So, today is, it would seem,
The Second Annual Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading.It must be said that a lot of contemporary poetry gives me agina, especially when I know the poet who has crafted said verses.
So, here I give you two poems, one by a writer whom I find personaly objectionable but who writes some stellar verse, another by a writer who I quite like personally and who also is a hell of a poet. I'll leave it up to you to decide who is who. Any mistakes are mine; the formatting on the first gave me fits and I still can't make it work.
Thirty Dollar Sweatshirts, Yellow Paper StarsAndrew Fenwick
Gusti drives these roads
by memory, mostly, and walks
whenever she can. Her grandchildren call
her Oma, and I, a late addition in-law,
think Old Mother,
although "old," alone,
insults the riverbeds
coursing
from her eyes. It lacks
the years dimpling her cheeks
as her skin snaps
to a grin. And German syllables
still click through her English
enough today
to confuse her paperboy, phoning to check
her cancellation of delivery
before she travels.
Befuddled by her accent, the young man
Yells, off the phone, to his parents:
"Some foreigner!
Can't understand her!"
With patience carved by waves crossed
in an early escape,
with the strength of three births, with the loss
of her husband, Oma spells the English words
she's uttered
millions more times than this youth.
And even so, this call
must end
with her daughter's Iowa English.
Over the plains, beyond the light-less intersections,
and past
the unpaved roads, Oma squints to the spot
where horizons shoulder heights
that share
a skin with distant skies.
Where Iowa touches the sixty years
of clouds and dust
above Vienna. The world is the world all over
again. Oma makes us soup, and her family chuckles
at the leftover
cereal bits, even cottage cheese, in the broth.
Until the paperboy calls. And then the sky
is just as blue
as anywhere. As if railroad cars could haul us away.
As if our thirty dollar sweat-shirts
were stamped
with yellow paper stars.
As if, like the sky, time shares
other times,
and this year, or any year
carries moments of '36. Or a few
moldy seconds,
one morning, before dawn,
when Oma cannot sleep, because she dreams
of a face
she never saw again. "You can't leave
what you don't want," she says,
and so
she spares nothing.
For her, we eat
her soup of scraps
as if no ingredient
fortifies
like preparation.
As if no greater cook exists.
PracticingMarie Howe
I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement
of somebody's parents' house, a hymn for what we didn't say but
thought:
That feels good or
I like that, when
we learned how to open each others' mouths
how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it
practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off -- maybe six or eight girls -- and
turned out
the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and
lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and Now you be the boy:
concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train
room, laundry.
Linda's basement was like a boat with booths and portholes
instead of windows. Gloria's father had a bar downstairs with stools
that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each others' throats.
We sucked each others' breasts, and left marks, and never spoke of it
upstairs, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was
practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a
hand still lost
in someone's hair...and we grew up and hardly mentioned who
the first kiss really was -- a girl like us, still sticky with
moisturizer we'd
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song
for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of
unreluctant desire,
just before we made ourselves stop.
