Ode to Poetry: Mrs. Darwin

Mrs Darwin

7 April 1852.

Went to the Zoo.

I said to him –

Something about that chimpanzee over there

reminds me of you.

-Carol Ann Duffy

Ode to Poetry: Having a Coke with You

Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it.

-Frank O'Hara

Ode to Poetry: Trading for Heaven

I saw you at the top of the stairs.
Now I live a secret life.

I saw you holding open the door.
Now I’m filling pages with
 

things I can’t tell anyone.
Now I’m more alone than I’ve ever been.
 

I traded every beyond, every someday,
for heaven in my lifetime. Now I’m dying
 

of my life. Now I’m alive
inside my death.
 

Do you see the space between our bodies?
Barely a hand, hardly a breath,
 

it is the space mountains and rivers are made of.
It is the beginning of oceans, the space
 

between either and or, both and neither,
the happiness of forgetting
 

our names and the happiness of hearing them
for the first time. I heard you
 

singing yourself to sleep.
It was a song from both of our childhoods.
 

And now I don’t know if singing
is a form of helplessness,
Time’s architecture revealed,
 

or some inborn motive all blood
and breath obey
to enact a savage wheel.
 

I found you at dawn
sitting by the open kitchen window.
You were sorting seeds in a plate.
 

And if you were praying out loud,
I’ll never tell.

And if you were listening to the doves,
and if their various whoo-ing, and coo-ing,
and dying in time,
are your earliest questions blown back to you
through the ragged seasons,
 

and if you’ve lived your life
in answer to those questions,
I’ll never tell.
 

Your destiny is safe with me.
Your childhood is safe with me.
What you decide to bury is safe with me.

-Li-Young Lee

Ode to Poetry: Love Poems from Yehuda Amichai

Songs for a Woman (Excerpt)

wherever you love 

furniture must be removed from the room 

trees, mountains, seas—all of it
gone from the narrow world.

4.
When you smile
serious ideas suddenly get drowsy 

all night the mountains keep silent at your side—
at morning, the sand goes out with you, to sea 

when you do nice things to me
all heavy industry shuts down

Advice for Good Love

Advice for good love: Don’t love

those from far away.  Take yourself one

from nearby.

The way a sensible house will take

local stones for its building,

stones which have suffered in the same cold

and were scorched by the same sun.

Take the one with the golden wreath

around her dark eye’s pupil, she

who has a certain knowledge

about your death.  Love also inside

a ruin, like taking honey out of 

the lion’s carcass that Samson killed.

And advice for bad love: With

the love left over

from the previous one

make a new woman for yourself,

then with what is left of that woman

make again a new love,

and go on like that

until nothing remains.

A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned 
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little. 

Ode to Poetry: I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

-Pablo Neruda

An Ode to the Elephant: My Own Poem

Just for fun...

This is an Ode to the Elephant

It’s not that I did a stint

in India 

or Africa 

that these

gray monstrosities

capture my attention,

my affection,

despite their forgetful 

representation.

No, you see,

it’s their majesty, 

that makes me reply,

to that dull guy,

asking “What animal would you be?”

“A dolphin,” 

says the girl from 

the sorority,

“A jaguar,” 

says the boy from

behind the bar,

“An ELEPHANT!” I cry, 

wide and far.

“Because they’ve got big ears for listening, 

big noses for smelling, 

big eyes for seeing, 

big feet for stomping.

they’re not afraid of being big and fat,

they’re alright with that. 

That means they’ve got more life, 

they’ve got more sense,

they never regret emails just after they’re sent.

They don’t sit it out on the bench, 

No, they’re grand but sweet too, 

fit to carry royalty,

they live in jungles,

I’d like a small one for a pet, 

but that’s silly,

who’d want to clean up after it wet

the floor?

but I like them anyway, 

they’re a cute set,

they’re funny and sweet and dangerous to boot, 

and always trumpeting when it all comes to,

they’re kind of like me

or how I wish to be,

so that’s why I reply

to that dull guy,

asking, “What animal would you be?”

AN ELEPHANT, I cry!

Roam: Chicago, Wrapped in the Cozy Blanket of AWP12

Last week was the arrival of a much anticipated event: my very first AWP Conference.

For those of you who don't concern yourselves with the inner-workings of the literary world, AWP stands for Associated Writers and Writing Programs. Each year, they host the largest annual conference of writers, editors and publishers in a different city. This year, it was in Chicago.

