Poems that you love

[Todd]

OLD PROBLEM FOR A NEW MATH     by Dian Sousa
        
        1

The parents have quit sleeping.
They are in the kitchen boiling chemicals,
covering the windows with cardboard.

The mother has lost two more teeth.
The soap is dirty and the dog is missing.
The father can’t feel his arms. His blood is a beehive. 

They have forgotten to send the children to school,
but the collection men assembling in the front yard
have taken strange pity on the filthy girl.

Everyday they bring her word problems
to keep her math skills sharp, 
to keep her dreary brain pumping with tricky equations 
to make her stomach shut-up and her mouth go numb. 

        2       THE  PROBLEM
 
At 10 a.m. when your little gut is whimpering 
like the skeletal dog dying under the burned-out car
and death gains velocity with every bit of bread and milk 
that goes instead to all the paunchy sucklings encased in sunny houses,
please, little hungry one, calculate in degrees how much suffering it will take
before time returns to its circular track and the mother's arms are finally free 
enough to reach you again, to re-cradle you, to feed you.

If you can, if you are strong enough,
here’s a stick and a square of dirt, 
please be sure to show your work,
even if it doesn’t make any sense right now. 

        3       THE HUNGRY GIRL SHOWS HER WORK
 
I will illuminate my work in a love-based equation
that reduces for eternity the stinking sad bones of poverty 
to the netherworld of zero.

I will solve for green
where green is multiplied by compassion 
so that green no longer equals the color of dried poison in a dirty cup,
or the edge of a dollar tied to the end of a string you’ll never catch
because it’s always jerked away by someone you’ll never see.

I will solved for green
where green is re-factored to its essence 
so that green equals the color of a jolly worm 
napping on a row of fat tomatoes.
I will divide green by green
and add exponentially the shady name of every fruit tree
and the medicinal secret of every flower.

I will solve for green
where green is the common denominator,
the one heavy thread that binds the blue ocean to the brown dirt,
the turquoise river to the red clay,
the claw and the hoof to the tail and the spike,
and starving spirit to the quaking body and the hopeful belly.

[Lizzie]

OLD PROBLEM FOR A NEW MATH     by Dian Sousa

Amazing. Hard to read, though......

---

Betrayal


In her fantasies about other men, as she grew older, about men other than her husband, she no longer dreamed of sexual intimacy, as she once had, perhaps for revenge, when she was angry, perhaps out of loneliness, when he was angry, but only about an affection and a profound sort of understanding, a holding of hands and a gazing into eyes, often in a public place like a cafe. She did not know if this change came out of respect for her husband, for she did truly respect him, or out of plain weariness, at the end of the day, or out of a sense of what activity she could expect from herself, even in a fantasy, now that she was a certain age. And when she was particularly tired, she couldn't even manage the affection and the profound understanding, but only the mildest sort of companionship, such as being in the same room alone together, sitting in chairs. And it happened that as she grew older still, and more tired, and then still older, and still more tired, another change occurred and she found that even the mildest sort of companionship, alone together, was now too vigorous to sustain, and her fantasies were limited to a calm sort of friendliness among other friends, the sort she really could have had with any man, with a clear conscience, and did in fact have with many, who were friends of her husband's too, or not, a friendliness that gave her comfort and strength, at night, when the friendships in her waking life were not enough, or had not been enough by the end of the day. And so these fantasies came to be indistinguishable from the reality of her waking life, and should not have been any sort of betrayal at all. Yet because they were fantasies she had alone, at night, they continued to feel like some sort of betrayal, and perhaps, because approached in this spirit of betrayal, as perhaps they had to be, any comfort and strength, continued to be, in fact, a sort of betrayal.


~by Lydia Davis, from Hambone

[RiverNotch]

appealed to my vanity thrice: the second part of my first name is Reuel, at this point my bible-madness is well-published, and the tone of the poem went the places i want to go, in an order which i love: first sticking with the usual, old-testament weight, undercutting that with some sardonic quip, then gradually twisting the knife to the sharp (garnet light), the weighty (samuel versus basemath), the grand (abraham, and especially the last stanza). all the love

BIBLICAL ALSO-RANS


Hanoch, Pallu, Hezron, Carmi,
Jemuel, Ohad, Zohar, Shuni:
one Genesis mention's all you got.

