Garden of Eden

What a profound longing
I feel, just at this very instant,
For the Garden of Eden
On Montague Street
Where I seldom shopped,
Usually only after therapy,
Elbow sore at the crook
From a handbasket filled
To capacity. The glossy pastries!
Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!
Once, a bag of black beluga
Lentils spilt a trail behind me
While I labored to find
A tea they refused to carry.
It was Brooklyn. My thirties.
Everyone I knew was living
The same desolate luxury,
Each ashamed of the same things:
Innocence and privacy. I’d lug
Home the paper bag, doing
Bank-balance math and counting days.
I’d squint into it, or close my eyes
And let it slam me in the face—
The known sun setting
On the dawning century.

—Tracy K. Smith

(From Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith.)

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.
I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold
While your better selves watch from the bleachers.
I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow
You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night
In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-
Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars
Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.
I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough
To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

—Terrance Hayes

(From American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes)

The Language of the Brag

I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the center of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.
 
I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.
 
I have wasted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around
 
my belly big with cowardice and safety,
my stool black with iron pills,
my huge breasts oozing mucus,
my legs swelling, my hands swelling,
my face swelling and darkening, my hair
falling out, my inner sex
stabbed again and again with terrible pain like a knife.
I have lain down.
 
I have laid down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and feces and water and
slowly alone in the center of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.
 
I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg. I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.
 
—Sharon Olds
 
(This poem appears in The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux.)

Saint Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them;
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
 
—Galway Kinnell
 
(From Collected Poems by Galway Kinnell)

Pearl

“She was a headlong assault, a hysterical discharge,
an act of total extermination.”
—Myra Freidman, Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin
 
She was nothing much, this plain-faced girl from Texas,
this moonfaced child who opened her mouth
to the gravel pit churning in her belly, acne-faced
daughter of Leadbelly, Bessie, Otis, and the booze-
filled moon, child of the honky-tonk bar-talk crowd
who cackled like a bird of prey, velvet cape blown
open in the Monterey wind, ringed fingers fisted
at her throat, howling the slagheap up and out
into the sawdusted air. Bareface, mouth warped
and wailing like giving birth, like being eaten alive
from the inside, or crooning like the first child
abandoned by God, trying to woo him back,
down on her knees and pleading for a second chance.
When she sang she danced a stand-in-place dance,
one foot stamping at that fire, that bed of coals;
one leg locked at the knee and quivering, the other
pumping its oil-rig rhythm, her bony hip jigging
so the beaded belt slapped her thigh.
Didn't she give it to us? So loud so hard so furious,
hurling heat-seeking balls of lightning
down the long human aisles, her voice crashing
into us—sonic booms to the heart—this little white girl
who showed us what it was like to die
for love, to jump right up and die for it night after
drumbeaten night, going down shrieking—hair
feathered, frayed, eyes glazed, addicted to the song--
a one-woman let me show you how it's done, how it is,
where it goes when you can't hold it anymore.
Child of everything gone wrong, gone bad, gone down,
gone. Girl with the girlish breasts and woman hips,
thick-necked, sweat misting her upper lip, hooded eyes
raining a wild blue light, hands reaching out
to the ocean we made, all that anguish and longing
swelling and rising at her feet. Didn't she burn
herself up for us, shaking us alive? That child,
that girl, that rawboned woman, stranded
in a storm on a blackened stage like a house
on fire.

—Dorianne Laux
 
(From Smoke by Dorianne Laux.)

Pumpernickel

Monday mornings Grandma rose an hour early to make rye
onion & challah, but it was pumpernickel she broke her hands for,
pumpernickel that demanded cornmeal, ripe caraway, mashed potatoes,
& several Old Testament stories about patience & fortitude & for
which she cursed in five languages if it didn’t pop out fat
as an apple-cheeked peasant bride. But bread, after all,
is only bread & who has time to fuss all day & end up
which a dead heart if it flops? Why bother? I’ll tell you why.
For the moment when the steam curls off the black crust like a strip
of pure sunlight & the hard oily flesh breaks open like a poem
pulling out of its own stubborn complexity a single glistening truth
& who can help but wonder at the mystery of the human heart when you
hold a slice up to the light in all its absurd splendor & I tell you
we must risk everything for the raw recipe of our passion.
 
—Philip Schultz
 
(From Deep Within the Ravine by Philip Schultz.)

The Summer Day

 Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
 
—Mary Oliver
 
(From New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver.)

Poet at Twenty-Four

In those days the wind seemed to whittle me down
to the root. Round off my fingers as if I were some
piece of glass in the evening sea. If you saw me
at the grocery store picking through fruit,
my backpack hanging behind,
eyes gone slack as a turned-off TV at the Radio Shack
in the mall, testing the peaches and the ripe avocados,
scratching the skin of a grapefruit
for luck, you would barely have noticed
the hawk’s foot necklace I wore on a copper
electrical wife, the ribbon of foil I glued to my beanie
to block out invisible low-wave rays.
If you saw me at the coffee shop watching the crowd,
scribbling notes on a wrinkled receipt,
you would never have noticed yourself in these words,
but you would be there still,
in the softest rhyme, in streetlight spilling across
your empty cup. You would be the simple
wish of mist, the unnamable music that kept me alive,
even after you turned to forget who I was
and left through the automatic doors.
 
—Kai Carlson-Wee
 
(From Rail by Kai Carlson-Wee.)
 

Horse Jacket

I am the woman who bought the mustard-yellow
denim jacket, painted across the back of a turquoise
 
horse, its mange orange, its eyes lime green, acrylic paint
so think the jacket was heavy as wet newspaper. God,
 
I loved that jacket. From the front it looked almost
respectable: practical, made to last. From the back
 
it looked like a carousel from Hell. Hell, I wore that jacket
day and night, from late adolescence into late-arriving
 
adulthood, a jacket fit for all seasons, if any at all,
wore it home the day I bought it at the 23rd Street flea market,
 
from a woman who had hung each of her hand-painted jackets
on a wire hanger, lifted each hanger onto the chain-link fence.
 
I was 19 years old, she the age that I am now, her hair gray,
her eyes gray, her nail polish flat back. She wore a red jacket,
 
raised her arms and spun like a ballerina to show me,
“It's ears are wrong. It doesn't look like a horse,”
 
which was true but irrelevant, as her brief dance attested.
The mustard-yellow jacket draped a metal chair, waiting
 
for a woman who had left a ten dollar bill, said
she's return with the rest of the money, disappeared.
 
“It's yours, Honey, for the difference,” the woman said,
and I bought that jacket for ten dollars and change,
 
for the promise it held of a life like no other. I wore it
without irony. I wore it with love. I hand-washed it
 
in cold water. I wore it from apartment to apartment,
those years I moved almost yearly, thinking
 
I would know my home as I had known my jacket:
the moment I saw it. Home would be the place where I, too,
 
would work my art until late at night,
as did the woman who held her mustard-yellow jacket
 
for the last time, as I slipped my arms into the sleeves
as she told me again how to care for it, as if the jacket
 
were a pet she was giving away, as, in fact, it was.
It was her horse, and now it was mine.

—Suzanne Cleary
 
(From Crude Angel by Suzanne Cleary.)

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
 
—Jack Gilbert

(From Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert.)