The Best American Poetry

Steady, Steady [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest bleaders,

A poem, for your contemplation.  It is by I.  First published in Columbia Magazine, I'm gonna say 2006.  By the way, isn't spring sproinging champically?
love,
Jennifer

Steady, Steady

I believe you can build a boat.

I believe you can get to water.

I do not believe you can get the boat on water.

 

How do other people bear

what you are still afraid of?  The answer

is that when big things happen

you do go through the looking glass,

but it is still you who goes through,

the inner text is all still right to left,

so you just keep reading.

 

Because there is no boat and there is no water.

I stare at my tiny baby’s face

but he so wriggles he can’t quite be seen. 

He grows steadier, more the blur

is gone; joins us in the myth of the stable.

 

Of the quakiness of infancy and old age

we shimmer and shimmy into being

and out again.  In the mean

time, we’re horses in the stable of the myth.

 

A quick check of the ocean, or any fire,

is a reminder of how things seem;

I can’t seem to see them.

 

You’re on the beach and you find out the Secretary

of Defense thinks calico cats are agents of the devil.

Your friend asks if they get ten percent.

She was funny, your friend.

The water in this metaphor

is unreal, because of the way time passes

so you can’t quite get the boat on water,

but you can build the boat,

 

and a boat is good for a lot of things

not just on water.

 

Will we, without the boat on water,

always feel that we are missing

something basic to the picture?

 

No.  That is what I’m trying to say.

It is important to let sense quiver;

even in this stable of the myth of stable,

even living aboard a boat mired

in mud in view of the sea.

 

Who wants yet another world?

It’s enough already. 

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Bob Dylan is on what must seem to him to be  be an ever-quickening nonstop journey to his next birthday. He'll be 68 on May 24th. Such an age might prompt him to consider retirement. But age seems to have sped up his pace, as though some hyper-awareness of the ever-reducing time he has left requires a defiant burst of creative activity. But then throughout his career the palpable presence of death-- sometimes menacing, sometimes alluring--has always brought out his fiercest yearning for creation. It still does. He has a new album coming out later this month. He's working on a second volume of his memoirs. He tours as though on a mission.

Why does he keep going? I'd like to believe he's trying to demonstrate that artistry endures through life, that behind his weathered face and dissipated voice is a soul that still houses a yearning youth with a fire in every vein. And if he doesn't quite have the agility of youth, he has the cagey mind of the experienced and determined.

In his youth the flashing images burning in his mind found their way into memorable songs during extraordinary moments in social history. He changed the age enough so that he now paces nervously in the penthouse of what Leonard Cohen has called the "Tower of Song." It's enough for several lives. But Dylan never did like limits imposed on him. He wants to see just how far the human spirit can stretch, to explore all the still dark corners of his seemingly boundless mind.

So others can sum up his achievements. I want him to rage against the dying of the lyric. I hope when he's 120 he'll be refusing interviews and be pessimistic about the world and still be struggling to find love.

For him, there are always the songs. Art is all that lasts. That's the love that won't desert him, won't be faithless, won't break his heart with slick words or empty promises. And so Dylan the artist won't stop looking for ways to produce that art. For him the rest is very far from silence.

"Seven Analogies" [by Kate Angus]

Seven Analogies

1. Finances
Liken me to a helium balloon untethered and my debt
the vast blue sky into which I’m rising. Small down below,
the child waving is solvency.

2. Affection
Try to be both transparent and productive. This means
a gumball machine bursting with bright colors. Admit there’s an equivalent
between the need for approval and spare change.

3. Self-Preservation
If you make a sacrificial altar and use it,
the actual world will be pacified. Therefore a tender new lamb
is your lungs and you should start smoking again.

4. Beauty
If you narrow yourself down like a rivulet gushing forth
from what used to be the embanked bulk of your body, he will be thirsty
and kneel down to drink. This is to say: phone calls, emails, dinner.

5. Life
Bowling shows trajectory as a long path of polished wood.
The body is a roundness, jettisoned. Each pin: a reminder
that if you near what you want you’ll destabilize it. 

6. Self-Knowledge
A kitten pawing string: wide-eyed, clawed. A strutting pigeon
on the sidewalk. A kicked dog. A dead possum by the roadside
whose flesh hives buzzing insects.

7. The Afterlife
A white car on a winter road.
A red fox in the inferno. If in the rain
there were more rain of the same temperature.

-- Kate Angus

Les Keiter: "He beat the ball . . ."

