the meaning you make

poem of the day from poetry daily

Ecclesiastes

The trick is that you’re willing to help them.
The rule is to sound like you’re doing them a favor.

The rule is to create a commission system.
The trick is to get their number.

The trick is to make it personal:
No one in the world suffers like you.

The trick is that you’re providing a service.
The rule is to keep the conversation going.

The rule is their parents were foolish,
their children are greedy or insane.

The rule is to make them feel they’ve come too late.
The trick is that you’re willing to make exceptions.

The rule is to assume their parents abused them.
The trick is to sound like the one teacher they loved.

And when they say “too much,”
give them a plan.

And when they say “anger” or “rage” or “love,”
say “give me an example.”

The rule is everyone is a gypsy now.
Everyone is searching for his tribe.

The rule is you don’t care if they ever find it.
The trick is that they feel they can.

Khaled Mattawa

from Tocqueville
New Issues Poetry & Prose

I’ve been spending a lot of time tooling around on poetryfoundation.org — there is so much — and last night I started with “Often I Imagine the Earth” by Dan Gerber which led me somehow to “Somewhere” by Robert Creeley and then I had to read everything they have on the site by Creeley, I think I love him.

I am still recovering from the reading of Infinite Jest. I feel confident that I have watched every David Foster Wallace interview available online. While I have found some answers, even more questions arise. When I read this poem today I could not help but think of DFW and IJ and all the characters that live in it.

poem of the day from poets.org

Having it Out with Melancholy
by Jane Kenyon

If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.

A. P. CHEKHOV The Cherry Orchard

1 FROM THE NURSERY

When I was born, you waited
behind a pile of linen in the nursery,
and when we were alone, you lay down
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.

And from that day on
everything under the sun and moon
made me sad — even the yellow
wooden beads that slid and spun
along a spindle on my crib.

You taught me to exist without gratitude.
You ruined my manners toward God:
“We’re here simply to wait for death;
the pleasures of earth are overrated.”

I only appeared to belong to my mother,
to live among blocks and cotton undershirts
with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes
and report cards in ugly brown slipcases.
I was already yours — the anti-urge,
the mutilator of souls.

2 BOTTLES

Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin,
Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax,
Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft.
The coated ones smell sweet or have
no smell; the powdery ones smell
like the chemistry lab at school
that made me hold my breath.

3 SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND

You wouldn’t be so depressed
if you really believed in God.

4 OFTEN

Often I go to bed as soon after dinner
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away
from the massive pain in sleep’s
frail wicker coracle.

5 ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT

Once, in my early thirties, I saw
that I was a speck of light in the great
river of light that undulates through time.

I was floating with the whole
human family. We were all colors — those
who are living now, those who have died,
those who are not yet born. For a few

moments I floated, completely calm,
and I no longer hated having to exist.

Like a crow who smells hot blood
you came flying to pull me out
of the glowing stream.
“I’ll hold you up. I never let my dear
ones drown!” After that, I wept for days.

6 IN AND OUT

The dog searches until he finds me
upstairs, lies down with a clatter
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.

Sometimes the sound of his breathing
saves my life — in and out, in
and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . .

7 PARDON

A piece of burned meat
wears my clothes, speaks
in my voice, dispatches obligations
haltingly, or not at all.
It is tired of trying
to be stouthearted, tired
beyond measure.

We move on to the monoamine
oxidase inhibitors. Day and night
I feel as if I had drunk six cups
of coffee, but the pain stops
abruptly. With the wonder
and bitterness of someone pardoned
for a crime she did not commit
I come back to marriage and friends,
to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back
to my desk, books, and chair.

8 CREDO

Pharmaceutical wonders are at work
but I believe only in this moment
of well-being. Unholy ghost,
you are certain to come again.

Coarse, mean, you’ll put your feet
on the coffee table, lean back,
and turn me into someone who can’t
take the trouble to speak; someone
who can’t sleep, or who does nothing
but sleep; can’t read, or call
for an appointment for help.

There is nothing I can do
against your coming.
When I awake, I am still with thee.

9 WOOD THRUSH

High on Nardil and June light
I wake at four,
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air
presses through the screen
with the wild, complex song
of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment.
What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye.

From Constance by Jane Kenyon, published by Graywolf Press. © 1993 by Jane Kenyon. All rights reserved.

Sometimes I pick up poem after poem and in nothing can I find what I am looking for. Sometimes I need the effect produced by poetry, yet when I read all the words jumble together and I can’t connect or make sense of anything. Sometimes I look to poems already with me and I am reminded of how to make connections and I remember how I understand. Here are some I continually return to:

from Rick Kilpatrick’s “Languages Grow Among Stars”

Earth has not forgotten its sadness

from Paul Guest’s “Invitation”

when will you decide to live peaceably
with yourself, Paul Guest?

from Jorge Luis Borges’s “Two Forms of Insomnia”

It is trying to sink into death and being unable to sink into death. It is being and continuing to be.

from Susan Hansell’s ” … in 10 years she’ll wish she knew the answer to that mathematical question with the weights and the cubes … she’ll wish she could call me up and ask … ”

a struck match, burnt clean and blue

one day you will want what you can have

from Charles Bukowski’s “For Jane”

