Tag Archives: poem

A poem for a cousin going into rehab upstate

Posted on July 30, 2008 by | Comments Off

For today’s Wordsmith Wednesday, I return to a poem I composed for another of my cousins. Earlier, I shared a different kind of poem for another cousin. This one is a lot more direct, maybe even to the point of cliche, but at the time, it captured what I was thinking about my cousin and maybe about my own life.

For A Cousin Going Into Rehab Upstate

Listen, even in the silence the secondhand

keeps moving, the rat-a-tat of a keyboard,
one hand clapping 
in the wind.
 
Where do we go from here?
Upward mobility is a fancy name for 
the dream we dream.
I can't promise you 
the cruelty of the world 
won't try to crush you.
To put it in perspective, 
at least 300 are feared
dead in a Moroccan earthquake,
there are larger headlines to be written
than cousin goes into rehab upstate,
to be sure,
but none so personal to me than to know
what the world needs now
is to see you in it
breathing
in
out
in 
out,
the clock can be your friend,
not your enemy.
 
Listen, even in the silence 
the secondhand keeps moving, 
the rat-a-tat of the keyboard 
keeps rat-a-tatting along
 
like some jazz song from
years gone by.
It makes no sense
what we do
but we continue:
to live.

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The first moment the mouse crawled out of the wall

Posted on July 23, 2008 by | 1 Comment

For today’s Wordsmith Wednesday , I’m going to continue something I started last week and share a journal entry from 1991, the year after I graduated from college and when I was living with my parents. This is from October 14, 1991. For me, it is interesting to note that some of the struggles with which I was battling then philosophically, I still am battling now, from journaling in general to how I view the world: “through a glass darkly.”

From this point on: I am going to use this journal for more than
just recording my own thoughts, impressions, poems, but for putting
others' ideas down also. (Not saying I'll cease from my own ranting,
because this might give me the chance to place all or a lot of
scattered notes for different poems and articles into one journal.
Into one place. I doubt all my ideas would fit into one journal.)

First, currently in my reading, I am happening across some very
interesting quotations that seem to be written for me, to inspire me
to continue writing. Here a few to begin with:

From "The Man with The Blue Guitar" by Wallace Stevens:

	I sing a hero's head, large eye
	And bearded bronze, but not a man.

	Although I patch him as I can
	and reach through him almost to man.

It reminds me of a great aunt's drawings of a man's head, an eye
in a broken piece of mirror. And how possibly it was with her
schizophrenia that caused her to perceive the word in pieces. How
maybe we are all trying to patch the world together, to come to
a fuller knowledge of what man is.

From "The Blue Buildings in the Summer Air," also by Wallace Stevens:

	Cotton Mather died when I was a boy. The books
	He read, all day, all night, and all the nights
	Had got him nowehere. There was always the doubt,
	That made him preach the louder, long for a church
	In which his voice would roll its cadence
	After the sermon, to quiet that mouse in the wall.

The line that struck me was "to quiet that mouse in the wall." Here
in this room I write there is a mouse in my wall. And I feel like
four years of education may have gotten me here – in the middle of
nowhere. And maybe doubt makes me write louder and louder to shut
up that mouse.

Later, I would write about “that mouse in the wall” in a few poems. If you missed this the first time around, here they are again.

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Among Things You Learn on NPR

Posted on June 25, 2008 by | 1 Comment

My wife and I got rid of our cable in 2004 and we often listened to the radio then and still do. One of the things to which we listened regularly was, and still do from time to time, National Public Radio. This poem came out of that.

Among Things You Learn On NPR

1.

It’s called the Dardas Mission,

and tonight 1.4 million people,

who signed their names on silicone paper,

are on that mission in a capsule

in a space probe, ready to go

through the comet’s tail in 2006,

and beyond, if all goes

according to plan.

Astronomers theorize the comet will stay in orbit

around the sun, or will remain

in space, to hit a planet, or go out of the solar system,

“which is more likely,” says the optimistic

scientist on the phone from Houston.

Twenty billion years from now,

those names etched in silicone

will be the surviving artifacts of

our system, he says.

2.

In Bam, at least 30,000 people

die,

but the survivors

blog on

in forums for freedom of expression.

“As long as media is controlled in Iran, the blog on the

destruction of Bam has given Iranian bloggers new impetus:

emotions about people’s death,” says the sociologist stoically.

Examples are “I can hear the voice of death, it’s close

and whispering in my ears”;

“I don’t know if I should be sad or angry,

I don’t think the regime criminals care.”

“Two bloggers even arranged to meet in Tehran,”

he says in amazement.

For now, the bloggers are allowed to blog

on and on,

undeterred.

Twenty billion years from now,

we will see where our freedom has gotten us.

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CHK-6645

Posted on June 11, 2008 by | Comments Off

The poem for today’s Wordsmith Wednesday came out of a real experience, but with embellishment, of course, to certain things, as such as is with poetry.

CHK-6645

“Who’ll stop the rain?”
– CCR

She couldn’t bring herself to climb into the Chinook
at the air show, she said, because it reminded her
of her father serving in Vietnam. But I did,

on her behalf, and as I walked up the ramp,
heard the boots shuffling across the tarmac:
the other men as they climbed in behind him.

There were no individual seats, just two benches
running down both sides, and bubble-shaped
windows which looked out on the jungle,

straps to hold you in. About every five feet,
a medical kit was inset in the wall, a red cross
painted on it to remind you this was not a drill.

She said he only talked about his experience once,
and that even then it wasn’t much. It was a tale
he told around the campfire to her and her sister

when they were children. Like a ghost story,
the Viet Cong were the bogeymen in the bush,
but smaller, wielding machine guns, machetes.

He never spoke of losing any friends there,
of the woman in Saigon, the photograph
her mother found in a box of medals

he’d won for assorted acts of bravery,
or why he won them. He was also silent
when he and his daughter walked down the path

to the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington,
as if he was remembering walking up a ramp,
the names of those who went with him.

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