Ziphion, Muppim, Arodi: lost
in a list even the most devout skip over
like small towns on the road to L.A.

How tall were you, Shillim?
What was your favorite color, Ard?
Did you love your wife, lob?

Not even her name survives.
Adam, Eve, Abel, Cain--
these are the stars crowds surge to see.

Each hour thousands of Josephs,
Jacobs, Benjamins are born.
How many Oholibamahs? How many

Mizzahs draw first breath today?
Gatam, Kenaz, Reuel? Sidemen
in the band. Waiters who bring

the Perignon and disappear.
Yet they loved dawn's garnet light
as much as Moses did. They drank

wine with as much delight.
I thought my life would line me up
with Samuel, Issac, Joshua.

Instead I stand with Basemath, Hoglah,
Ammihud. Theirs are the names
I honor; theirs, the deaths I feel,

their children's tears loud as any
on the corpse of Abraham, their smiles
as missed, the earth as desolate

without them: Pebbles on a hill.
Crumbs carried off by ants.
Jeush. Dishan. Nahath. Shammah.


~by Charles Harper Webb
from LIVER (University of Wisconsin Press)

[Lizzie]

The Hanging Man

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid:
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did.

~Sylvia Plath

[Achebe]

The Hanging Man

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid:
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did.

~Sylvia Plath

It begins well in the first two lines, but peters out thereafter.  Plath is terribly overrated.

[Lizzie]

More Plath you ask? Well, I suppose......


Morning Song
 
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry   
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

~Sylvia Plath

[just mercedes]

View of a pig - Ted Hughes (I always wondered just how much this was about Sylvia)


The pig lay on a barrow dead.
It weighed, they said, as much as three men.
Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.
Its trotters stuck straight out.

Such weight and thick pink bulk
Set in death seemed not just dead.
It was less than lifeless, further off.
It was like a sack of wheat.

I thumped it without feeling remorse.
One feels guilty insulting the dead,
Walking on graves. But this pig
Did not seem able to accuse.

It was too dead. Just so much
A poundage of lard and pork.
Its last dignity had entirely gone.
It was not a figure of fun.

Too dead now to pity.
To remember its life, din, stronghold
Of earthly pleasure as it had been,
Seemed a false effort, and off the point.

Too deadly factual. Its weight
Oppressed me—how could it be moved?
And the trouble of cutting it up!
The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.

Once I ran at a fair in the noise
To catch a greased piglet
That was faster and nimbler than a cat,
Its squeal was the rending of metal.

Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.
Their bite is worse than a horse’s—
They chop a half-moon clean out.
They eat cinders, dead cats.

Distinctions and admirations such
As this one was long finished with.
I stared at it a long time. They were going to scald it,
Scald it and scour it like a doorstep.

---

Aubade Related Poem Content Details
BY PHILIP LARKIN
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

[milo]

Since we are doing Plath, here is an old favourite of my own:

Lament

A Villanelle
The sting of bees took away my father
who walked in a swarming shroud of wings
and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

Lightning licked in a yellow lather
but missed the mark with snaking fangs:
the sting of bees too away my father.

Trouncing the sea like a ragin bather,
he rode the flood in a pride of prongs
and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

A scowl of sun struck down my mother,
tolling her grave with golden gongs,
but the sting of bees took away my father.

He counted the guns of god a bother,
laughed at the ambush of angels’ tongues,
and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

O ransack the four winds and find another
man who can mangle the grin of kings:
the sting of bees took away my father
who scorned the tick of the falling weather.

-Sylvia Plath

[Lizzie]

Damaged Villanelle

To get rid of the sound of his voice
you take off your ears
but then they grow back.

You try a sharper blade,
two hours hunched over the whetstone,
and, rid of the sound of his voice,

for a day you hear
nothing
until they grow back.

You are not happy.
In birdsong you just hear I’m hungry or Fuck me,
everything threaded with the sound of his voice

you core out your eardrums to escape
and you do for a while
until they grow back.

Little flesh tom-toms announcing the night-march
from within the ridged whorls of your ears
which to get rid of the sound of his voice

you burn off this time
with a blowtorch.
They grow back

sooner than your hair does.
Smoother, this time, too,
and in skids the sound of his voice.