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

from Margaret Atwood’s “Variations on the Word Sleep”

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

from Marina Sigareva’s “Adult Arts and Crafts”

I work so long, and snip so small
to open you up, to see the the rotted threads
and even stitches I was not the one to make before

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.  ~ Hal Borland (from Autumn is for Understanding)

All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.  ~ Thomas Wolfe

There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October.  ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

October is nature’s funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming – October than May. Every green thing loves to die in bright colors.  ~  Henry Ward Beecher

when i read this, at first i feel the mysticism borges builds into the night: its inaccessibility,  its never ending mystery, its possibilities. and then with the last two lines he reminds us it is different only because of the way we see it, because we categorize it as different from the day. its mystique lies within our inability to see it. as humans we must make sense of everything, assign things to their boxes so that we may understand them, but what do we do with the things that have no boxes? the things that we are unable to access? and do we really understand all the things we do box away? just because we can see them, do we know them?

would we know when the night comes if we could not see the light vanishing? would the diminishing warmth of the sun raise the same questions?

History of the Night
by Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Charles Tomlinson

Down through the generations
men built the night.
In the beginning it was blindness and sleep
and thorns that tear the naked foot
and fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
which divides the two twilights;
we shall never know in what century it stood as a cipher
for the space between the stars.
Other men engendered the myth.
They made it mother of the tranquil Fates
who weave destiny,
and sacrificed black sheep to it
and the cock which presages its end.
The Chaldeans gave it twelve houses;
infinite worlds, the Gateway.
Latin hexameters gave it form
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de León saw in it the fatherland
of his shuddering soul.
Now we feel it to be inexhaustible
like an ancient wine
and no-one can contemplate it without vertigo
and time has charged it with eternity.

And to think it would not exist
but for those tenuous instruments, the eyes.

the latest from lists on mcsweeny’s:

Spoilers I’ve Delivered To English Lit Majors.

BY WAYNE GLADSTONE

- – - -

Godot never comes.

Bartleby is a lot like humanity in his preferring not to.

Peyton Farquhar sure has an active imagination at Owl Creek.

Your close reading skills and knowledge of symbolism will not be rewarded in your job as a lawyer or coffee barista.

there is something very powerful in the image of humans rewriting “each page and every line” if every book were to be destroyed. upon my first reading of this poem i (not unlike the faithless) cynically agreed with history being burned along with its books, but not borges. it seems such a romantic notion, now even more so than in borges time (which wasn’t really that long ago),  that as a people we would be nothing without our books, and that we would know it. i do agree that we would be nothing though, because nothing can replace the smell of a book, the notes in the margins from the previous owner, being able to hold in your hand and trace the shape of a letter – to feel the ink rise from the page.

Alexandria, 64 A.D.
by Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Stephen Kessler

Since the first Adam who beheld the night
And the day and the shape of his own hand,
Men have made up stories and have fixed
In stone, in metal, or on parchment
Whatever the world includes or dreams create.
Here is the fruit of their labor: the Library.
They say the wealth of volumes it contains
Outnumbers the stars or the grains
Of sand in the desert. The man
Who tried to read them all would lose
His mind and the use of his reckless eyes.
Here the great memory of the centuries
That were, the swords and the heroes,
The concise symbols of algebra,
The knowledge that fathoms the planets
Which govern destiny, the powers
Of herbs and talismanic carvings,
The verse in which love’s caress endures,
The science that deciphers the solitary
Labyrinth of God, theology,
Alchemy which seeks to turn clay into gold
And all the symbols of idolatry.
The faithless say that if it were to burn,
History would burn with it. They are wrong.
Unceasing human work gave birth to this
Infinity of books. If of them all
Not even one remained, man would again
Beget each page and every line,
Each work and every love of Hercules,
And every teaching of every manuscript.
In the first century of the Muslim era,
I, that Omar who subdued the Persians
and who imposes Islam on the Earth,
Order my soldiers to destroy
By fire the abundant Library,
Which will not perish. All praise is due
To God who never sleeps and to Muhammad,
His Apostle.

the formatting is not quite what it should be, see it in its proper form in the paris review

The Heart Under Your Heart
by Craig Arnold

Who gives his heart away too easily must have a heart
under his heart.
—James Richardson

The heart under your heart
is not the one you share
so readily      so full of pleasantry
& tenderness

it is a single blackberry
at the heart of a bramble
or else some larger fruit
heavy      the size of a fist

it is full of things
you have never shared with me
broken engagements      bruises
& baking dishes

the scars on top of scars
of sixteen thousand pinpricks
the melody you want so much to carry
& always fear black fear

or so I imagine      you have never shown me
& how could I expect you to
I also have a heart beneath my heart
perhaps you have seen      or guessed

it is a beach at night
where the waves lap & the wind hisses
over a bank of thin
translucent orange & yellow jingle shells

on the far side of the harbor
the lighthouse beacon
shivers across the black water
& someone stands there      waiting

a friend, mr. b, just sent this my way:

There was a legend that Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to create a six word story and he came up with the line

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn