The first time I kissed
It was my girlfriends who kissed
They invented a flavor, a style, a smell
My lips weren’t there.
The first time I kissed
The prince was chosen by these dreaming girls
He was a jerk to me
A toad, a dragon that spat its fire on me
I don’t know what it was like
They didn’t see my closed eyes
I wasn’t there.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 60th birthday.
I overcome because I am overwhelmed.
I whip my life into shape,
one tension, one bit of calm at a time,
if I must I give back the distance I run,
if I must I rise and cut something from myself.
I’ve arrived at this hour dragging my body from moment to moment. Surreptitiously I serve up wounded blood.
The story I bear, how will you receive it?
The water I’ve gathered makes itself heard.
Here is the mother who keeps her child
forever in her womb.
And decides she will live, even as she drowns.
So far,
all over the world,
women have survived it.
Perhaps it was that our grandmothers were stoic
or, that back then, they weren’t entitled to complain,
still they reached old age
wilting bodies
but strong souls.
Now, instead,
dissertations are written on the subject.
As early as thirty agony sets in,
Foretelling the catastrophe.
A body is much more than the sum of its hormones.
Menopausal or not
a woman remains a woman,
beyond the production of secretions or eggs.
To miss a period does not imply the loss of syntax
or coherence;
it shouldn’t lead to hiding
as a snail in a shell,
nor provoke endless brooding.
If depression sets in
it won’t be a new occurrence,
each menstrual cycle has come to us with tears
and its load of irrational anger.
There is no reason, then,
to feel devalued:
Get rid of tampons
and sanitary napkins!
Use them to light a bonfire in your garden!
Be naked
Dance the ritual of aging
And survive
Like so many
Before you.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 90th birthday.
They piled the houses high,
in front long balconies.
Far below was water
far below were trees
They piled the houses high,
a thousand stairs to climb.
The outlook a far cry
and friendships further still.
They piled the houses high
in glass and concrete drowned.
In our wisdom we forgot
the earth that was remote
and those who stayed earthbound.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 40th birthday.
I
we share the same teacher, she and I.
he, who considers each poem
a breathing, pulsing thing
brain, muscle, skeleton, breath
all essential for it to thrive
on its own, without its creator
and how these boundaries overlap
breath floods brain
rhythm drives intention home
meeting in the space where silence
lives in the body on the page –
the in-between.
II
next week, when deadlines haranguing
her head have passed, she will go in search
of the in-between
and write those poems
waiting within her
a selfless, selfish act
of reaching within
to reach without
I asked a gardener
He said: the plant… the plant of light
I asked a woodcutter
He said: the tree… the tree of light
I asked a farmer
He said: the flower… the flower of light
I asked a poet
He said: the word… the word of light
I asked a lover
She said: the kiss… the kiss of light
I asked them all
The scoundrels didn’t tell me about a leaf
that falls every day on the head of one of us
No one told me about the shiver
and the plants of the other world
where there exists the smooth stone of eternity
What kind of idiots are these people?
Their leaves fall every day on my head
while I am rocking them to their last resting place.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 60th birthday.
Set off to see for myself
my father’s name
carved in a Tohoku museum
Once the “world’s strongest,”
my father’s magnet
crouches on a shelf
Monday morning
the head of the Magnetic Research Institute
picks out his necktie
My father, perfectly at home
with rare earth elements,
loves Modigliani women
“Writing more love poems?”
half humorously
half anxiously
His present—
Sanuki noodles—
comes stuffed in a company envelope
Something warm in the way
he calls his wife “Mother”
without the least hesitation
He wipes his face with a hot towel
and sighs contentedly—
looking at him now I see an ordinary man
Moving away from the telephone
he sips his tea as if to say
“I’m not listening”
Forgiven
their inability to express tenderness—
men of my father’s generation
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 75th birthday.
after John Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal on St Lucy’s Day’
At midday on the year’s midnight
into my mind came
I saw the new moon late yestreen
wi the auld moon in her airms
though, no,
there is no moon of course –
there’s nothing very much of anything to speak of
in the sky except a gey dreich greyness
rain-laden over Glasgow and today
there is the very least of even this for us to get
but
the light comes back
the light always comes back
and this begins tomorrow with
however many minutes more of sun and serotonin.
Meanwhile
there will be the winter moon for us to love the longest,
fat in the frosty sky among the sharpest stars,
and lines of old songs we can’t remember
why we know
or when first we heard them
will aye come back
once in a blue moon to us
unbidden
and bless us with their long-travelled light.
Who was it that cried out? This cry,
a call that opens night
breaks out like a bird
breaking to greet dawn, or
the arrival of a high tide
that brings schools of fish
whose scales make the waters
glint and shimmer, glint and shimmer.
Who cried? Who woke us
to such things on such a dark night?
Do not ask. No, do not ask.
The moon will make a basin
for tears and where your heart beats
a well will dry up and the weight
of ships leaning against the wind
will make you think of a woman
hanging in the hammock
of an early death.
We present this work in honor of the Day of Reconciliation.
in the night when everything was black
burnt to a cross of ash
on the blind glass
and the dog’s bark a dark kite
blowing away in darkness
to where the moon
tears like the keel of a sinking boat
I dreamt my language
the title page smeared black
with signs now undecipherable raw
and inside the book
I saw my reflection
standing there three times
first among dead friends
with mottled grieving faces
like dogs staring directly into the blind window
while their thoughts like empty glasses
turning in the hands
and I was there
thin neck and moustache
our poems are slaves each with a full wave
feathers proudly on the head
then in a tableau at departure
in the garden of the night
with cape of white hair
my mother an aged virgin in my embrace
and further back
in the folds of memory
all other trusteds as torches of forgetting
were I now the prophet
sent to spy if there is life
in this world
or the senseless exile returning to say
our language was a footnote
under the illegible page history?
a last time on a bench in the empty garden
of a madhouse of toothless ageds
as skeletons with little bitter flesh
swaddled in the blanket
and wild tuft and eyes blind marbles
bow and mutter bow and mutter
many words oh many words
but only the whispering of dead slaves
but not enough to groove or make boat
and outside of the book beyond all listening
the bark and the wind and the ash
of the moon in dark water
Poets Corner 