Stranger

“we make strangers of ourselves by loving others”  Carol Moldaw (in a reading at Skylight Books)

*******************

Lazy Eye                                                         Lesley Wheeler

The stranger unplugs her bogus teeth
with a damp pop, tossing discarded parts
across my room, where she bunks this summer.
She brings Cadbury bars and Oxo cubes.

I am ten and not Cassandra. The gods
broke me, didn’t send a gift or a note—
Sorry, Second Sight is out of stock.
So one eye glares at tomorrow, the other watches

the visitor. Off with the belt that cinches her fine
figure. She tucks her dress, as green as envy,
into the pastel sweetness of my closet.
A bra’s silky cones protrude from her case.

I peel a scrap of plastic from one iris,
drop it in the shag, kneel to stroke
the rug, sit up to scrape the ball again:
could the lens still be drifting there? Have I lost

something, or not? Contacts improve me for other
lookers, but do not change what I see,
the double vision, partial views, the way
she’s my grandmother, the way she’s

a foreign country. Oh, hyphenated you,
the chorus mocks. I am a lucky girl, I have
souvenirs, I have plans, I can gaze along two
paths at once. Some kind of recompense. 

********************************************8

“The man who is detached in this way is the friend of God, as ‘a stranger is a friend of another stranger on account of their strangeness on earth’”. Martin Buber, The Legend of the Baal-Shem

*************************

The Possibilities for Wings                        Gary Fincke

How often have the customs of strangers
Silenced me into dreaming their beliefs.
In Java, for example, some people
Insist the souls of suicides return
In the bodies of crows, while in Scotland,
Souls of the lonely flee to butterflies.

In Pennsylvania? In this town where death
Belongs to those with names I've said, the souls
Of the ordinary are cries called out
And gone into an afternoon of rain,
Leaving me to wish winged things for the friend
Whose heart has failed, the friend who killed himself
In his meticulously sealed garage.

In my back yard? I'm talking to the friend
Who, like me, has sidestepped the terrible,
And even, from time to time, laughs aloud,
Neither of us, not yet, fluttering off
In moths or whatever we might predict
For our futures, the possible wings for
Depression, jealousy, the waste of hours.

Choose one? he asks, and I say the poorwill,
The only bird that hibernates, waking,
After months, to flight. Yes, he answers, good.
Overhead, just now, a small plane pierces
The air, and I imagine both of us
On board, becoming birds that seem to fly
Without love of anything but ourselves,
Shaping our fear against the summoned sky. 

****************************

Palsy                                                                                       Bob Hicok

Ignoring the obvious is most of manners.
Better to turn from the man
with a nose shaped like the boot
of Italy, the bad dancing
of Siamese twins, to the lillies,
white & flecked red, and praise
their novel arrangement
in the green vase. Now that her hands
shake, music lives in her martini,
the bright collisions of ice and glass.
I didn't see this coming in the way
I didn't see the universe coming
or my loss of hair, the limp
that's set up shop in my left hip.
It's not rude but descriptive to say
her head bobs as those tigers
in the backs of cars do or
plastic dolls dressed in the uniform
of a favorite ball club that nod
their agreement in the rear view
all the way to Miami. An earthquake
lives in her signature on the bill
she snags at the bistro and insists
is hers, the pen moves
as the stylus in Ouija does,
giving a dark answer from a realm
without blood. When she lays
the tremor of her hand on my arm,
I'm reminded we all vibrate
more or less from womb to death.
Years back I'd have asked what
it's like, to be a stranger
in your body, but my greater pride
at forty's what I don't say. Anyway
truth encumbers. She might
contradict what I've decided,
might say all hopes and memories
are beaten about, that it's
like living in a tornado and not
proof of a soul so happy
to still be around it shivers. 

***********************

From the Plane                         Anne Marie Macari

It is a soft thing, it has been sifted
from the sieve of space and seems
asleep there under the moths of light.

Cluster of dust and fire, from up here
you are a stranger and I am dropping
through the funnel of air to meet you. 

****************

Questions for Silence                                                  Paul Guest

In its first thin tide. In the place
to which it's come like a stranger.
Where the day is a map
you cannot read, crickets begin
in the warm night to whirr
green songs they could not unlearn
had they minds to grow bored.
The willow tree shudders
as though it were sewn up
with twitching nerves, with wire
bright as new-minted pennies. Where
do you go to gain the ear
of the moon, its ravaged face
lamented by no one? And
what do you tell something so old
it cannot remember
being once part of the world and not the sky?
What would your shadow care
to hear, to come close, to touch
hand to wall the tremor
of a passing train? If it had bones inside it,
you know it would flee.
So what are your words worth
to the hurried traffic,
to everything blurred,
to the ice cream truck
and its sweet patrol,
its song spilling out like a toy,
even in the dark? For all the sunlight
passing from the world
like a thought, who might you sing
to timid sleep? However long
you waited for rain
to rinse you of light's molten color,
for the elbow of the river
to bend back
to your life, the grass whispers,
you waited too long—
and all the while it speaks
it grows. 

