POEMS
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.
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