Who remembers Les Keiter?
He recreated West Coast baseball games for heartsick New Yorkers bereft of the Dodger and Giants after they moved to LA and SF at the end of the 1957 season.
How well I remember lying in bed listening to my black Zenith radio with the lights out as the clock moved toward midnight on a September night in 1959. The Giants and Dodgers were battling for first place. In the opening inning, Don Drysdale walked the first three Giants to face him. Then he proceeded to strike out the next three. The Dodgers won, ended the season tied for first with the defending champion Braves, then of Milwaukee. The ex-Brooks prevailed in a two-game playoff, copping the NL pennant. Then they beat the Chisox in six. It was the last hurrah of Messrs. Snider, Hodges, and Carl Furillo, my father's favorite. I was eleven.
Alone in the radio studio, or maybe he had an engineer, Les Keiter would get the teletype, make an appropriate sound with a rudimentary noisemaker, and call the play. The teletype would say: Gilliam singles. Keiter would say: Antonelli goes into his windup . . .the pitch. . .is a fastball down the middle . . .Gilliam swings. . .and hits a scorching line drive. . . just out of McCovey's reach. . .into right field. . .Gilliam makes the turn. . .and. . .  holds at first with a single." The next day you'd learn that Gilliam had actually beaten out a lazy roller to the left side.
Les Keiter was at his best on a close play at the plate. A sacrifice fly became a big dramatic moment. The tap of a drum stick indicated the meeting of bat and ball: Ron Fairly or Don Demeter lifted a shallow fly to center field, which Willie Mays patrolled with the efficiency of DiMaggio. Maury Wills, tagging up on third base, broke for the plate when Mays made the catch. Then: "Here comes Wills. . .Mays throws . ..and. . .and. . .he beat the ball, he beat the ball!" The crowd noise always sounded the same but that was radio for you.
Les Keiter died on Tuesday in Hawaii at the age of 89
-- DL

Maybe We Should Talk [by Stacey Harwood]

Many years ago, a colleague of mine and long-time employee of the agency where I worked jumped to his death from the 13th floor of our office building.  It was mid-day.  The office complex straddled a highway; there was traffic below and office workers coming and going on the sidewalks.  The impact of his body was so powerful that the people working in the lower floors could feel it, and every bone in Bob’s body was shattered.  A man with the build of a longshoreman, Bob was flattened like road kill.
 
At the time I was, in addition to being a policy analyst, a volunteer employee assistance coordinator.  As such, I was trained to give confidential guidance to coworkers in need of help.  I did not counsel them; I helped them find the resources they needed. 
 
During the weeks following Bob’s suicide, I helped arrange grief counseling sessions for my fellow workers.  Trained crisis counselors from a nearby hospital trauma unit led the sessions, during which   those close to Bob and those who had witnessed his death were encouraged to talk about how the experience affected them.  Bob’s closest friends and colleagues were plagued with nightmares, unable to silence their frightening thoughts, and consumed with guilt about what they might have done to help or save him.  At the crisis sessions these otherwise reticent men -- buttoned-up lawyers, accountants, engineers -- sobbed openly, confessed to their feelings of inadequacy, and struggled to come to terms with what they believed to be their lapse in responsibility because they were unable to help Bob. At the same time, by hearing each other share stories of their recent contacts with Bob, we all learned that many knew that he was suffering, that his closest friends had begged him to get help, and that he had promised that he would but didn’t. One especially loyal friend had researched psychotherapists and coached  Bob while he made an appointment, one that he failed to keep. He was determined to carry out his plan and to succeed.  
 
   His plan:  He had a plan.  As I later learned during more in-depth training on suicide prevention, the sirens should go off when someone reveals that he or she has a plan and the means to carry it out.  When someone shares this information, even if they beg that it be kept confidential, do not keep it confidential.  Sadly, many suicides are so determined that they will keep their plan to themselves.  They’ve made up their mind, their mood lightens as one’s mood tends to upon making a big decision, and all that remains for them to do is to wait for preparation to meet opportunity.

    The other day, after David and I learned of Deborah Digges suicide, we counted on our fingers the number of writer-suicides in recent years.  David asked on Facebook why so many poets are taking their lives.  Someone responded that poets are no more likely to commit suicide than firefighters or Finns.  While that may be true, it shouldn’t stop the discussion of this tragedy among poets, for those are our friends and colleagues and the life of the poet is what we know.  Maybe we owe it to ourselves and our loved ones to learn more about suicide, just as we learn about heart disease and alcoholism.  How do we observe each other with compassion and express our concern when someone close seems to be in a downward spiral? 
 
