Featured Poem Archive
Back Then
I was just an average Joe back then.
I had no plans or dough back then.
Family gone, no friends to speak of--
I was feeling pretty low back then.
I started hanging out too much.
I had no place to go back then.
I don’t remember making choices;
you just went with the flow back then.
It wasn’t that strange to move in with people
you didn’t really know back then.
I think I might have been okay--
some things were touch-and-go back then--
but I started getting into stuff.
I never could say no back then.
To feel like you were keeping up
you did a lot for show back then.
What little I had going for me,
I lost it in the snow back then.
America, it wasn’t you.
I did it. Long ago. Back then.
From In Which We See Our Selves. First appeared in 32 Poems.
I was just an average Joe back then.
I had no plans or dough back then.
Family gone, no friends to speak of--
I was feeling pretty low back then.
I started hanging out too much.
I had no place to go back then.
I don’t remember making choices;
you just went with the flow back then.
It wasn’t that strange to move in with people
you didn’t really know back then.
I think I might have been okay--
some things were touch-and-go back then--
but I started getting into stuff.
I never could say no back then.
To feel like you were keeping up
you did a lot for show back then.
What little I had going for me,
I lost it in the snow back then.
America, it wasn’t you.
I did it. Long ago. Back then.
From In Which We See Our Selves. First appeared in 32 Poems.
FOR PASOLINI
In the dream Pasolini came up to me
in a lead role.
He looked good, blinking blue like a machine
for acting everything—.
Pasolini stomped through puddles, he could be
small, squat, dark and asocial
he was always Pasolini and always someone else.
Then he stood in the doorways of roughed-in buildings
waved down from scaffolds.
He pointed his finger at old cars.
All over the country lived a people
whose lover he was
and with the camera he found countries
he could no longer see through his dark glasses.
My pictures are moaning, he said
I could make silents; I haven’t
heard a word in years.
He started rubbing himself against me and that
went all right.
Then he fell into an excavation.
A car burned up.
Rain fell into the sea.
The dirty screen was washed all white again.
--Nicolas Born, tr. Eric Torgersen
first appeared in Slope 47
In the dream Pasolini came up to me
in a lead role.
He looked good, blinking blue like a machine
for acting everything—.
Pasolini stomped through puddles, he could be
small, squat, dark and asocial
he was always Pasolini and always someone else.
Then he stood in the doorways of roughed-in buildings
waved down from scaffolds.
He pointed his finger at old cars.
All over the country lived a people
whose lover he was
and with the camera he found countries
he could no longer see through his dark glasses.
My pictures are moaning, he said
I could make silents; I haven’t
heard a word in years.
He started rubbing himself against me and that
went all right.
Then he fell into an excavation.
A car burned up.
Rain fell into the sea.
The dirty screen was washed all white again.
--Nicolas Born, tr. Eric Torgersen
first appeared in Slope 47
YET
Hang him from a tree he hasn’t hung from yet.
Fling him off a bridge no one’s been flung from yet.
Send succor, in whatever dark disguise:
a hornet’s nest he’s not gone running, stung, from yet.
Early fall, and not one branch the wind
has not stripped every leaf that clung from yet.
Recess. Winter. Second or third grade.
A frozen pipe he hasn’t freed his tongue from yet.
The drought seems endless. Spring. No drop of rain.
Just parched soil no shoot has sprung from yet.
Find it in some corner of the workshop,
some damp rag no last drop has been wrung from yet?
Probe the dank recesses of the cellar--
not one cask he hasn’t yanked the bung from yet.
He’d have it be a tower, not a steeple--
the height in him no bell has rung from yet.
Not by wit or rhetoric alone
will Eric find a voice he hasn’t sung from yet.
(first appeared in New Ohio Review #6, Fall 2009)
YET
Hang him from a tree he hasn’t hung from yet.
Fling him off a bridge no one’s been flung from yet.
Send succor, in whatever dark disguise:
a hornet’s nest he’s not gone running, stung, from yet.
Early fall, and not one branch the wind
has not stripped every leaf that clung from yet.
Recess. Winter. Second or third grade.
A frozen pipe he hasn’t freed his tongue from yet.
The drought seems endless. Spring. No drop of rain.
Just parched soil no shoot has sprung from yet.
Find it in some corner of the workshop,
some damp rag no last drop has been wrung from yet?
Probe the dank recesses of the cellar--
not one cask he hasn’t yanked the bung from yet.
He’d have it be a tower, not a steeple--
the height in him no bell has rung from yet.
Not by wit or rhetoric alone
will Eric find a voice he hasn’t sung from yet.
(first appeared in New Ohio Review #6, Fall 2009)
MY BLINDNESS
Once I woke up in the dark and thought I was blind.
There was no light at all. There's always some light.