I hadn't planned on going to the conference. It all seemed too far off, too professional, too grand for a little first-year poet MFA like me. But I changed my mind after listening to a 25 minute reminiscence/laugh fest about last year's conference at a staff meeting for our literary journal.
"You must go." Our managing editor commanded us timid interns. She looked us each dead in the eye around the conference table and we nodded with quaking hearts.

Whether our attendance was to be for our own benefit or to have more hands to man our table at the Bookfair, I know not. Either way, we booked our flights, booked our hotel, booked our registration, and I was on my way to the Windy City.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into. To give you some idea of the insanity of this event, I will henceforth refer to it as the Writer's Olympics, or the Writer's World Cup. 10,000 writers descended upon Chicago in a literary frenzy, carrying fresh business cards and smart phones with thumbs stretched and ready to tweet. Having been to World Youth Day twice (aka Catholic Olympics, Catholic World Cup, etc.), which generally has attendees numbering in the millions, I was alright with the crowds. In fact, I thrive off of that kind of collective energy. What I couldn't deal with was the pressure: the pressure to be at the best panel, the best reading, the best off-site event at any given moment. The Olympics ran from Wednesday to Saturday: the Bookfair's 550 booths continuously stretching out in the nooks and crannies of the basement of the Hilton Chicago like some monstrous Kraken of the sea, hovering beneath the various ballrooms hosting the panels. The panels themselves gave me heart palpitations, with as many as 20 panels/readings happening at a time. Each featured experienced and well-known writers, editors, and publishers expounding on subjects like Connecting with Readers via your Website and Social Media or The Art of Writing a Joke. There were panels on publishing via your iPhone, on writing with violence, how to write about loss, when a text becomes feminist...you get the picture.  Then came the more than 200 off-site events synchronously happening in different parts of Chicago.

I did my best. I averaged 2/3 panels a day, some of which I ducked out of early if they got too boring. I'd run down to the Bookfair or drop in on another. I loved The Art of Writing a Joke featuring Alan Shapiro, at which he and his friends essentially told their favorite dirty jokes for an hour. I didn't learn too much, but I got a good laugh.

My major highlight of the week was meeting my ultimatefavorite contemporary poet: Kim Addonizio. I love her. I love her poetry.
Now, I've met a few famous poets in my day. At Gonzaga, we had Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forché and Li Young-Lee come to read, come talk to the poetry classes. We even had a small mixer at Spokane's Atticus for the poetry students with Sharon Olds(!) Through all these, I kept my calm. But I've always wanted to meet Kim Addonizio because she clinched poetry for me. I'd always liked poetry, but it wasn't until I read her work that I realized what poetry could be, its wide potential. She's sassy. Her poems are wild, surprising and different. So I brought my book of hers with me to the World Cup and planned to go to her panels and meet her afterwards. It was my number one goal. I had a speech planned. One that went something like, "Hi, it's such an honor to meet you. I'm a young poet and your poetry really inspired me at a crucial point in my life. It made me decide to be a poet. Would you sign my book?" and then step back and be quiet.

This is not what happened.
Instead, I was at the Bookfair, chatting with some lady at some booth about their summer writing program featuring Billy Collins and Joyce Carol Oates, when I saw Kim's name in little print. This is what went down.

"Oh Kim Addonizio's on here! I love her."
"Oh really? She was just here...actually she's right there." and the lady helpfully pointed her out at the next booth.
I spun around wildly and didn't think at all before I launched.
Me, breathless: "Hi Kim?!"
Kim: "Uh, yes?"
Me, shaking her hand for too long: "Hi, I'm Colleen, I just wanted to say that I'm such a fan of your poetry, and it really clinched being a poet for me, it's just so inspring (speaking faster and faster now) andIwenttoGonzagandstudiedunderTodMarshallwhointerviewedyouonceandhegaveusyourbookanditreallychangedmywholelifebecausenowI'mgettingmyMFAandIhaveWhatisThisThingCalledLovebutnotyourlatestbook."
Kim: "Have some coasters. They're for my new book."
Me: "Thanks!!!! I'll see you at your panels!"

I then ran away, almost bumping into several people. I'm pretty sure I went blind for a few moments. I forgot to ask her to sign my book. It took an hour for my adrenaline to die down. But I still met her!!!!!

