Deep Poems--with ah!--Cute Things

Oh. Sorry. Hello. Are you on your way to work, too? I was just taken aback by how you also have a briefcase, also small & brown. I was taken by how you seem, secretly, to love everything. Are you my new coworker? Oh. I see. No. Still, good to meet you. I’m trying out this thing where it’s good to meet people. Maybe, beyond briefcases, we have some things in common. I like jelly beans. I’m afraid of death. I’m afraid of farting, even around people I love. Do you think your mother loves you when you fart? Does your mother love you all the time? Have you ever doubted? I like that the street we’re on is named after a tree, when there are none, poplar or otherwise. I wonder if a tree has ever been named after a street, whether that worked out. If I were a street, I hope I’d get a good name, not Main or One-Way. One night I ran out of an apartment, down North Pleasant Street — it was soft & neighborly with pines & oaks, it felt too hopeful, after what happened. After my mother’s love became doubtful. After I told her I liked a boy & she wished I had never been born. After she said she was afraid of me, terrified I might infect my brothers with my abnormality. Sometimes, parents & children become the most common strangers. Eventually, a street appears where they can meet again. Or not. I’ve doubted my own love for my mother. I doubt. Do I have to forgive in order to love? Or do I have to love for forgiveness to even be possible? What do you think? I’m trying out this thing where questions about love & forgiveness are a form of work I’d rather not do alone. I’m trying to say, Let’s put our briefcases on our heads, in the sudden rain, & continue meeting as if we’ve just been given our names. *** Chen Chen, "Poplar Street," Poetry, June 2015.

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons. They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another, So it is impossible to tell how many there are. My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep. Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage—— My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head. I am a nun now, I have never been so pure. I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet. The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. Before they came the air was calm enough, Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine. They concentrate my attention, that was happy Playing and resting without committing itself. The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat, And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health. ***Sylvia Plath, “Tulips” from Collected Poems, 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981.

A man walks into a museum in Paris, the Museum of Natural History, to saw a tusk off an elephant- skeleton centuries-older than he’ll ever be, becoming in those early morning hours part of a derelict and inglorious human history, while swallows darn the air in loops, their glinting wings an origami of hushed folds only glimpsed by one vigilant girl, framed as she is within a pane of glass, the door of her heart opening onto a filigreed balcony that keeps her suspended, an unlikely wish about someone not coming back. A man walks. A man walks into a bar. “Whaddya want?” Dusty continent of desire. Majesty left as ragged meat in heaps for hyenas “laughing” in heat. Who can look away? A man sets rough elbows heavy on the lip of zinc, thumbs each cheekbone so his pointers steeple to catch his brow, shuts eyes, heaves a sigh then slumps to rest an unshaven cheek against the cool, unquestioning bar, as though to sink into what’s most elemental. What’s “natural” about any man making his way alone through empty Left Bank streets carrying not a lovely burnished box of watercolor paints in uniform lozenge-cakes but a chainsaw? The wheeling sky sees all while sleepers sleep, still dreaming in languages long lost when day breaks. The pinking sky sees all, but rarely speaks though someone more Romantic might say it weeps. And the sleepless girl, orphaned by light, the bright tusk of her hopes. The joke no joke, no punch- line, but a gut-punch in plain sight. ***Katrina Roberts, "Want," Poem-a-Day May 28, 2015, Academy of American Poets.

Our paper house sat on the banks of the red river and though mother wasn’t like other mothers I was like other girls trapped and lonely and painting pictures in the stars. I was slick with old birth or early longing, already halfway between who I wanted to be and who I was. Our floors were made of flame but there was no wind so we were as safe as anyone. When spring came, I walked for a very long time up I-35, and at the end of the road, I found a boy who placed earphones onto my head and pumped opera into my body. I can feel it still. Underneath that treeless sky, I was as changed as I would ever be. Not even mother noticed. ***Nicole Callihan, "Fable."

1. After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see. And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure That someone was there squinting through the dust, Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then, Even for a few nights, into that other life where you And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy? Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove? Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old, Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns. 2. He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out, Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens. But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin. Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives Before take-off, before we find ourselves Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold? The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky Like migratory souls. 3. Bowie is among us. Right here In New York City. In a baseball cap And expensive jeans. Ducking into A deli. Flashing all those teeth At the doorman on his way back up. Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette As the sky clouds over at dusk. He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel The way you’d think he feels. Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes. I’ve lived here all these years And never seen him. Like not knowing A comet from a shooting star. But I’ll bet he burns bright, Dragging a tail of white-hot matter The way some of us track tissue Back from the toilet stall. He’s got The whole world under his foot, And we are small alongside, Though there are occasions When a man his size can meet Your eyes for just a blip of time And send a thought like SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE Straight to your mind. Bowie, I want to believe you. Want to feel Your will like the wind before rain. The kind everything simply obeys, Swept up in that hypnotic dance As if something with the power to do so Had looked its way and said: Go ahead. ***Tracy K. Smith, "Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?" Life on Mars, Graywolf Press, 2011.

***Rusty Morrison, “History of sleep,” Beyond the Chainlink, Ahsahta Press, 2014.

And that other time after we got carjacked in L.A. on the way home from Spago. Like a scene outta that movie I don’t like about those hoes I don’t love. It is hard out there for a pimp. A white woman and her brown babies /brown babies in a fancy car with unlocked doors. Most everything is semi-automatic. Two black men hopped into the front row seats and started waving guns like pom-poms. 
We made it! We made it! Right against the rim of her porcelain brain. All they wanted was the car and the color. The car was white like her. She saved our lives. Then the penguins came over with a book full of photos of black men, so serious like kings in their mugging, and they asked us to pick which two it was. I was five but I could feel the shrugged evil of it so true and impossible to touch as I pretended to recognize us. We closed our eyes and pointed at you, and said, I don’t know that man. Je ne connais pas cet homme. We saved our lives. We tugged at the flashlight looking for bruises and found you awake, and found a way. ***Harmony Holiday, "Do any black children grow up casual?" Poetry, November 2013.

She’s a copperheaded waitress, tired and sharp-worded, she hides her bad brown tooth behind a wicked smile, and flicks her ass out of habit, to fend off the pass that passes for affection. She keeps her mind the way men keep a knife—keen to strip the game down to her size. She has a thin spine, swallows her eggs cold, and tells lies. She slaps a wet rag at the truck drivers if they should complain. She understands the necessity for pain, turns away the smaller tips, out of pride, and keeps a flask under the counter. Once, she shot a lover who misused her child. Before she got out of jail, the courts had pounced and given the child away. Like some isolated lake, her flat blue eyes take care of their own stark bottoms. Her hands are nervous, curled, ready to scrape. The common woman is as common as a rattlesnake. ***Judy Grahn, “The Common Women Poems: II. Ella, in a square apron, along Highway 80," love belongs to those who do the feeling: New & Selected Poems (1966-2006), Red Hen Press, 2008.