Blind, I was calm in that perfect dark. Friends would
come, and I'd tell them what they had had to do. It
would be all right.
I'd go back home, but dignified, and I'd know my way
perfectly in the house, even on the streets. I'd only
been gone a few years.
I'd have them read me strange books, and they'd love my
strangeness, thinking This is what it was, we knew there
was something. They'd loved it a little already.
There at home in my great dark I'd find a single purpose,
and begin.
But you know this: the light came.
Don't laugh at me. I live with so little blindness. Such a
long way I've come; so little blindness.
(From Good True Stories.)
OH
we find it
and photograph it
bury it out of sight
and try to sleep with it
tunnel the earth
for one of its hands
to lead us
as if
we could follow you
as we followed to Bedlam
and part
as we followed
past Live
but you give us the slip
(elegy for Anne Sexton, unpublished, 1974)
FIRST SHOT
I said I was hunting deer. I knew the trails, the split tracks and pellets of shit; circles
where they bedded down together. I faced a buck once, for almost ten minutes I think;
I moved first and it left me. I ran home to think.
I had a bow, target arrows, a target on straw. My father said be careful, and I was, but
I sneaked my bow and arrow to the woods. I surprised a tiny rabbit near a hole. It
froze. I had an arrow on it. I moved and it ran for the hole. I never shot.
They had a blanket, in a clearing of wiry grass that sloped to the north. He had her
down, her hands all over his back. I thought I knew her. They hadn't seen me. I notched
an arrow. His head turned my way, vague, like he needed his glasses, and maybe afraid.
I got scared, I wasn't sure what it was; I shot my arrow, my first shot, wild I think, and ran.
I waited for something for weeks, for more than weeks. I couldn't answer questions. I
thought I saw her a few times, later. I never went back until I was sixteen, almost, and
nothing was there but I only stayed for a minute.
From Heart. Wood. First appeared in Poetry NOW, 1981.
re: THAT
That was no language, that was your life.
That was a punning linguist.
That was the headline Author Gets Off.
That was an offer of amnesty and amnesia,
a garden variety fantasia,
a sobriety test and I’m sorry, you passed.
That was in love with the history of the West,
in league with mastery, in line with most of the rest.
That was a linguist’s boast.
That was no language boat and you broke it.
That was a love boat and kept you perfectly dry.
A boat in the sky.
That was a scheme with a name on it.
That was to blame and too blind to see.
That was me too.
It was you.
(first appeared in The Diagram)
IN PRAISE OF PUBLIC RADIO
The Estudiantina, a waltz of Waldteufel,
court pianist, it says, to the Empress Eugènie,
was played for me today on public radio,
and oh my God it was the Rheingold Beer song:
My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer,
Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer. . .
It could have been Rheingold beer my father drank
at J & J's, down by the station,
nights when he didn't come home,
but to his kids it meant the Miss Rheingold contest:
once a year, the dingy store on the corner
was hung with black-and-white glossies
of six or eight beautiful blondes and brunettes
and we took our solemn pick,
as I suppose our father was taking his,
though I don't recall seeing much of their bodies
in even the modest swimsuits of the day,
just those beautiful mild faces
in which we invested so much of our new selves,
happy not yet knowing there are demons
that run with the wolves and giants in that forest
the souls of children wander and grow old in.
Rheingold has gone on to the heaven or hell
reserved for commercially unsuccessful beers,
and with it the Estudiantina of Waldteufel
has vanished perhaps forever from the AM airwaves,
but thanks to the support of listeners like you
the Rheingold song and the old world it suffuses
have come back, welcome, not to be lost, for a time.
from Heart. Wood.
THAW
Morning
and the ice gone
off the river.
The bridge
to cross over,
the boats
to bear us
downstream,
all gone
with the dream.
AN APPLE FROM WALT WHITMAN
There's never been a poet where I live,
but I grew up in the shade of Whitman's name:
born in West Hills—our hills—he would have walked
our paths along the crest. I walked Whitman Road,
crashed the Whitman Drive-In, stole a book
from the sci-fi rack at the Melville-Whitman Pharmacy,
even played lacrosse against Whitman High;
we lost three times, the guys from Halfway Hollow,
to studs with Whitman in white on their varsity jackets.
My mother tells a story about Thanksgiving,
back when kids went begging in rags and blackface:
how Carrie Wicks's sister said she got
an apple from Walt Whitman, right at his house,
an old man with a beard. The big kids laughed,
knowing the white-haired caretaker was no one.
I set no foot inside the Whitman House
or Leaves of Grass till after I went away,
but I'm better having grown up with the name,
the house and hills of a poet everyone knew,
a poet big enough in the mothers' stories
for a girl to believe he came to the door with a long
white beard and smiled and handed her an apple.