The second highlight of the Olympics was Friday night. Some of the girls and I decided to show up late for the HowtobeanAlcoholic panel at the bars of Chicago and go to the Poets Laureate Reading to hear Philip Levine and Carol Ann Duffy (Britain's Poet Laureate).

I went looking forward to hearing Philip Levine, and left entranced by Carol Ann.

I have never heard any poet read the way she read. Carol Ann Duffy is one of those languid women that seem to float on the air they breathe. She quite simply slinked up to the podium, and began to speak in a slow, thick voice, a voice that normally would sound quite drunk, if it weren't for her sharp, dry observations and perfect timing. Her poetry was phenomenal, and I listened breathlessly, attentive to every inflection, every word. As we were sitting there, listening to this great poet of our time, I got the feeling that such events are supposed to give: this wonderful feeling of nowness, of being part of this world, of the privilege that comes with hearing history speaking from the stage in front of me and knowing myself to be part of it simply because I was there. There were well over a thousand writers in that ballroom listening to Duffy read, but it was wonderfully personal. I was discovering new poetry to love, and isn't that really what it's all about? So much of the literary world today is focused on the career aspect of writing: on making connections, networking, researching, reading everything, so as not to get left behind. And I don't necessarily condemn that...it has made a very vague kind of vocation more specific, more accessible, and I am most certainly benefitting from the modern approach to writing (as one friend likes to put it, I'm good at the internet.) For more on the subject, check out this article from the New York Review.  It sums up my feelings about it quite nicely.
But boy, do I enjoy it when all those things fall away and I stop thinking about myself, my writing, stop  wondering if I could write something like the poetry I'm hearing. How glorious it was to just hear some poems and like them and know that I could never, ever, ever write the way she does, because it's a voice so very Duffy, how glorious to just sit back and fall in love with poetry, with words, with art again because I'm absorbed in the story being told, in the beauty of a turn of phrase. I want to own it, these things, that story, that turn of phrase, but I can't, even if I bought the book or wrote my own perfect lines...I can't own it, and trying to write something just as good won't give it to me. All I can do is listen.
The Bookfair was a pleasure in and of itself. I bought my friend Claire Mcquerry's excellent first book, Lacemakers, and had her sign it. I spent a lot of time at the table handing out flyers and just chatting with the people that came by. These chats can lead to a variety of connections, and a few of the second and third years left in excitement over possible book deals and publishing opportunities, but as a first year, I don't have so much ready for publication, so was free to wander the fair for my own amusement, with no agenda to push as so many at AWP do. It was wonderful, perusing the booths, talking to editors who'd normally never give me the time of day (people are nice when they're hoping you'll buy something). I subscribed to Tin House and Agni and The Fairytale Review and bought more books than I had suitcase space for. I even bought a mug from the Rumpus, seen here. I'm not a mug collector, but this one: I couldn't resist.

It was strange to be with so many of my "people." Writers either dress terribly or wonderfully, and everyone looks the same. We talk the same too. We went out with a few MFAs from Maryland and it struck me: the surreal similarity of our conversations. I almost applied to Maryland, and it was reassuring to realize that I could go to any school for my MFA, and though the program would be different, the conversations would be the same. It was comforting, this sense of a national community.
I've read some critiques of AWP, mostly by misanthropic writers who have an issue with the incestuous "Aren't we wonderful?!" collective selfbackslap of the writer's community and I have to say that yes, yes, we are.

Ode to Poetry: Rilke, Uncollected

Paris, early summer 1909:
Forget, forget, and let us live now
only this, how the stars pierce through
cleared nocturnal sky; how the moon's whole disk
surmounts the gardens. We've sensed so long already
how the darkness breeds many mirrors: how a gleam
takes shape, a white shadow in the radiance
of night. But now let us cross over
and invest this world where
everything is lunar-

Duino, late autumn 1911:
For I don't think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don't invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you've gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself,
when, for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

Ode to Poetry: To Bedlam and Partway Back

Her Kind
I have gone out, a possessed witch, 
haunting the black air, braver at night; 
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch 
over the plain houses, light by light: 
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. 
A woman like that is not a woman, quite. 
I have been her kind. 

