Poems by 2011 Frost Place Faculty

WALKING IT OFF

Whenever I try to maybe just breathe
some appalling shit happens
and I have to get on the couch

and pretend to recover. Even when the trouble slows
I'm a light bulb with a skull fracture,
a brick in a way in a dumb-dirty river


being lobbed by semi-kids in splashy shorts
and bobby pins. And yes being tossed
wounds the poor viscera

and no we should not be so self-important
as to think in the plural first person
as yes we know

we are not the protagonist of the story
or even a semicolon
in the middle of a sentence about it

as what really matters is America and her heartaches,
her girls on rollerskates. Yes the moon landing
and yes the GDP.

O Michael Jackson O Walter Cronkite O Natasha
Richardson: what was it like
that last second

in the US among us? Was there
a rope to grab or was it a staircase of mist
and did you climb to outer space

or was it more like being knocked out
and carried into the woods
and thrown into a ditch

or should I imagine each of you wrapped
in receiving blankets after being
milked and powered

or should I think up ants and other insects—
weevils—crawling your bodies
and what do you miss

the most? Your skin, your mouths, your
unique way of thinking with the radio low
and you smoking at the ravine all hot and giddy

or is it something more unspeakable
such as your glee of the speed at which
you rose and flew I guess

and left us so ramshackle and lowdown and droning and loose?

Poem by John Murillo
Enter the Dragon
--Los Angeles, California, 1976

For me, the movie starts with a black man,
Leaping into an orbit of badges, tiny moons

Catching the sheen of his perfect black afro.
Arc kicks, karate chops, and thirty cops

On their backs. It starts with the swagger,
The cool lean into the leather front seat

Of the black and white he takes off in,
Deep hallelujahs of moviegoers drowning

Out the wah wah guitar, salt & butter
High-fives, Right on, brother! and Daddy

Glowing so bright he can light the screen
All by himself. This is how it goes down.

Friday night and my father drives us
Home from the late show, two heroes

Cadillacking across King Boulevard.
In the car's dark cab, we jab and clutch,

Jim Kelly and Bruce Lee with popcorn
Breath, and almost miss the lights flashing

In the cracked side mirror. I know what's
Under the seat, but when the uniforms

Approach from the rear quarter panel,
When the fat one leans so far into my father's

Window I can smell his long day's work,
When my father—this John Henry of a man—

Hides his hammer, doesn't buck, tucks away
His baritone, license and registration shaking as if

Showing a bathroom pass to a grade school
Principal, I learn the difference between cinema

And city, between the moviehouse cheers
Of old men and the silence that gets us home.

Poem by Kevin Prufer

In a Beautiful Country

A good way to fall in love
is to turn off the headlights
and drive very fast down dark roads.

Another way to fall in love
is to say they are only mints
and swallow them with a strong drink.

Then it is autumn in the body.
Your hands are cold.
Then it is winter and we are still at war.

The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear
about how we live in a beautiful country.
Snow sifts from the clouds

into your drink. It doesn't matter about the war.
A good way to fall in love
is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,

then down you'll fall through lovely mists
as a body might fall early one morning
from a high window into love. Love,

the broken glass. Love, the scissors
and the water basin. A good way to fall
is with a rope to catch you.

A good way is with something to drink
to help you march forward.
The gold-haired girl says, Don't worry

about the armies, says, We live in a time
full of love. You're thinking about this too much.
Slow down. Nothing bad will happen.

Poem by Cleopatra Mathis

SOUL

It is not the angel riding a goat,
trying to make him go. It does no work
with refusal or guilt, which loves
only its contorted self. But fancies instead
my terrier's long pink tongue,
how it teases out the bone's marrow,
tasting with all its muscle.

The angel is silver, but so is the goat
and the box on which they perch,
a Victorian gesture in the mansion
where I spent the fall. They have followed
me home, their permanent shine presuming,
while around me, everything withered,
slowly froze, and began its turn
toward white. The snow
is nothing but a great emptiness,
and I'm tired of trying to find a secret there.
But look—one leaf
skittering across the glazed surface
catches its stem to stand upright,
the shape of a hand waving.

Poem by Vievee Francis

How to Hide a Poem?