Many of you who read this blog are teachers as well.  What should you tell your students? Is this a conversation for the classroom? What should we do?  

What Would Hegel Do? [by Jerome Sala]

In a recent issue of Poetry, I came across a familiar theme.  In the commentary section, a critic, Jason Guriel, recommended a tougher, more “negative” approach for poetry reviews (a bit like William Logan).  Too much pulling of punches, it seems, has resulted in a mushier criticism and taste.  Guriel then goes on to criticize a number of new books for their abstract language, preferring instead writing with more “chewy imagery”.  He contrasts, for example, a line (by Eric Ormsby) describing a rooster’s “dark, corroded croak/Like a grudging nail pulled out of stubborn wood” (good), with the more general one (by Jane Mead), that simply points to “the sound of cowbirds/in sudden excellence” (bad).
 I saw Guriel’s piece, coincidentally, just as a reading group I was in had finished some of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics.  And, on the verge of converting to Hegelianism myself, I was initially in sympathy with this critic’s approach.  After all, Hegel was the master of “tarrying with the negative”; with him, it was an ethical point –only through endless critique can anything like clarity be achieved.  But, in keeping with this approach, I quickly began critiquing Guriel’s critique.  I became skeptical of the basis of his skepticism.  Hegel, too, it turns out, warned against empty generalities when it came to aesthetics, remarking that “to produce works of art according to…abstractions is of course wrong – and just as unsatisfactory as when a thinker thinks in vague ideas…”   At the same time, he cautioned that if you privilege the concrete above all else (like some art historians did in his own time), you paint yourself into an aesthetic corner.  Something like this happened in our era.  Back when I was in creative writing school, the main commandment teachers preached was the one Williams was credited with: “no ideas but in things.”  Unfortunately, this often resulted in tons of poems with tons of things, but no ideas.  If you embrace the empirical as a sort of aesthetic security blanket, you end up losing the visionary quality that makes poetry cool in the first place.  To his credit, I think Guriel himself senses this, as at the end of his piece he complains about the tidal wave of competent but boring poetry he sees everywhere; poetry, without, as he puts it, “game-changing metaphors” – where it’s always “business as usual.”
 So, as a born-again Hegelian (at least in aesthetics), let me propose another standard of judgment.  It may be one the great man himself would have agreed with  -- though I’m not sure about this, because Hegel is hard to understand.  In any case, I think it’s actually the standard many critics and poetry freaks use already (without knowing it).  So here goes…
 Hegel divided aesthetic approaches by era.  Each epoch, he theorized, had its particular characteristics.  For example, the Classical Era, he felt, was the only one where the arts fully expressed the essence of their times.  But this match between the arts and the real was only possible because the times themselves were more simple.  During our own era, which in Hegel’s eyes begins with Christianity, goes through the Romanticism of his time – and is projected forward, this is no longer possible.  Reality is too complicated to be fully expressed by poetry – or any other art form.  The most significant art of our era, in his view, is on some level aware of this – and, as a result, is skeptical about itself – questioning its own assumptions, trying in the end to transcend even the definition of what makes an artwork in the first place.
 This may sound a bit lofty, but it’s not really, if you think about what makes us notice breakthroughs in poetry.  Take Creeley, for example.  Isn’t one of the most striking things about his poems the fact that, although he was a direct descendent of Williams, sometimes he refused to use any “things” at all?  That he was writer who, in place of standard-issue empiricism, proposed a poetry that proved “There is no trick to reality-/a mind/makes it, any/mind…”

"Letter to the Younger Me" [by Kate Angus]

Letter to the Younger Me

Hello, darling. The sky is gray
this morning, like an old wool blanket left
out in the rain. In the bookstore,

I misheard someone asking
for “the graphic novel” as them wanting “the death
of the novel” and I thought, “of course.” How are you

getting along? Lately, I keep trying
to peel myself like an apple, pare everything down, open up
like envelopes or doors. It isn’t working--

so much easier to watch
the inexorable march of digital numbers pressing forward
under the smooth surface of the clock. These minutes:

orderly little lemmings plunging
into the dark gray sea
or they’re the small enameled cars

I’d make a caravan of and push
so they tumbled
off the white wicker snow-cliff of the couch. Oh clanging

against the tiled sunroom floor. Come back,
sun on the floor, slow-moving
trapezoidal shape projected in through the window

when I had all the hours left in the world. 