I have found the warm caves in the woods, 
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, 
closets, silks, innumerable goods; 
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: 
whining, rearranging the disaligned. 
A woman like that is misunderstood. 
I have been her kind. 

I have ridden in your cart, driver, 
waved my nude arms at villages going by, 
learning the last bright routes, survivor 
where your flames still bite my thigh 
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. 
A woman like that is not ashamed to die. 
I have been her kind.

-Anne Sexton

Write a Poem about it.

      I like to be general when people ask me what I do. "I'm a writer." I reply. "Have you published anything?" "That depends on what you mean by published."

     I never know what's apropos. Does my college literary journal count? The independent magazine my brother started? The little local writing contest I won? If I earned money for it, does that validate my claim? Should I then throw in my year of technical writing in LA? Some of that's published...but is probably not very interesting.

So I give the easiest answer, "I'm getting my Master's in Creative Writing." But that doesn't stop them.

"What kind of writing?"

Inside, I writhe. Isn't it enough to know I write? Now I have to classify myself further?

"Poetry, I guess, technically."

"Ah." Their heads bob, they nod appreciatively.

     However, poetry far from dominates my education here in San Diego. Sure, I write poems, read much more them than I did before, but I've also become addicted to Pintrest, had far too many conversations about Occupy Wall Street than I should care to, and visited most every dive bar within 10 miles of my apartment. My MFA has brought me the intellectual stimulation I was so afraid of losing after my return from my summer adventuring in Europe: after meeting so many people, perusing so many museums, reading so much, I was terrified of returning to mainstream American culture and losing that part of myself.
     What I've learned most about poetry since taking it up as my official course of study is how everything is a poem. And I learned this not from my classes, but from my fellow writers. The delightful part of attending a poetry program is the community. Oh we've our far share of weirdos...we're a writing program after all. And because we're all writers, so we're all alike in a few predictable ways. We all think that what we have to say really, really, really needs to be heard. First. Over everything else. Over everyone else. We delight in a little well-placed drama and dry wit and have penchants for clever anecdotes and absurd facts.
      But the best part of being an MFA student is that I'm no longer a writer, I'm one of many writers. We're a movement of poets, a literary gang, a Kardomah group, the Inklings, the Beats (we wish)...we sit around our beers and the bearded men smoke their cigarettes and we talk and laugh and if anything interesting gets said, someone inevitably responds,"You should write a poem about that."

The best part about getting my MFA is that my classmates and I all live on the same page.

Ode to Poetry: Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

-William Carlos Williams

Ode to Poetry: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Part 1)

S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

-T.S. Eliot

My Latest Poem: Orion

I've never posted a poem of mine on my actual blog before. I have a few under the Poetry Portfolio Tab, but even that was a reluctant decision on my part. Poetry is so very personal that I've always felt it deserved to be read aloud, usually to one person at a time...not just viewed on a screen.
However, I am now officially enrolled in San Diego State University's Creative Writing program. For the next 3 years, I'll be working on my Master's degree in poetry itself, so I've decided I need to start putting my work out there!

My latest poem is titled "Orion". Several different threads in my life led to writing this poem...In March, I attended a film event at the California Space Center titled "Startling Beauty", a film that chronicled the beauty of the discoveries of the Hubble Telescope. What made this event special was not just the film however...Dr. Massimo Robberto, one of the leading astro-physicists in the world, spoke to our group of 400 about the film, about our universe, and about our place in it. One of the images that stayed with me most closely after seeing this film was that of the Orion Nebula, an immense cloud of pink and purple dust, where winds blow stars into being.

Growing up, Orion was always the easiest constellation for me to recognize. Find his belt, and suddenly there he was, my own warrior in the sky...

Orion

Like a young woman,
too loud and too beautiful,
I watched you rise, and fall
in frustration, in admiration.
I dreamt of you, watched you,
tasted you, like the slippery
innards of a sharp, pungent
dandelion,
licked your light
like moonshine liquor.

Once, I found experience
on the sidewalk.
With you, under your gaze,
I dipped it in meaning, like an ice
cream cone in chocolate:
dripping, melting to nothing,
the residue left sticky on my
fingers.

I left you.
Like a rebel child,
I sought the other,
denied your wisdom.
But you slipped back to me:
silently, deftly.
In secrets and notes
played slowly on the piano,
I heard again of your beauty.

I came back a captive
to your bright stars,
to your bright belt,
wound round my waist.

