trickle up. The car is carapaced in ice, abandoned at summer’s end in this cornfield so the cops won’t find it incriminating, illegal, expired. Someone tried to start it last month in the dark, cut the right wires and spliced them together, waited for a spark of ignition, a joyride with the girl who only goes with boys who drive Camaros. When the weather drops below zero I recall the law of impermanence that governs our universe and keeps me insistent: someday this will be different: ice will be water and the car will tear up the field in a storm of mud, lightning under the hood. The boy will get the girl, trees will remember their leaves and I will believe that no death lasts forever.

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

Anne Sexton - You, Doctor Martin

You, Doctor Martin, walk from breakfast to madness. Late August, I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talk of pushing their bones against the thrust of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel or the laughing bee on a stalk of death. We stand in broken lines and wait while they unlock the doors and count us at the frozen gates of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken and we move to gravy in our smock of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates scratch and whine like chalk in school. There are no knives for cutting your throat. I make moccasins all morning. At first my hands kept empty, unraveled for the lives they used to work. Now I learn to take them back, each angry finger that demands I mend what another will break tomorrow. Of course, I love you; you lean above the plastic sky, god of our block, prince of all the foxes. The breaking crowns are new that Jack wore. Your third eye moves among us and lights the separate boxes where we sleep or cry. What large children we are here. All over I grow most tall in the best ward. Your business is people, you call at the madhouse, an oracular eye in our nest. Out in the hall the intercom pages you. You twist in the pull of the foxy children who fall like floods of life in frost. And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, counting this row and that row of moccasins waiting on the silent shelf.

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

There is a gold light in certain old paintings BY DONALD JUSTICE

There is a gold light in certain old paintings That represents a diffusion of sunlight. It is like happiness, when we are happy. It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light,              And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross              Share in its charity equally with the cross.       2 Orpheus hesitated beside the black river. With so much to look  forward to he looked back. We think he sang then, but the song is lost. At  least he had seen once more the  beloved back.              I say the song went this way: O prolong             Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.      3 The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work. One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good. The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar. Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.              And all that we suffered through having existed              Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

We Real Cool 

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

              The Pool Players.        Seven at the Golden Shovel.

           We real cool. We  

           Left school. We

           Lurk late. We

           Strike straight. We

           Sing sin. We  

           Thin gin. We

           Jazz June. We  

           Die soon.

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

CITRUS

Nick Courtright

I have shut off the grove, and the light. For once I allow the night its effect on every bowing branch. When I say you are enormous, I mean you are the tree.

On the path the dogs have come and gone, their tails whipping like emeralds thrown in the time after money. The dogs lay beneath the leaves, eating oranges.

The oranges could be you. The oranges could be. The oranges could be you as a dog or you as a fierce cup of a thousand leaves. Those thousand leaves watch the night, too.

But today, let’s not lie. Let’s fall into a stark raving madness, like children whose hands are on fire. We can watch them as they fly through the grove,

catching every blade with dancing fire-hands. See, when I say dancing I mean you are the strongest tree for a billion acres. When I say dancing I mean you are wood.

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

Proust’s Madeleine BY KENNETH REXROTH

Somebody has given my Baby daughter a box of Old poker chips to play with.   Today she hands me one while   I am sitting with my tired   Brain at my desk. It is red.   On it is a picture of An elk’s head and the letters   B.P.O.E.—a chip from A small town Elks’ Club. I flip   It idly in the air and Catch it and do a coin trick   To amuse my little girl. Suddenly everything slips aside.   I see my father Doing the very same thing,   Whistling “Beautiful Dreamer,”   His breath smelling richly Of whiskey and cigars. I can   Hear him coming home drunk   From the Elks’ Club in Elkhart   Indiana, bumping the Chairs in the dark. I can see   Him dying of cirrhosis Of the liver and stomach Ulcers and pneumonia, Or, as he said on his deathbed, of   Crooked cards and straight whiskey,   Slow horses and fast women.

[theonesaboutstayingalive]

April 21, 2006: A Sad Child, Margaret Atwood

A Sad Child Margaret Atwood You’re sad because you’re sad. It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical. Go see a shrink or take a pill, or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll you need to sleep. Well, all children are sad but some get over it. Count your blessings. Better than that, buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet. Take up dancing to forget. Forget what? Your sadness, your shadow, whatever it was that was done to you the day of the lawn party when you came inside flushed with the sun, your mouth sulky with sugar, in your new dress with the ribbon and the ice-cream smear, and said to yourself in the bathroom, I am not the favourite child. My darling, when it comes right down to it and the light fails and the fog rolls in and you’re trapped in your overturned body under a blanket or burning car, and the red flame is seeping out of you and igniting the tarmac beside your head or else the floor, or else the pillow, none of us is; or else we all are. – [I love the way Atwood contrasts short, staccato statements with longer sentences in this poem. This is so pretty and sad.] A YEAR AGO TODAY: The Crunch, Charles Bukowski