-- Kate Angus

No Hemlock Rock [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

No Hemlock Rock Don’t kill yourself. Don’t kill yourself. Don’t. Eat a donut, be a blown nut. That is, if you’re going to kill yourself, stand on a street corner rhyming seizure with Indonesia, and wreck it with racket. Allow medical terms. Rave and fail. Be an absurd living ghost, if necessary, but don’t kill yourself. Let your friends know that something has passed, or be glad they’ve guessed. But don't kill yourself. If you stay, but are bat crazy you will batter their hearts in blooming scores of anguish; but kill yourself, and hundreds of other people die. Poison yourself, it poisons the well; shoot yourself, it cracks the bio-dome. I will give badges to everyone who’s figured this out about suicide, and hence refused it. I am grateful. Stay. Thank you for staying. Please stay. You are my hero for staying. I know about it, and am grateful you stay. Eat a donut. Rhyme opus with lotus. Rope is bogus, psychosis. Stay. Hocus Pocus. Hocus Pocus. Dare to not kill yourself. I won’t either.

Rainy day projects

Me and my three year old and my four year old drew this on a blank puzzle I bought at the local art supply shop.

Here is another:

"Hulk Smash!" [by Greg Santos]

Hulk Smash!

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
-Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”

Hulk know. Hulk have a problem.
Hulk took break from Avengers after orphanage and tanker truck incident.
Hulk’s therapist said it cry for help.
Hulk said “Hulk strong! Hulk self-reliant! Ugh!”
Who Hulk kidding? Hulk not really so incredible.
Hulk look in mirror everyday and want to smash things.
Hulk never cut out to be superhero.
Hulk really just regular Joe.
Hulk got Hungry Hungry Hippos for birthday.
But no one want to play with Hulk. Everyone too busy saving world.
Hulk like watching Tennessee Titans with bowl of chips and dip.
Hulk like to go beachcombing for giant squid carcasses.
Hulk OK guy.  Just misunderstood.
Hulk really just want to have normal 9 to 5 job.
But who would hire Hulk?
Hulk first tried 7-11 cashier job in Schertz,Texas.
Hulk wore stupid uniform even though it too small.
Hulk still want to smash Slurpee machine.
Hulk think it give too much ice, not enough syrup!
Captain America lecture Hulk. Captain America douche bag.
Hulk then tried work in office job.
Hulk carpool with Joan and Frank from accounting.
Hulk wear snappy tie and dress shirt.
Hulk even bought new purple pants!
Cubicles too small for Hulk, though.
Hulk hate paperwork!
Hulk smash paper shredder!
Hulk got yelled at by Shelley in cubicle next door.
Hulk hate Shelley! (Hulk think about Shelley every day.)

-- Greg Santos

A version of this poem was first published in Nthposition.

I saw a woman on the train reading poetry!

All this hoo-ha about print culture and/or poetry being in decline...  Well, I see - get this! - actual regular people reading poetry... in public places!  Some of these real-life readers are toting books they have (you won't believe this) purchased, supporting bookstores and living breathing poets not to mention publishers; others cradle books checked out from public libraries - which still apparently acquire volumes of contemporary poetry for the enjoyment and enlightenment of their patrons.

To celebrate this counterintuitive phenomenon, I would like to institute an occasional National Poetry Month quiz:

Guess Which Contemporary Poet Whose Book I Saw Somebody Read on the Train!

For this inaugural (so to speak) edition, I have provided a clue in the image above. 

Good luck.  The first person to correctly guess or otherwise intuit the answer will receive... something, I promise!  Extra points for guessing not only the poet's name, but the title of the book seen.

"Why Women Love Horses" [by Nancy Carpenter Czerw]

Why Women Love Horses

You can kiss them on the neck and it's not cheating.
You can kick them in the sides and it's not beating.
You can spread your thighs, and when you're overheating,
You can whisper lies you'll never hear repeating.

-- Nancy Carpenter Czerw

"A Note for a Rainy Tuesday" (by Laura Orem)

Like all of you, I have been pondering the apparent suicide of the poet Deborah Digges. I didn't know her. But I have lost someone I loved very much, also a poet, to suicide, so the news this week of her death has stirred up some things for me that I realize I'm going to have to deal with - which means, of course, write about.

But not now, not today. Instead, I would like to share with you this poem by William Meredith, on the suicide of his friend John Berryman. I hope those of you who knew and loved Deborah Digges can take some comfort in it.