21 Love Poems: #3

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we’re not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.


-Adrienne Rich

Ode to Poetry: What Do Women Want?

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

-Kim Addonizio

Ode to Poetry: Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

-Robert Hass

Ode to Poetry: Other Women's Men

Not that I am the type to move in,

steal them away. Still, I can see why some women do, 

crossing legs on a bar stool, brightening

like the corner house that leaves

all their lights on: everyone knows



their kitchen walls are blue.
A flash of teeth or eyes that says

pay attention. All of us must hide

such hunger somewhere. Or, 

if we are certain he loves her, the thrill



that he finds us interesting,

not for what we might offer in the end:

his question about my childhood trip to Russia

genuine, that hand he lifts to his glasses,

rubs around his neck, not affect but pure gesture.

I would like to believe this, as I crush

the lime over my glass, not trying to sparkle but not

not. 

This story about the car

he rebuilt in high school-



but people are all affect, I think

and then must wait for sense

to catch up with his sound, 

so I can deliver the awaited response,

with some extra show to compensate.

The way the young men at church, 

newly married, avoid me or make 

great show of wedding bands, why, at a potluck,

one whose wife is gone to her sister's in Tucson,

when I sit beside him, becomes deeply

fascinated by his pecan pie.

Some puritanical sensibility that sees an impure thought

far down the road and crosses to the opposite sidewalk-

even if that thought in the end is nothing

but a trick of sunlight.

There was a time, if we believe the stories,

when men and women didn't know their nakedness.

The afternoon in that shared kitchen

when I asked Sarah's husband about Amarene:

cherries soaked in syrup and brandy from the Friday market

and he crossed the room, holding the little clay jar,

unlidded it and lifted one cherry on a spoon,

the red syrup pooling the spoon's bowl, 

and I opened my mouth to take

the bright fruit, closed my lips over the spoon,

only a moment, until a rat moved against a drain pipe

or I lifted a finger to wipe the syrup from my lip,

and we both saw how 

close we stood, and he 

turned quickly setting

he jar aside, to scour at

the coffee staining

the sink.

-Claire Mcquerry


Claire is an up and coming modern poet currently getting her PhD at University of Missouri. I have the good fortune of knowing her personally through our alma mater and my oldest brother, Paul, but did not know how wonderful her poetry was until 2 year ago when she came back to Gonzaga as a guest in the Visiting Writer's Workshop. She read this poem at her reading and I fell in love with it. It's still one of my favorite poems.

Ode to Poetry: Love Song

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws one voice out of two seperate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.


-Rainer Maria Rilke

Ode to Poetry: Entrance into Wood

With scarce my reason, with my fingers,
with slow waters slow flooded,
I fall to the realm of forget-me-nots,
to a mourning air that clings,
to a forgotten room in ruins,
to a cluster of bitter love.

I fall into shadow, the midst
of things broken down,
I look at spiders, and graze on forests
of secret inconclusive wood,
I pass along damp uprooted fibers
to the live heart of matter and silence.

Smooth substance, oh drywinged rose,
in my sinking I climb your petals,
my feet weighed down with a red fatigue,
and I kneel in your hard cathedral
bruising my lips on an angel.

Here I am faced with your color of the world,
with your pale dead swords,
with your gathered hearts,
with your silent horde.

Here I am with your wave of dying fragrances
wrapped in autumn and resistance:
it is I embarking on a funeral journey
among your yellow scars:
it is I with my sourceless laments,
unnourished, wakeful, alone,
entering darkened corridors,
reaching your mysterious matter.

I see your dry currents moving,
broken-off hands I see growing,
I see your oceanic plants
creaking, shaken by night and fury,
and I feel leaves dying inwards,
amassing green materials
to your desolate stillness.

Pores, veins, circles of smoothness,
weight, silent temperature,
arrows cleaving to your fallen soul,
being asleep in your thick mouth,
dust of sweet pulp consumed,
ash full of snuffed-out souls,
come to me, to my measureless dream,
fall into my room where night falls
and incessantly falls like broken water,
and clasp me to your life, to your death,
to your crushed matter,
to your dead neutral doves,
and let us make fire, and silence, and sound,
and let us burn, and be silent, and bells.


-Pablo Neruda

Ode to Poetry: You Who Never Arrived

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me-- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

-Rainer Maria Rilke