Hide it in the hem of your dress
glued to the underside of a table
under a loose floor board inside the sole
of your left shoe place it in a waterproof bag
under the hood of the toilet of a car in a field
within an old purse on a trash heap
          with all of your other things
wood will do if there is time
with your sharpest point scratch it into a tree
a chair a child's rocking horse legs
use the ink of the body when there is no other ink
          pee will disappear blood will stick
but you you you have panicked
want to keep it can't let it go so
before the neighbor knocks
a van arrives the lover returns
fold it up tightly
           a desperate origami
press it into some speechless orifice
swallow it whole quick wash it down
with wine or with water
if you have no water then use your spit
          O you will have spit to spare
and your poem will plant itself in your belly
be your victory garden your garble of sinew and paper.

Poem by Robert Farnsworth
Vagrancy

From an American early autumn evening
flung back into tomorrow's afternoon,
I sat a while in the car park, smoking
over a map, then for practice drove west
to a neglected town, where transatlantic
flying boats set down seventy years ago,
and on the silent pier beside their museum,
imagined back the long white scuds of their
landings. No one else otherwise like me
would have come here. So now that no one
could take my peculiar solitude from me,
I set out, prompted by the intuition that my
heart would feel welcome on the grounds
of some enduring verse I first read forty
years ago. Intimation, almost invitation---
I felt bound to honor, no, not answer, honor.
Even knowing the big house was a ruin.
Under steep September sky: sea-gray,
lavender, blue, and quartz, I shouldered
a bag, and set off into the Seven Woods
toward the lough, not expecting swans—
all flown, long flown, as that weary spell
of a poem supposed they would be.
But on those woodland paths I made a loop
of several miles, until I'd walked myself
quite out of the life I'd yesterday begun
to shed in the airport lounge. The pleasure
was guilty, but pleasure it was, piercing
as music I wished never to end, a real
depaysement, an achieved disappearance,
a belonging more profound for its complete
fictitiousness, and I lay down in these
beneath a lime tree in Lady Gregory's garden,
to sleep a just sleep, as in the cherished
crypt of a page. Invisible, anonymous—
who could I fail now? My sleep was not
my own; who was going to wake me?
Nobody I knew knew where I was, knew
that I was this contented tramp dozing
in September shade in a mildly famous garden.
His hour of sleep would change me,
just enough to make the next weeks happen
not exactly to me, but exactly. I woke
beneath the gaze of six red deer.

Poem by Sally Ball
No Threat, Nuthatch

Tiny presence in the pines,
hold still. Upside down—
rightside up—flock of nerves
and fretful hunger. Hold still.

Your brothers and your sisters
have forgotten me. That's how still
I have managed to be,
pip pip pip. No stillness
for the foragers. How I love
to make no difference here.

My throat like yours—
rapid little tremor,
heart-freight, air.

Poem by Teresa Carson
July 2, 1863

The letter, signed by one Walt Whitman, read:
After the rebel bullet tore
his leg and the surgeon took it off,
your Jamey lasted seven days.
I sat with him until the end,
kissed him as if he were my boy.
Aged seventeen, he bore death like a man.
No tears, no talk of might-have-beens.
He asked if I might read to him,
from Matthew, chapter 28.

His bloodstained Bible gathers dust.
Cabinet card—his smile on
a stranger's face—locked in a box.

He is not here: for he is risen as he said.

Poem by Patrick Donnelly
ON THE LUNGS, THE LIVER, AND THE BLOOD


                   A hard rain came that broke
        the afternoon heat, then at dusk upstream
of Togetsukyo Bridge a man with a rake
                 began to clear the weir of what
        an old poem calls mikuzu:
oddments, litter, confusion, a boot, all a metaphor
                 in the poem for the speaker, who
        is bound to die. The rain trapped
two boys smoking on benches
                 in an open hut, with a woman
        who checked her phone as one might gaze
at one's own face in a mirror, and an old man
                 whose dog barked at thunder, river, smoke,
        umbrellas crossing the bridge,
cafés, sweetshops, and the intersection
                 where thin brown rickshaw boys
        huddled under katsura leaves.
Just below where the man tilled his spot
                 but out of reach, a sad anomaly evolved
        that forced the same trash to circle
with no hope of escape, unless someday Amida really
                 does arrive from the West with his net.
        The river rose until the defile
where the man stood roared with a brown foam.
                 Every time the flume clogged, the man
        cleared it. Without hope,
therefore strangely moving. A moon
                 rose and offered to rake
        clouds away from the mountain,
but lit his service little, who stood
                 in sweat and mizzle to open
        one place where
the river needed to flow.