In Loving Memory of the Late Author of Dream Songs

Friends making off ahead of time

on their own, I call that willful, John,

but that’s not judgment, only argument

such as we’ve had before.

I watch a shaky man climb

a cast-iron railing in my head, on

a Mississippi bluff, though I had meant

to dissuade him. I call out, and he doesn’t hear.

 

‘Fantastic! Fantastic! Thank thee, dear Lord’

is what you said we were to write on your stone,

but you go down without so much as a note.

Did you wave jauntily, like a German ace

in a silent film, as the paper said?

We have to understand how you got

from here to there, a hundred feet straight down.

Though you had told us and told us,

and how it would be underground

and how it would be for us left here,

who could have plotted that swift chute

from the late height of your prizes?

For all your indignation, your voice

was part howl only, part of it was caress.

Adorable was a word you threw around,

fastidious John of the gross disguises,

and despair was another: ‘this work of almost despair.’

 

Morale is what I think about all the time

now, what hopeful men and women can say and do.

But having to speak for you, I can’t

lie. ‘Let his giant faults appear, as sent

together with his virtues down,’ the song says.

It says suicide is a crime

and that wives and children deserve better than this.

None of us deserved, of course, you.

 

Do we wave back now, or what do we do?

You were never reluctant to instruct.

I do what’s in character, I look for things

to praise on the river banks and I praise them.

We are all relicts, of some great joy, wearing black,

but this book is full of marvelous songs.

Don’t let us contract your dread recidivism

and start falling from our own iron railings.

Wave from the fat book again, make us wave back.    

from Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems , Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Another poem by Deborah Digges [by Moira Egan]

I am so sad to hear of the death of Deborah Digges. She was one of my professors at Columbia; in fact, she was the instructor of my very first graduate workshop. Over those months, she made a couple of infinitely useful comments about my work, things I still sometimes think about when writing, and certainly when teaching. Another thing she often did was to credit the "source" of a particular assignment or prompt or way of looking at a poem. "This came from Larry Levis," or "This is what Gerry Stern said about..." I think it's valuable to pass that information on to students, to let them know they're part of a continuum of poets and teachers.

I always loved her poem "My Amaryllis," which first appeared in Ploughshares and then in The Best American Poetry 1992 (edited by Charles Simic). Here it is.

A Poem by Deborah Digges

"Darwin's Finches"

1 
My mother always called it a nest, 
the multi-colored mass harvested

from her six daughters' brushes, 
and handed it to one of us

after she had shaped it, as we sat in front 
of the fire drying our hair.

She said some birds steal anything, a strand 
of spider's web, or horse's mane,

the residue of sheep's wool in the grasses 
near a fold

where every summer of her girlhood 
hundreds nested.

Since then I've seen it for myself, their genius—
how they transform the useless.

I've seen plastics stripped and whittled 
into a brilliant straw,

and newspapers—the dates, the years—
supporting the underweavings.


2 
As tonight in our bed by the window 
you brush my hair to help me sleep, and clean

the brush as my mother did, offering 
the nest to the updraft.

I'd like to think it will be lifted as far 
as the river, and catch in some white sycamore,

or drift, too light to sink, into the shaded inlets, 
the bank-moss, where small fish, frogs, and insects

lay their eggs. 
Would this constitute an afterlife?

The story goes that sailors, moored for weeks 
off islands they called paradise,

stood in the early sunlight 
cutting their hair. And the rare

birds there, nameless, almost extinct, 
came down around them

and cleaned the decks 
and disappeared into the trees above the sea.

Deborah Digges 1950-2009

 

Deborah Digges, 1950-2009

We are saddened by news of Deborah Digges's death.

<<
From THE MASSACHUSETTS DAILY COLLEGIAN
Officials: Woman dies following jump from McGuirk Police say it was a suicide

By William McGuinness, Collegian Staff

Published: Monday, April 13, 2009

A local resident fell from McGuirk Alumni Stadium on Friday in what police believe was a suicide. Deborah Digges, 59, of 101 Blue Hills Road, Amherst, Mass., was seen on Friday walking along the upper parts of the stadium by the Temple University women’s lacrosse team. Members of the team called the University of Massachusetts Police Department when they discovered her body on the ground near the stadium.

Digges was transported to Cooley-Dickenson hospital where she was pronounced dead. UMass spokesman Ed Blaguszewski said it is believed that Digges had no connection to the University and that police suspect no foul play in her death.