We should note now, though,
that it matters less what he said
than when (and where and how and why).

That whatever it was
was always at night
and though morning would reliably come

and snap night off
like a light or a finger extended
night would always grow back.

Different, more attentive maybe,
or gentle and whiny with rain,
but there, in the doorjamb, back.

~Conor Bracken

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/0...villanelle

[rayheinrich]

The Hanging Man

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid:
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did.

~Sylvia Plath

It begins well in the first two lines, but peters out thereafter.  Plath is terribly overrated.

Plath suffers, much like Dickinson, from the blind adulation of hangers-on predisposing others to judge them, not by their worth, but by these fans.
Such is the curse of popularity (and gender).  
I -- influenced by heart, intellect, and hubris -- remain in their thrall.

To me, Plath and Dickinson are sisters, separated only by generations.

Continuing on within the family:

    Emily Dickinson:
   
    I measure every Grief I meet
    With narrow, probing, eyes –
    I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
    Or has an Easier size.
   
    I wonder if They bore it long –
    Or did it just begin –
    I could not tell the Date of Mine –
    It feels so old a pain –
   
    I wonder if it hurts to live –
    And if They have to try –
    And whether – could They choose between –
    It would not be – to die –
   
    I note that Some – gone patient long –
    At length, renew their smile –  
    An imitation of a Light
    That has so little Oil –
   
    I wonder if when Years have piled –  
    Some Thousands – on the Harm –  
    That hurt them early – such a lapse
    Could give them any Balm –  
   
    Or would they go on aching still
    Through Centuries of Nerve –
    Enlightened to a larger Pain –  
    In Contrast with the Love –  
   
    The Grieved – are many – I am told –  
    There is the various Cause –  
    Death – is but one – and comes but once –  
    And only nails the eyes –  
   
    There’s Grief of Want – and grief of Cold –  
    A sort they call “Despair” –  
    There’s Banishment from native Eyes –
    In sight of Native Air –  
   
    And though I may not guess the kind –  
    Correctly – yet to me
    A piercing Comfort it affords
    In passing Calvary –  
   
    To note the fashions – of the Cross –  
    And how they’re mostly worn –  
    Still fascinated to presume
    That Some – are like my own –

[Lizzie]

I must confess something:

this is my favorite poem.

Lady Lazarus

 
I have done it again.   
One year in every ten   
I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin   
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,   
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine   
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin   
O my enemy.   
Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?   
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be   
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.   
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.   
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.   
The peanut-crunching crowd   
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.   
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands   
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.   
The first time it happened I was ten.   
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.   
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.   
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.   
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.   
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute   
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.   
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge   
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge   
For a word or a touch   
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.   
So, so, Herr Doktor.   
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,   
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.   
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,   
A wedding ring,   
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer   
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair   
And I eat men like air.


~Sylvia Plath

[rayheinrich]

I must confess something:

this (Lady Lazarus) is my favorite poem.

And one of mine -- with Plath it's hard for me to rate them with any consistency as their various values fluctuate
according to the instability of my emotions. And since her poems contribute to that instability, rating becomes impossible.

I'm in love with Sylvia.

When I first discovered Plath -- a book of hers found in a second-hand book store into which the original owner had pasted
newspaper photos and articles about Plath and her suicide -- it was love at first sight. The writer in me was overwhelmed by
the precise terror of her metaphor, my heart recognized her as a sister.

... but as for loving/living with someone day-to-day, sharing a life with them... that would be Emily.  

--------------------------------------------
And since my absolute favorite poems (to read or to write) are love poems:



    Eavesdropper   -   Sylvia Plath


    Your brother will trim my hedges!
    They darken your house,
    Nosy grower,
    Mole on my shoulder,
    To be scratched absently,
    To bleed, if it comes to that.
    The stain of the tropics
    Still urinous on you, a sin.
    A kind of bush-stink.
   
    You may be local,
    But that yellow!
    Godawful!
    Your body one
    Long nicotine-finger
    On which I,
    White cigarette,
    Burn, for your inhalation,
    Driving the dull cells wild.
   
