Poem of the Week is back!

To My Twenties

by Kenneth Koch

How lucky that I ran into you
When everything was possible
For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart
And so happy to see any woman—
O woman! O my twentieth year!
Basking in you, you
Oasis from both growing and decay
Fantastic unheard of nine- or ten-year oasis
A palm tree, hey! And then another
And another—and water!
I’m still very impressed by you. Whither,
Midst falling decades, have you gone? Oh in what lucky fellow,
Unsure of himself, upset, and unemployable
For the moment in any case, do you live now?
From my window I drop a nickel
By mistake. With
You I race down to get it
But I find there on
The street instead, a good friend,
X— N—, who says to me
Kenneth do you have a minute?
And I say yes! I am in my twenties!
I have plenty of time! In you I marry,
In you I first go to France; I make my best friends
In you, and a few enemies. I
Write a lot and am living all the time
And thinking about living. I loved to frequent you
After my teens and before my thirties.
You three together in a bar
I always preferred you because you were midmost
Most lustrous apparently strongest
Although now that I look back on you
What part have you played?
You never, ever, were stingy.
What you gave me you gave whole
But as for telling
Me how best to use it
You weren’t a genius at that.
Twenties, my soul
Is yours for the asking
You know that, if you ever come back.

Cinerama

by Barbara Hamby

When moviegoers die, instead of paradise they go to Paris,
      for where else can you find 200 screens
showing nearly every film you’d want to see, not to mention movies
      like Captain Blood, in which bad boy Errol Flynn
buckles his swash across the seven seas, and though I’m not dead,
      I may be in heaven, walking down the rue St. Antoine,
making lists of my favorite movies, number one being Cocteau’s
      Beauty and the Beast, but I’m with Garbo at the end:
“Where is my beast? Give me my beast.” Oh, the beasts have it
      on the silver screen—Ivan the Terrible, M, Nosferatu,
The Mummy—all misshapen, murderous monsters,
      because no matter how beautiful we are, inside we know
ourselves to be blood-sucking vampires, zombies, freaks cobbled
      together with spare parts from the graveyard,
and God some kind of Dr. Frankenstein or megalomaniacal director,
      part nice-guy Frank Capra, yes, but the other part
Otto Preminger, bald, with Nazi tics, because the world
      is so beautiful and hideous at the same time,
an identical Technicolor sky over us all, and the stars, who came up
      with that concept: the distance, the light,
the paparazzi flash? And the dialogue, which is sometimes snappy
      or très poétique, as if written by Shakespeare himself,
then at other times by the most guttural Neanderthal on the planet,
      grubbing his way across the landscape, noticing the sky
only when it becomes his enemy or friend, dark with birds,
      not Hitchcock’s, but dinner, throwing rocks into the sky,
most of them missing their target, a few bouncing off his prognathous jaw,
      like Kubrick with his cavemen and spacemen existing
on the same continuum, a Möbius strip to be sure but with Strauss,
      both Richard and Johann, in the background, and though it’s winter
there’s a waltz in the air as I walk through the Place des Vosges,
      and I’m still trying to come up with number two,
maybe 400 Blows or Breathless, because here I am, after all in Paris
      still expecting to see Belmondo and Seberg racing
down the street, cops after them, bullets flying, and maybe I am
      in heaven, but I’ll always be waiting for Godard.

From Five Points

Here's one for all of my fellow Atlantians stuck in the snowpocalypse...STILL!

Snowflake

by William Baer

Timing’s everything. The vapor rises
high in the sky, tossing to and fro,
then freezes, suddenly, and crystalizes
into a perfect flake of miraculous snow.
For countless miles, drifting east above
the world, whirling about in a swirling free-
for-all, appearing aimless, just like love,
but sensing, seeking out, its destiny.
Falling to where the two young skaters stand,
hand in hand, then flips and dips and whips
itself about to ever-so-gently land,
a miracle, across her unkissed lips:
as he blocks the wind raging from the south,
leaning forward to kiss her lovely mouth.


From poetryfoundation.org

I Went in With My Hands Up

by Caleb Barber


It was a little like that pregnant black heifer
stuck in the aluminum feeder-box sized specifically for calves
—jackknifed, full of muesli and seed, her head turned out
toward the snowy morning.

Me and that 80-year-old Irishman had to lift it,
the several hundred pounds of green metal, knowing,
with our elbows hefted above our divergent hairlines
and our ankles foundered in thick pasture mud, we would be totally exposed.

And she’d be coming out in a hurry, big and taut around the middle.
Us just hoping she wouldn’t lose her calf in the fuss.

It was a little like that. Stopping by that girl’s house
the other night. Except without the help. And this doesn’t come out right.
I would never be so pigheaded as to compare a woman to a cow.
Just to compare the parameters using the inconsequential vessel of simile.

