Poems By Others

Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she’s a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours. Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn’t plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you’ll come home to find your son has emptied
the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs half way down. But there’s also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

Those who take the meat from the table
Teach contentment.

Those for whom the contribution is destined
Demand sacrifice.

Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.

Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.

When the leaders speak of peace
The common folk know
That war is coming.

When the leaders curse war
The mobilization order is already written.

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

When God, disgusted with man, 
Turned towards heaven. 
And man, disgusted with God, 
Turned towards Eve, 
Things looked like falling apart. 
But Crow . . Crow 
Crow nailed them together, 
Nailing Heaven and earth together –
So man cried, but with God’s voice. 
And God bled, but with man’s blood. 
Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint 
Which became gangrenous and stank – 
A horror beyond redemption. 
The agony did not diminish. 
Man could not be man nor God God. 
The agony 
Grew. 
Crow 
Grinned 
Crying: ‘This is my Creation,’ 
Flying the black flag of himself.

(This poem may seem odd to some. It is one of a few dozen
crow poems in Hughes’ entire book of crow poems, Crow.
Hughes had a very dark side. Just ask Sylvia Plath.)

Then, when we were joined, I became
completed, joyful, shyer. 
I may have shone more, reflected
more, and from deep inside there rose
some glow passing steadily through me, but I was not
small, in a raftered church, or in
playing, now, I felt like someone
a cathedral, the vaulted spaces of the body
like a sacred woods.  I was quiet when my throat was not
making those iron, orbital, earth,
rusted, noises at the hinge of matter and
whatever is not matter.  He takes me
into the endings like another world at the
center of this one, and then, if he begins to
end when I am resting and I do not rejoin him yet
then I feel awe, I almost feel
fear, sometimes for a moment I feel
I should not move, or make a sound, as
if he is alone, now,
howling in the wilderness,
and yet I know we are in this place
together.  I thought, now is the moment
I could become more loving, and my hands moved shyly
over him, secret as heaven
and my mouth spoke, and in my beloved’s
voice, by the bones of my head, the fields
groaned, and then I joined him again,
not shy, not bold, released, entering
the true home, where the trees bend down along the
ground and yet stand, then we lay together
panting as if saved from some disaster, and for ceaseless
instants, it came to pass what I have
heard about, it came to me
that I did not know I was separate
from this man, I did not know I was lonely.

The clock awakens
Ticking through time
The boy grows older
Abandoning nursery rhymes.

He learns to read,
Write, and talk
Goes through school
Books, tests, and chalk.

To a bright future he heads
Aging too fast
Going through college
Using his skills from the past

The boy, now a man
Becomes a lawyer
Happily marries
Is his own employer

He grows older
Wiser too
Still fresh and hip
As he was at age two

He reaches sixty-two
A perfect age to be
Is wished happy birthday
By his good old friend, me.

What a person desires in life
   is a properly boiled egg.
This isn’t as easy as it seems.
There must be gas and a stove,
   the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,
   banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.
There must be a pot, the product of mines
   and furnaces and factories,
   of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,
   of women in kerchiefs and men with
   sweat-soaked hair.
Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies
   and God knows what causes it to happen.
There seems always too much or too little
   of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping
   stations, towers, tanks.
And salt-a miracle of the first order,
   the ace in any argument for God.
    Only God could have imagined from
   nothingness the pang of salt.
Political peace too. It should be quiet
   when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums
   knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are
   ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and
   take it out on you, no dictators
   posing as tribunes.
It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear
   the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type
   of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.
Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain
   that came from nowhere.

Mo tennis balls, lawn bowls, 
Regular bowels,
No Mo broken bones.
Mo families, everywhere, 
cousins, ex in-laws, friends’ families, friends’ friends, 
All one big family of Mo, 
Mo, Larry and Curly, 
Mo parties, Mo ecstasy, 
Mo hanging from monkey bars. 
Mo mentum … No you’re retired. Relax. 
Mo ney please. 
Mo dogs (Donovan added that.)
Mo hikes.
Mo lying on the grass. 
Mo clutter, Mo mo clutter! 
Mo of everything
Mo beautiful. 
Many Mo years, Mo.
Lots more Mo, Mo.