    Let me roost in you!
    My distractions, my pallors.
    Let them start the queer alchemy
    That melts the skin
    Gray tallow, from bone and bone.
    So I saw your much sicker
    Predecessor wrapped up,
    A six and a half foot wedding-cake.
    And he was not even malicious.
   
    Do not think I don't notice your curtain—
    Midnight, four o'clock,
    Lit (you are reading),
    Tarting with the drafts that pass,
    Little whore tongue,
    Chenille beckoner,
    Beckoning my words in—
    The zoo yowl, the mad soft
    Mirror talk you love to catch me at.
   
    How you jumped when I jumped on you!
    Arms folded, ear cocked,
    Toad-yellow under the drop
    That would not, would not drop
    In a desert of cow people
    Trundling their udders home
    To the electric milker, the wifey, the big blue eye
    That watches, like God, or the sky
    The ciphers that watch it.
   
    I called.
    You crawled out,
    A weather figure, boggling,
    Belge troll, the low
    Church smile
    Spreading itself, like butter.
    This is what I am in for—
    Flea body!
    Eyes like mice
   
    Flicking over my property,
    Levering letter flaps,
    Scrutinizing the fly
    Of the man's pants
    Dead on the chair back,
    Opening the fat smiles, the eyes
    Of two babies
    Just to make sure—
    Toad-stone! Sister-bitch! Sweet neighbor!

[Achebe]

A bit like:


The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.
They lay. They rotted. They turned
Around occasionally.
Bits of flesh dropped off them from
Time to time.
And sank into the pool's mire.
They also smelt a great deal.


http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Paula_...e_Jennings

[rayheinrich]

While Adams is always appropriate, I think it's more like:

Dead swans,
such tragic beauty.
Live swans,
on the other hand,
are big nasty birds that will bite the shit out of you.

[CRNDLSM]

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair   
And I eat men like air.


'When you say you eat men like air.... sort the ambiguity please'

[rayheinrich]

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair   
And I eat men like air.

'When you say you eat men like air.... sort the ambiguity please'

    She's alluding to the Tuath Dé.

[Lizzie]

Crundle: I like being read. ><

Ray: toad-stone.  

I need to start saying that one more, along with "thunder bugs."

[Achebe]

My all time fave shortish poem is under the plagiarisation section on the Pen
But reproducing the original anyway:

Late Echo
By John Ashbery
Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

John Ashbery, "Late Echo" from As We Know. Copyright © 1979 by John Ashbery. Reprinted with the permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author.
Source: As We Know (Viking Press, 1979)
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrym...tail/34278

[just mercedes]

Trapped Dingo
So here, twisted in steel, and spoiled with red
your sunlight hide, smelling of death and fear,
they crushed out your throat the terrible song
you sang in the dark ranges. With what crying
you mourned him! - the drinker of blood, the swift death-bringer
who ran with you so many a night; and the night was long.
I heard you, desperate poet, Did you hear
my silent voice take up the cry? - replying:
Achilles is overcome, and Hector dead,
and clay stops many a warrior's mouth, wild singer.

Voice from the hills and the river drunken with rain,
for your lament the long night was too brief.
Hurling your woes at the moon, that old cleaned bone,
till the white shorn mobs of stars on the hill of the sky
huddled and trembled, you tolled him, the rebel one.
Insane Andromache, pacing your towers alone,
death ends the verse you chanted; here you lie.
The lover, the maker of elegies is slain,
and veiled with blood her body's stealthy sun.

Judith Wright :

[rayheinrich]

Crundle: I like being read. ><

Ray: toad-stone.  

I need to start saying that one more, along with "thunder bugs."

---

        IN TIDES   -   Mária Ferencuhová (Translation: Juana Adcock)
       
        They simply came out of the woods.
        As a herd, slowly,
        they made their way to the city,
        hooves clopping
        on asphalt.
        Traffic parted
        as cars pulled over
        to the side of the road.
       
        Roes and does
        headed for the suburbs
        kneeling in front of gates,
        on lawns.
        Folding down their bodies
        on pavements, on roadways,
        at crossroads.
        They bleat at us monotonously,
        but baulk
        when we reach
        to stroke their heads.
       
        Every day
        new and novel species
        appear, get used to us.
        They approach us,
        look us in the eye,
        lead us out to sea.
       
        Without fear
        together
        we stop breathing.