I didn’t even know what horns that heifer bore.
What spawn might be brewing within her black belly.
But it had to be done. She had to be turned loose. I kept my legs.
And one doesn’t count as a stampede.

From Rattle - Poetry for the 21st Century

One of my New Year's resolutions is to get back to posting a poem every week...because we all need more poetry in our lives, I think.

On that note, here's a poem for the new year!


New Year's Day

by Kim Addonizio

The rain this morning falls
on the last of the snow

and will wash it away. I can smell
the grass again, and the torn leaves

being eased down into the mud.
The few loves I’ve been allowed

to keep are still sleeping
on the West Coast. Here in Virginia

I walk across the fields with only
a few young cows for company.

Big-boned and shy,
they are like girls I remember

from junior high, who never
spoke, who kept their heads

lowered and their arms crossed against
their new breasts. Those girls

are nearly forty now. Like me,
they must sometimes stand

at a window late at night, looking out
on a silent backyard, at one

rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls
of other people’s houses.

They must lie down some afternoons
and cry hard for whoever used

to make them happiest,
and wonder how their lives

have carried them
this far without ever once

explaining anything. I don’t know
why I’m walking out here

with my coat darkening
and my boots sinking in, coming up

with a mild sucking sound
I like to hear. I don’t care

where those girls are now.
Whatever they’ve made of it

they can have. Today I want
to resolve nothing.

I only want to walk
a little longer in the cold

blessing of the rain,
and lift my face to it.

From poetryfoundation.org

I’m Over the Moon

by Brenda Shaughnessy


I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do.
Confuse me, ovulate me,

spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient
date-rape drug. So I’ll howl at you, moon,

I’m angry. I’ll take back the night. Using me to
swoon at your questionable light,

you had me chasing you,
the world’s worst lover, over and over

hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight.
But you disappear for nights on end

with all my erotic mysteries
and my entire unconscious mind.

How long do I try to get water from a stone?
It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone. I’m going to write hard
and fast into you, moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn’t understand.
You with no swampy sexual

promise but what we glue onto you.
That’s not real. You have no begging

cunt. No panties ripped off and the crotch
sucked. No lacerating spasms

sending electrical sparks through the toes.
Stars have those.

What do you have? You’re a tool, moon.
Now, noon. There’s a hero.

The obvious sun, no bullshit, the enemy
of poets and lovers, sleepers and creatures.

But my lovers have never been able to read
my mind. I’ve had to learn to be direct.

It’s hard to learn that, hard to do.
The sun is worth ten of you.

You don’t hold a candle
to that complexity, that solid craze.

Like an animal carcass on the road at night,
picked at by crows,

taunting walkers and drivers. Your face
regularly sliced up by the moving

frames of car windows. Your light is drawn,
quartered, your dreams are stolen.

You change shape and turn away,
letting night solve all night’s problems alone.

From poetryfoundation.org

Dream Song 14

by John Berryman


Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

From PoetryFoundation.org

Night Watch

by Mark Smith-Soto

Chico whines, no reason why. Just now walked,
dinner gobbled, head and ears well scratched.
And yet he whines, looking up at me as if confused
at my just sitting here, typing away, while darkness
is stalking the back yard. How can I be so blind,
he wants to know, how sad, how tragic, how I
won’t listen before it is too late. His whines are
refugees from a brain where time and loss have
small dominion, but where the tyranny of now
is absolute. I get up and throw open the kitchen door,
and he disappears down the cement steps, barking
deeper and darker than I remember. I follow
to find him perfectly still in the empty yard—
the two of us in the twilight, standing guard.

From PoetryFoundation.org

Love Sections a Grapefruit

by Barbara Bates

The knife circles the inside edge along the lip
until the little triangles loosen
and the fruit opens

to more than it's mirror image,
an interior pattern, so perfectly hewn
that following it ensures each bite exquisite.

But those in a hurry to taste the pulp
will quarter the whole and eagerly fold
spoke, membrane and zest into their mouths.

They never notice the divine pattern,
the discreet placement of flesh in the mold,
juice just runs down their chins and on to the floor.


Frpm Caveat Lector. Barbara Bates has published work in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Red Rock Review, and elsewhere. Her first book, Littoral Zone (John Daniel Press), appeared in 2004. She lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Fifteen

by Leslie Monsour


The boys who fled my father's house in fear
Of what his wrath would cost them if he found
Them nibbling slowly at his daughter's ear,
Would vanish out the back without a sound,
And glide just like the shadow of a crow,
To wait beside the elm tree in the snow.
Something quite deadly rumbled in his voice.
He sniffed the air as if he knew the scent
Of teenage boys, and asked, "What was that noise?"
Then I'd pretend to not know what he meant,
Stand mutely by, my heart immense with dread,
As Father set the traps and went to bed.

From PoetryFoundation.org