Digges was a local author who often attended and participated in poetry readings. She was a professor of English at Tufts University.
>>

How things go nuts. [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

There is a theory about dogs, about how at some point some wolves who were more mellow figured they’d hang by the dump and eat what humans left over, and very quickly, in one generation, it bred out the wolf traits of killing for food.  And this had, previously, been the wolf’s whole gig.  This so severely disrupted the DNA that everything else fell drastically out of whack, and resulted in mutations from the Dachshund to the Terrier to the Great Dane and Saint Bernard.   None of which look like the same animal as a wolf. 

I like to image this in a sudden bloom of dog families in which each member looks like a different species.  It must have been a ruff time to be a dog. It must have been a weird thing for man and dog to go through this.  Maybe owning dogs changed us too?   There is a mechanism, if people who could get along with dogs were much fitter, that would do it.

Sexy Poets Quiz

Match the poet with the quote from his or her poem:

 

1.  "I groped for him before I knew"

 

2.  "you slip/ half-a-foot deep into someone you like"

 

3.  "new memory like a seltzer in my crotch"

 

4.  "he kissed her Anne Sexton/ and she returned the favor, caressing

            his Ted Berrigan"

 

5.  "that slippery ingress ... its complicated fragrance"

 

6.  "Gently, with my lips/ loosen the button./ Have them slip into my hands/

            Like two freshly poured beer mugs"

 

7.  "she wanted him hung up on her breasts, not on her feet"

 

8.  "The clam shell opens./ The oyster is eaten."

 

9.  "At each beat of his heart it threw/ An odd little nod my way.  From the

            slot of the spout/ Extended a drop of transparent viscous goo"

 

10. "nude ghosts seeking each other out in the silence"

 

Charles Simic                Marge Piercy                    Albert Goldbarth

Emily Dickinson             David Lehman                  Allen Ginsberg

Elizabeth Alexander       Michael Ryan                    Jim Cummins

                                    W. H. Auden

        

Nin Andrews on Wiliam Faulkner

William Faulkner

When I was a girl, William Faulkner lived on our farm.  Whenever I say that, I feel as if I am saying Jesus lived with my family once upon a time.   My father liked to tell anyone who would listen that William Faulkner stayed in a cottage for a spell, back when he was teaching at U.Va.  I was just a baby and don’t remember one thing about him.  But I loved hearing the stories. Like the one about Faulkner saying his favorite character was the corncob from his novel Sanctuary. My mother insisted Faulkner was far too refined to say such a thing.  Even if it was true that he drank all the time.  And slept his days away.  And avoided any conversation, which was probably why he stayed on our farm instead of in town.  But there were those fall days when he would saunter up to the horse barn and ask if he could take one of the mares out on a trail ride.  He’d always choose the same feisty gray mare, and that horse always came back alone. William, my father would ask him, why don’t you try Sugar Lump today? Sugar Lump was so nice and calm, she would let a sack of potatoes stay on her back all day long.  My father said she’d probably let a drunk man ride her until the sun came down. But Faulkner didn’t take advice.  And he didn’t ride horses with names like Sugar Lump or Sweet Pea. No, he always had to pick Graylight, the meanest horse we owned. At the end of the day, Faulkner could be seen  walking him across the pasture alone, his riding hat in his hand, the shadows growing tall behind him. A writer always does like the horse who tosses him off, he said once, meaning who knows what.  But my father said he was pretty sure that’s just the way it is with the famous kind.  They need someone to make them walk on the ground.

-- Nin Andrews

One Hundred Poems from the Chinese [by Ben Mirov]

One Hundred Poems from the Chinese

He who sleeps all night beneath the snow
is a chrysanthemum
whispers One Hundred Poems from the Chinese
one rainy day in October
when you can no longer think of the soldiers
in Afghanistan who spend their nights
shooting at the same five guys.
The camels are spooked and can't catch a wink,
not to mention the kids in the mud hut
who hope One Hundred Poems from the Chinese
is something you can eat, or sell for something to eat.
Is there anything One Hundred Poems from the Chinese
can do for the broken toilet?
Probably, but neither you nor it can figure out what.
Still it's there for you somehow there
for all of us like a moonbeam
lighting a little piece of the house.
Months pass with no mention of Wandering Ghost Bridge
or snow-capped mountains
until the moment you need one
and One Hundred Poems from the Chinese is there
with its little bald man waving
from beneath his thatched roof with an armful of roots.

-- Ben Mirov