I don’t often have the chance to monitor my poem-elfings once they’re up. I do wonder what happens to the poems I’ve left behind, but I don’t pursue my curiosity. It’s the fate of former boyfriends in the pre-Facebook age. They may have grown bald, fat and alcoholic, but we used to be […]
MoreInterim by Ruth Stone Like the radiator that sits in the kitchen passing gas; like the mop with its head on the floor, weeping; or the poinsettia that pretends its leaves are flowers; the cheap paint peels off the steamed walls. When you have nothing to say, the sadness of things speaks for […]
MorePoem by Thomas McGrath How could I have come so far? (And always on such dark trails?) I must have traveled by the light Shining from the faces of all those I have loved. If I were skilled in the art of micrographia, I would copy this poem on vellum in […]
MoreInvisible in the Torn Out Interiors by Dara Wier A man looked at us across his little dish Of watercress and peas and said he’d wasted Five years. We couldn’t ask him doing what? He said he knew he’d let some thing alive die And didn’t know how to get it […]
MoreTo write my last post I had to look up the cast of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. I came across an amusing bit from the script. Terry Thomas, playing his usual upper-crust Englishman equal parts outraged and dastardly, serves up this rant on an American obsession: “As far as I can […]
MoreA New Lifestyle by James Tate People in this town drink too much coffee. They’re jumpy all the time. You see them drinking out of their big plastic mugs while they’re driving. They cut in front of you, they steal your parking places. Teenagers in the cemeteries knocking over tombstones are slurping […]
MoreYesterday I listened to an anti-Valentine’s Day show on the radio. Then I read an anti-anti-Valentine’s Day advice column. What’s with all the hating on my second favorite holiday of the year? Valentine’s Day is about love. That’s all there is to it. Yeah, love! It doesn’t have to be romantic love or hot […]
MoreMIRAGE by: Christina Rossetti THE hope I dreamed of was a dream, Was but a dream; and now I wake Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old, For a dream’s sake. I hang my harp upon a tree, A weeping willow in a lake; I hang my silenced harp there, wrung and […]
MoreGray Room by Wallace Stevens Although you sit in a room that is gray, Except for the silver Of the straw-paper, And pick At your pale white gown; Or lift one of the green beads Of your necklace, To let it fall; Or gaze at your green fan Printed with the red branches […]
MoreMy mother used to have us children memorize poems in the summers. I don’t remember if we got a reward or not (learning to dive merited a candy bar, so I suspect the same for poem-memorization), but we didn’t resist. The easiest poems to memorize were A.A. Milne’s from the wonderful When We Were Very […]
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