Poem by Baron Wormser
Eve Dying


The foretaste flared in a bleak twitch—
A memory that couldn't be,
Her final heart flinching.
She threw the caging clothes aside

And fled her housed duties
While overhead
A cold cloud glowered,
The grimace of gathered nullity.

Womb-ruined, a stone
In her dwindled voice, fast
Fear shaking the seed
Of first faith while the sour

Coffin of breathless power
Prepared its lone, acute line—
A promise she knew must
Come due but could not conceive.

Her staggered, shortened moans
Smashed every fable
She had been told.
Time shrank to a groan.

Imagine her stretched out
Upon the ground—horizon
And sky resolutely empty.
No painter appears or apostle.

When the jackals draw near
They sniff and begin to cry,
Their voices plangent, raw—
Less and more than human.

Poem by Dawn Potter
Eclogue
 

A marriage worth of minutes we've stood
side by side, staring into the hooded depths
of your 1984 Dodge Ram pickup truck,
watching the engine chitter and die
for no apparent reason. I feel a crazy,
ignorant joy: here we go again, sweetheart,
struggling in harness over yet another
crappy mystery. Do you? I can't say I'll ever
know one way or the other what your thoughts
will do, though twenty years ago I made you cry
when I dumped you for the jerk down the hall,
and I'll never get over it, the sight of you,
cool autocrat, in tears for a dumb girl
who happened to be me.
 
Now I'm the one who cries all the time,
you're the one not walking away from me
down the hall.  Just the same, you imagine
walking away, I'm sure of it; maybe when you're
dragging another snow-sopped log to the chainsaw
pile, or we're curled in bed waiting for a barred owl
to stammer in the pines, the barn dog shouting back
like a madwoman. It's not that being here
is misery; it's more like marriage is too much
and not enough at the same time: the trees crowd us
like children, our bodies betray a fatal longing.
What's left for us, at forty, but dismay
till labor shakes us back into our yoke.
 
Work, work, that puritan duty—yet
how beautiful the set of your shoulders
when you heave a scrap of metal siding
into the trash heap. Our bodies linger
this side of lovely, like flowers under glass.
We drive ourselves to endure; on my knees
in the hay mow, stifled and panting,
I plant bale after bale in place: you toss,
you toss, I shove, I shove. We keep pace,
patient and wordless; the goats in their pen
blat irritably. In the yard our sons quarrel.
Mourning doves groan in the eaves.
Long hours ahead, till our job is done
and another begins.

Hunting scattered chickens in the bug-infested dew:
I watch you crouch along the scrubby poplar edge,
then circle back between the apple trees,
white hen skittering ahead, luminescent in the shabby
dark. Suddenly she drops her head and sits,
submissive as a girl. You've got her now; tuck up her feet
and carry her back home, then squat to mend the ragged fence.
A breath of sweat rises from your sunburnt neck,
salt and sweet. My love. Marry me, I say. You cast
an eye askance and shrug, I did. How odd it seems
that this is where we've landed: chasing chickens
through the woods at twilight, humid thunder rumpling
the summer sky, dishes washed, a slice of berry pie left
cooling on the counter. I've been saving it for you.

Poem by Martha Carlson-Bradley
Orbita

to Francesco Maria Grimaldi

As you adjust, once more, the telescope,
to track, closely, the path of the Moon—

the speed of its travel astounds you.

And its silence.

All that light, all that weight
of the Moon's splotched body

flies with no flapping of wings
or grinding of wheels:

the odd hum of the ball accelerating
down Galileo's inclined plane

does not sing out as the Moon

rolls around Earth, which, you insist,
never moves from its spot
in the heavens—dead center—

where God, if you're quiet enough
and still, can always find you.

Poem by Martha Rhodes
THE CONCUSSION

Let me remind you that the bile
his injury riled up arrived
on your pillow as you slept.

He would have forgotten
the shower's purpose
were you not there,
soaping him front and back,
your hair not clean yet, braided
and complicated to unbraid
when wet and foul;
the bed hastily stripped
then re-made by you
while he, propped in a chair
and snug in your robe,
stared at—
what—

For all of this, he still
may not be kind to you again—
concussions known to turn some rabid.
Your floppy retriever. Now he's weaving
toward coffee in the galley kitchen.
Retract your hand.