We were searching for
ourselves, after logic
for no good reason,
jumping fires to take
the heat for walking,
wishing the blue night
not to fall into the blue
sky and darken what
remained. We were
holding on to music,
playing the solemn
string the healing horn,
rolling back the meadow
to give innocence one
more tumble, waiting
for the breeze to send
the screen door slamming
open. We were rushing
with the sea of people
tiding over curb and
sidewalk, twilight running
out of light, a city pacing
its expansion into the sky,
block by block, new
views burying the old,
thinking not thinking
about the dead. We were
who we never thought
we’d be, at the corner
of expectation and desire,
the world kind and un-
kind, the rabbits scared
the palace in ruins,
language failing the earth
in transition, the infinite
sky divided the clouds
dispersing premonitions.
Come evening come
shade, float us to your
constellation, let the void
draw us still; the radiologist
turn off her light and go.
Copyright © 2017 by Howard Altmann. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 23, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
like the shapes we made in the things we said were demanding of us
now you ask me why the sky is a tank full of lemonade out back
all wet tonight and bugs call up a swamp in this desert in my story
my dad wrote all the wrong names for her on a brick that could lift
through my mother’s window came the words arrayed in glass
dusting San Martincito on her dresser cast in plastic with spaces in his robes
a home for the hen the dog made mild in the skirts of the mongrel saint
still lining a thin easy silence around me come the scenes all down our street
in someone’s car music each word lifted into its own space thumps in the moon’s
heavy sleep breath there are extensions we can read what we said
it’s such a simple printshop so mothers might tell us about what came
to be more known a pear tree in the commons and really
the words left idle beside if they could tell us about the forms
if these came to lift them if we could ask sin miedo y sin piedad
Copyright © 2017 by Farid Matuk. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 6, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
I remember once I ran after you and tagged the fluttering
shirt of you in the wind.
Once many days ago I drank a glassful of something and
the picture of you shivered and slid on top of the stuff.
And again it was nobody else but you I heard in the
singing voice of a careless humming woman.
One night when I sat with chums telling stories at a
bonfire flickering red embers, in a language its own
talking to a spread of white stars:
It was you that slunk laughing
in the clumsy staggering shadows.
Broken answers of remembrance let me know you are
alive with a peering phantom face behind a doorway
somewhere in the city’s push and fury.
Or under a pack of moss and leaves waiting in silence
under a twist of oaken arms ready as ever to run
away again when I tag the fluttering shirt of you.
This poem is in the public domain.
given his showing up to teach at the U disheveled, jittery cigarette and cigarette and probably the drink, losing the very way there over river, river of all song, all American story which starts way north of St. Paul quiet or undone wandering south, not enraged mostly, something stranger. That’s one epic shard of John Berryman anyway. Notorious. And par for the course in a classroom destined, struck-by-lightning in sacred retrospect, the kind those long-ago students now can’t believe themselves so accidentally chosen, grateful though one probably claimed the poet absolutely bonkers then, out of his tree toward the end, so went the parlance. Wasn’t he always late—Give them back, Weirdo!—with those brilliant papers they eked out, small dim-lit hours when a big fat beer would’ve been nice. Really nice. Fuck him, I hear that kid most definitely blurting were he young right now though the others— From the get-go their startle and reverence. But not even that malcontent did the damning I can’t believe they gave him tenure. Here’s where I think something else, think of course it’s the Dream Songs that rattled him until— as grandparents used to say—he couldn’t see straight. Like Dickinson’s bits of shock and light did her in between naps and those letters to some vague beloved unattainable. Or Plath, her meticulous crushing fog. Maybe closer to Milton working his blindness—literally blind rage, if you want to talk rage—into pages soaked through with triumphant failure and rhyme, always that high orchestration, that alpha/omega big voice thing. And Satan, after all, as wise guy and looming because for chrissake, Jack, get an interesting character in there! Someone must have lobbed that right. All along, Berryman: how those Dream Songs surely loosened a bolt or a wheel in his orderly scholar-head, must have come at him like Michael the Archangel, 77 days of winged flash searing him to genius, some kind of whack-a-mole version. Maybe like Gabriel cutting that starry celebrity deal for a most dubious conception in the desert, near a fig tree, no proper human mechanics required. At last Berryman’s rage wasn’t rage but sorrow turned back on itself. With teeth. Henry my hero of crankiness and feigned indifference, unspeakable industry, exhaustion and grief, half funny-crazy, half who-knows-what- that-line-means. A henry whole universe of Henry, of there ought to be a law against Henry—pause and pause—Mister Bones: there is. Will be! Was! Not to say poetry’s worth it or the most healthy fascination for the sane. I’m just, I mean—is this love? There’s break, as in lucky, as in shatter. There’s smitten and there’s smite.
Copyright © 2018 by Marianne Boruch. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 19, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Haven’t found anyone From the old gang. They must be still in hiding, Holding their breaths And trying not to laugh. Our street is down on its luck With windows broken Where on summer nights One heard couples arguing, Or saw them dancing to the radio. The redhead we were All in love with, Who sat on the fire escape, Smoking late into the night, Must be in hiding too. The skinny boy On crutches Who always carried a book, May not have Gotten very far. Darkness comes early This time of year Making it hard To recognize familiar faces In those of strangers.
Copyright © 2018 by Charles Simic. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 13, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets
He says I live far-far away as we build a robot out of blocks. The heart's a dollar music box he chose on his last birthday wringing every handle for the song about a star. This year a star ornament dashed all colors by an artist the summer he was born. We hung it by his window like the star he sings about at night. It's not a star that fell inward long ago as its light fled out. Every troubled night that first year of his life I held him on my chest and called his name into his sleep until he calmed enough to watch the moon arc past the blinds above us. Do you have two hearts because you're a boy and a girl? You're a girl but you're my dad and not and then he says his mother’s partner’s name. Nothing changes until it must I told myself when I lay down on the surgeon’s table. Drowsy now he sings again about the star which is a song about a traveler grateful for the light to chart a course.
Copyright © 2019 by Jordan Rice. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 30, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.