If a poet the size of Whitman named our few
square miles and a few in Jersey it's going to take
a lot more big ones to hand us all a welcome
sweet as a Thanksgiving apple from Walt Whitman,
white-haired care-taker, seed of mothers' stories,
Appleseed of our poetry: nourishment, shade.
From Heart. Wood. First appeared in Centennial Review, Fall 1987.
CLEARING OUT OLD BOOKS
Farewell Rudolf Steiner, Methods of Spiritual Research;
Farewell, The Reach of the Mind by J.B. Rhine;
Goodbye, Alchemists through the Ages by Arthur E. Waite and A
Complete Guide to the Tarot by Eden Gray.
Au revoir, Gurdjieff's Meetings with Remarkable Men, step lightly,
Sane Occultism by Dion Fortune, you too, Amulets and
Talismans by E.A. Wallis Budge.
Farewell, Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows.
Goodbye, No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Best-Selling Biography of
Jim Morrison, see you perhaps in Hell;
Goodbye, Bob Dylan—What Happened? and Elvis—What Happened?;
Farewell, The Age of Rock and The Age of Rock II.
Out of the box in the closet, into the light
of someone else's day who might love you now;
out, along with these berry baskets, these egg cartons,
this handmade rocking-horse, this almost full box of Pampers a
decade old,
these tiny pink dresses and lightly stained pastel playsuits
saved all this time in hope of another child.
from Heart. Wood.
KILLING THE MILK SNAKES
It couldn't be true, about them drinking from cows,
but milk snakes like to live in the walls of houses.
You call them house snakes. Ours would sun
in the grass right off the front porch on warm days
and slide up under the siding home at night.
It felt good, letting milk snakes come and go,
watching our step around that part of the lawn,
and I didn't mind when a baby snake was crawling
on the kitchen floor in the morning early one spring.
Then we found a dead skin on the living room rug.
I'm not sure why, but it meant we had to kill them.
It's hard to kill snakes you've talked about in poems,
and I'd written "Not to appeal is that milk snake"--
something at home in life that doesn't complain.
I dropped a concrete block off the porch on the first one.
I thought it would leap and hiss and scare me sick
but it never said a word, just made for home,
up under the siding, with a kink where a corner of the block
must have hit. It had a hard time to get that kink
through the hole, and two days later it started to stink.
My wife said I didn't know how to kill a snake right.
I cut the other one down with a hoe. I could see it
sliding off home already, really slow,
the way a snake has of looking like it's not there.
With a hoe you can keep a snake from running away.
First I took off a little piece of the tail,
then three more pieces. Here are my observations:
Down to six inches, that snake never made a move
that wasn't classic. I'm writing a loose pentameter;
if you're going to write in prose you might as well.
I started this poem before I started the killing--
which would you start first, with that much choice left?
I'm tired of the killing we do to keep these houses.
From Good True Stories. First appeared in Ironwood.
PERSEIDS
Wave-slap,
crickets,
cars,
one jet;
some quarrel
crossing the lake.
Lie
on your back
on the dock
in the chill dark
and look up--
remember it all?
What
could possibly
fall
out of all that
with an answer
for you?
Enough
that the brief
light of these
when they come
even seem
to stop time.
That their silence
amaze.
PERSEIDS
Wave-slap,
crickets,
cars,
one jet;
some quarrel
crossing the lake.
Lie
on your back
on the dock
in the chill dark
and look up--
remember it all?
What
could possibly
fall
out of all that
with an answer
for you?
Enough
that the brief
light of these
when they come
even seem
to stop time.
That their silence
amaze.
MY HOME
A proud wayfaring stranger, I’ve not known my home.
I call this fate, to walk the earth alone, my home.
Dream on, great America, without me.
What I have I with which to own my home?
In my next life, delivered safe from this,
I’d live by music, make each lucid tone my home.
Loving seed and blossom, branch and fruit,
I’d make each garden I have sown my home.
God me no Gods, saint me no saints, who’d have me
embrace the dying, make each mortal groan my home.
Would you expect me, loving so the flesh,
to make this sorry cage of bone my home?
At times I think it will not be so hard
to make that small space underneath a stone my home.
Farewell, E.T. bids you; you must bid
E.T. farewell. You cannot hope to phone my home.
first appeared in The Ghazal Page
NO DANCER / STILL WALKING
In one of the open-air restaurants
along the beach at Progreso
three shy pretty Indian girls
danced for us with trays bottles
glasses balanced on their heads
and I picked one out I always
pick one out
Back in Mérida at a juice
and licuado stand a woman
fell down was helped toward a chair
fell down again and a blind man
brought his dog to dance
for money for the crowd around a woman
who couldn't even walk
I've never been much
of a dancer at least not with anyone
looking but I can still walk
take my pick of the dancers
no blind man with cup and dog
that can dance has worked the crowd
around me yet
from Heart. Wood. First appeared in Poetry NOW.