Two Poems from Barry Tagrin's work in progress: The Bluest Dog
POSTED 2007-11-28 IN POEMS
PHUKET DANCER
(December 27th, 2005)
You are at work tonight, my darling.
I know you are full of hope, dreaming
that money will come your way.
I see you’ve dressed up in that outfit I gave you.
The one that covers over your shyness,
and the fear you have about your body after the baby.
It will be more difficult you tell me
that you are less now than what the men want.
At twenty, past your prime
and the innocence they love to eat out of you.
It’s true you will seek to perform in the dimmer,
more romantic light. Turn the lamps down,
and work more at quickness,
when in the past you were a princess of time,
giving more than you must.
Even to the bad ones, who you thought
your richness could alter.
Like me you believed there had to be some goodness
somewhere in the process.
Your child now, little Tam, is home with your mother.
Your father, you say, was killed in the big wave.
I’m sorry, my gifts are all I have left.
Probably I too am damaged by this world of the body
and the commerce of affection.
Nevertheless, you were surprised that as my time
was running out, I was wasting it
getting to know you.
When perhaps I could have asked for more,
I asked for less.
We come together, just because we are so far apart.
This evening, the sky is back, and the sea is calm.
The sand along the lonely beach glistens anew.
Good bye and good luck.
When you have an all night guy now,
you take care best you can,
body and soul.
And keep your heart just as it is.
3 Poems by Barry Tagrin
POSTED 2007-05-29 IN POEMS
Perhaps no critical insight can adequately sum up the force of voice and creative impulse that marks this unique and original poet. Tagrin’s highly personal poems are made up of a natural complexity of insight and a dramatic interplay of emotions, and while not opaque, are not always easily absorbed on first reading. Wisdom and tenderness at one moment can shift next into wonderment and raw, troubled self reflection.
Preview his new book in the 'True Visitor Books' section
THE FEMININE CENTURY
When I came home tonight I lit the lamps in the patio,
a couple of those kerosene flares too.
I guess I was lighting up the loneliness all around.
Just like my mother did. She too fought to stay young.
As a boy I watched her tape her cheeks up tight,
glue her neck at the back sides to tighten the throat.
She was a real magician. She taught me romance.
That’s why I’m up on the roof now,
listening to the goats navigate the moonlight terraces,
their bells the sentimental code of the mountain.
It was the sound Karen most loved.
It always made her feel safe.
The peacefulness that replaced my troubled days away.
How she suffered, my queen. How we rode the struggle,
between the present impossible and the future
we could not build.
Whenever I am out here, on the roof of the house
we built together, I think of her.
I like to imagine she is the center mystics dream of finding.
The secret scientists feel the universe possesses.
It makes me wonder just what it is that I have accomplished.
Perhaps the way is other than I have imagined. For example,
I could have cast aside the various defections of my troubled
behavior, the selfish nature of the un-godly investigations.
That punishing game of the body which worked to diminish
the spirit of the woman I loved. Yes I could have, but I didn’t.
Instead, I went on sending failed postcards to imaginary dolls,
and secret letters to angels who lived in my loins.
O I dreamed up a filthy universe, and made my wife carry
it to church. Into the garden, out on picnics along the bay.
For a generation I worked to salvage the Eros of my childhood.
Thundering under all before me. Using up the hopes
of my loving partner. Went on, and on, until I killed her heart.
And here on my fingertips are what remains,
a number of conquests, from cashmere
to dirty white cotton.
3 Poems by Linda Gregg
POSTED 2007-05-28 IN POEMS
Linda Gregg has been the recipient of many awards for her work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Whiting Writer's Award, as well as multiple Pushcart Prizes. She was the 2003 winner of the Sara Teasdale Award and the 2006 PEN/Voelcker Award winner for Poetry.
PARIAN MARBLE
I was walking in the fields with a friend
and asked what the farmers do when they plow up
something extraordinary. He said it depends
on what its worth. They take it to a middleman.
“Look at that,” I said, and picked up a five-pound
marble head of Eros. The cheeks protected
the smile but otherwise it was beaten up.
A crack down the forehead and under one eye
made it seem to be frowning. Behind us were
four bushes: sage, thyme, oregano, mirtia.
The sun was going down. I would like to hold
something up against the ruin. To show how the heart
and spirit pass the test. The look on the face
was understanding and blissful. The light changed
and I hid it inside a bush for another two thousand years.
3 Poems by Jack Gilbert
POSTED 2007-05-28 IN POEMS
Gilbert is the author of Refusing Heaven (2005), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (1996). He has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Monolithos won the Stanley Kunitz Prize and the American Poetry Review Prize, and Views of Jeopardy won the Yale Younger Poets Series. Both books were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
INFIDELITY
She is never dead when he meets her.
They eat noodles for breakfast as usual.
For eleven years he thought it was the river
at the bottom of his mind dreaming.
Now he knows she is living inside him,
as the wind is sometimes visible
in the trees. As the roses and rhubarb
are in the garden and then not.
Her ashes are by the sea in Kamakura.
Her face and hair and sweet body still
in the old villa on a mountain where
she lived the whole summer. They slept
on the floor for eleven years.
But now she comes less and less.
2 Poems by Sarah Mitchem
POSTED 2007-05-24 IN YOUNG WRITERS POEMS
Sarah Mitchem is a sharp young writer out of Virginia Tech. She is at once careful, strikingly open, and very exact in her work. These poems, arising from her time in Paros, Greece, where she studied writing at Hellenic International Studies in the Arts, allow a very literary, internal view into an acute self-awareness.
THE WATERLINE
At the harbor a little
fishing boat is tied
to the pier.
The rough water and chopping at it.
I want to get in.
Not to lose myself in its rocking motion,
just desiring to write in the boat
and not worry about slipping away.But I would end up noticing
where the paint is chipped,
what lay at the bottom of the boards,
the colors chosen.
All so that I could transcribe it
faithfully in my journal.
Recording small accuracies and
promising to remember them.
Reciting what’s around me to
avoid what’s in me.Always in this body
but that I don’t know myself,
don’t let my heart rule.
I’m always brought back
to segments of myself.
The way my motions
make people record me.
The Greek men reeling me in by my wrists
so that I struggle to slip onto side streets.
To dissolve there, and dissolve here.I did not get in the boat.
I do not write how salted wood feels.
I did what I do with you.
I imagine the boat.
I record the habits I would perform.
I fail to reconcile.
A Tribute to Jack Gilbert
and Linda Gregg
POSTED 2007-05-21 IN JOURNAL
Among the poetry crowd, Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg are well known, respected figures. Their latest books which are presented here in our Selected Poets Series have received extraordinary critical acclaim and are very fine examples of their work. Between them they have won a score of awards, prizes and grants. Biographic details can be found on Wikipedia.org, or on many of the online poetry directories. It is our intention here though to pay tribute to more than their work, for these are two very special people who have given a life time of serious devotion not only to the art of poetry and its creation, but to the teaching and mentoring of other writers too.
3 Poems by Allison Noël Seay
POSTED 2007-05-20 IN YOUNG WRITERS POEMS
Allison is a young talented writer out of the Writing Program at the University of North Carolina. She is currently Associate Editor at the "Greensboro Review".
THE NEWLYWEDS
He desired her most in summer—poolside, the wet
nape of her neck, a puzzle book damp on her towel.When she lay down next to him, he startled her
with an ice cube at the small of her back.The heat was as thick as grass. The ice melted
faster than she thought it would. Then,there was no visible trace, only a marked absence
which became the place the sun felt most violentwhich was, I see, the beginning of grief.
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