"This Ship of Fools"...Poetry Friday, Volume Three!

Better late than never...you'll have to forgive the tardiness of this post and the absence of any other posts this past week, as my brain is completely fried and honestly, I really think it caught the midnight train going anywhere... and now you have that song in your head.... ;)

Missing: Tracy's brain, average in size, pinkish-grayish in color, probably somewhat skittish and covered in sparkles, stickers, and Popsicle sticks... tends to have a short attention span unless you put on any program from The Discovery Channel or the original Star Wars trilogy...if seen please mail back to Burbank, California and I'll reimburse you for the shipping charges....

Yeesh.

Anyways, here's your poems this week to celebrate National Poetry Month... I'll be back next week and blogging normally er as normal as I get, anyways...

For My Daughter in Reply to a Question

by David Ignatow

We're not going to die.
we'll find a way.
We'll breathe deeply
and eat carefully.
We'll think always on life.
There'll be no fading for you or for me.
We'll be the first
and we'll not laugh at ourselves ever
and your children will be my grandchildren.
Nothing will have changed
except by addition.
There'll never be another as you
and never another as I.
No one ever will confuse you
nor confuse me with another.
We will not be forgotten and passed over
and buried under the births and deaths to come.

***************************************************************

September Twelfth, 2001

by X.J. Kennedy

Two caught on film who hurtle
from the eighty-second floor,
choosing between a fireball
and to jump holding hands,

aren't us. I wake beside you,
stretch, scratch, taste the air,
the incredible joy of coffee
and the morning light.

Alive, we open eyelids
on our pitiful share of time,
we bubbles rising and bursting
in a boiling pot.

***********************************************

Yes

by Catherine Doty

It's about the blood
banging in the body,
and the brain
lolling in its bed
like a happy baby.
At your touch, the nerve,
that volatile spook tree,
vibrates. The lungs
take up their work
with a giddy vigor.
Tremors in the joints
and tympani,
dust storms
in the canister of sugar.
The coil of ribs
heats up, begins
to glow. Come
here.

************************************

Meteor

by Larissa Szporluk

I chose this. To be this
stone, grow nothing. I wanted this
absolute position in the heavens
more than anything, than you,
my two, too beautiful, my children.
A man I knew once
muttered in his terrors of the night,
no, no, no, instead of yelling.
It was this, this dismal low,
that made me leave him. I will leave them.
All the butterflies the lord above
can muster, all their roses.
I will leave whatever colors
struggle to be noticed. To leave,
to leave. That's the verb I am,
have always been, always will be,
heading, like a dewdrop, into steamy
confrontation, my train of neutral green
lasting half a second
before casting off its freight -- his arms
outside the sheet, how warm they were,
like Rome the year it burned,
Nero at the window, loving no one,
fusion crust. I fly because
my space is crossed
with fear and hair and tail and hate,
the bowels of a lioness,
iron in her roar.

*********************************

Fog

by Carl Sandburg

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

***********************************************

Sea of Faith

by John Brehm

Once while I was teaching "Dover Beach"
to a class of freshmen, a young woman
raised her hand and said, "I'm confused
about this 'Sea of Faith'. "Well," I said,
"let's talk about it. We probably need
to talk a bit about figurative language.
What confuses you about it?"
"I mean, is it a real sea?" she asked.
"You mean, is it a real body of water
that you could point to on a map
or visit on vacation?"
"Yes," she said. "Is it a real sea?"
Oh Christ, I thought, is this where we are?
Next year I'll be teaching them the alphabet
and how to sound words out.
I'll have to teach them geography, apparently,
before we can move on to poetry.
I'll have to teach them history too --
a few weeks in the Dark Ages might be instructive.
"Yes," I wanted to say, "it is.
It is a real sea. In fact it flows
right into the Sea of Ignorance
IN WHICH YOU ARE DROWNING.
Let me throw you a Rope of Salvation
before the Sharks of Desire gobble you up.
Let me hoist you back up onto this Ship of Fools
so that we may continue our search
for the Fountain of Youth. Here, take a drink
of this. It's fresh from the River of Forgetfulness."

But of course I didn't say any of that.
I tried to explain in such a way
as to protect her from humiliation,
tried to explain that poets
often speak of things that don't exist.
It was only much later that I wished
I could have answered differently,
only after I'd betrayed myself
and had been betrayed that I wished
it was true, wished there really was a Sea of Faith
that you could wade out into,
dive under its blue and magic waters,
hold your breath, swim like a fish
down to the bottom, and then emerge again
able to believe in everything, faithful
and unafraid to ask even the simplest of questions,
happy to have them simply answered.


And my two poet bloggers that I am highlighting this week: Wine and Words, over at Quiet Commotion, who writes with such an astonishing grace and tenacity that her poems sometimes grab me by the throat and don't let go for weeks. Take this one, for example, or this one; beautiful, hard to read, unflinchingly brave. Please go check her out.

Next up is Maggie May over at Flux Capacitor. I really, really wish I had a proper warning for what you are getting yourself into when you read the way Maggie May writes...about her day, her health, her children, her experiences...but I don't. Words do not do justice to how beautiful her writing is, how amazed I am every time I read her blog and how my heart soars or plummets along with hers as she blogs about her daily struggles. Just...visit. See for yourself. Dare to disagree.

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone. Catch ya next week...brain tied to a freakin' leash if need be.