Color II

Questions for Silence                                                  Paul Guest

In its first thin tide. In the place
to which it's come like a stranger.
Where the day is a map
you cannot read, crickets begin
in the warm night to whirr
green songs they could not unlearn
had they minds to grow bored.
The willow tree shudders
as though it were sewn up
with twitching nerves, with wire
bright as new-minted pennies. Where
do you go to gain the ear
of the moon, its ravaged face
lamented by no one? And
what do you tell something so old
it cannot remember
being once part of the world and not the sky?
What would your shadow care
to hear, to come close, to touch
hand to wall the tremor
of a passing train? If it had bones inside it,
you know it would flee.
So what are your words worth
to the hurried traffic,
to everything blurred,
to the ice cream truck
and its sweet patrol,
its song spilling out like a toy,
even in the dark? For all the sunlight
passing from the world
like a thought, who might you sing
to timid sleep? However long
you waited for rain
to rinse you of light's molten color,
for the elbow of the river
to bend back
to your life, the grass whispers,
you waited too long—
and all the while it speaks
it grows. 

*************************************

Time and Materials                      Robert Hass

Gerhard Richter:  Abstrakt Bilden

I.

To make layers,
As if they were a steadiness of days:

It snowed; I did errands at a desk;
A white flurry out the window thickening; my tongue
Tasted of the glue on envelopes.

On this day sunlight on red brick, bare trees,
Nothing stirring in the icy air.

On this day a blur of color moving at the gym
Where the heat from bodies
Meets the watery, cold surface of the glass.

Made love, made curry, talked on the phone
To friends, the one whose brother died
Was crying and thinking alternately,
Like someone falling down and getting up
And running and falling and getting up.

2.

The object of this poem is not to annihila

To not annih

The object of this poem is to report a theft,
   In progress, of everything
That is not these words
   And their disposition on the page.

The object o    f this poem is to report a theft,
   In progre    ss of everything that exists
That is not th    ese words
   And their d    isposition on the page.

The object    of    his poe    is t    epro    a theft
   In   rogres    f  ever    hing    at    xists
Th    is no    ese    w rds
   And their disp sit on o     the pag

3·

To score, to scar, to smear, to streak,
To smudge, to blur, to gouge, to scrape.

"Action painting," i.e.,
The painter gets to behave like time.

4·

The typo would be "paining."

(To abrade.)

5·

Or to render time and stand outside
The horizontal rush of it, for a moment
To have the sensation of standing outside
The greenish rush of it.

6.

Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger
Or desire can rip a life apart,

Some wound of color.

**************************

Landscape                                                            Chad Sweeney

I subtract one color at a time

to arrive at green.

Green cardinal.

Green snow.

This green is excavated rather than built.

Looking you begin to feel

disappearance

what culture feels when exposed

to time---

a pit

in the air, a climbing up to

no altar.

The clover,

the teeth of the horses,

shine.

Green burns in the green cloud.

**********************************

Did We Betray the River                                                      Dionisio D. Martínez

Did we betray the river or did the river betray us? You've noticed, I'm
sure, how, under certain conditions, a ladder leaning on a wall is a draw-

bridge waiting for a sailboat that keeps delaying its journey, calling
the man who operates the bridge, layering elaborate excuses so neatly

that the man only hears one excuse: the boat's coming, just not yet, not
while the water's in control of the situation. The man waits—drawbridge

up, traffic on hold. Sometimes the world is all patience and silence
and there is nothing you can do to stir up trouble. The driver who keeps

a knife beneath the seat is tapping on the dashboard a song coming from
another car. This is an exception. Others are praying to their private

rivers, as if the one just ahead were not there: seeing is too easy: one
acquires increasingly complex needs, like the taste of earth just

turned by oxen who know the plow as well as a man knows his river. We
know this blue's an illusion: the things that shelter us are colorless and

hover just so, not quite halos and not quite hats, and they can all be named
even if the names are arbitrary, even if they're not quite words. Our boat

waits for the water to go from blue to brown to ocher, as in a Turner
vision—a realism so crude it borders on beauty, the way beauty

was meant to touch us: with its repulsive allure, its unwashed mirrors of
heavy morning fog. We have to look head-on, and learn to forget again. 

**********************************

Nasturtium                         Gigi Marks

is a ring of simple petals
in a single o of surprise as if saying,
this is not what I expected.
is color in one shade that doesn't flinch
but meets what fate hands out,
the slender stem broken and placed
in clear water in clear glass,
so that there are no more days outside
near round-faced green petals, and
there are no bees and no seeds to
form, and the earth that seemed
so certain always right below is gone,
and all it seems to say is I see with my
one way of seeing that I will live what life
I have left in someone else's house.

**********************************

Hummingbird                                                            Barbara Crooker

He comes every day, in his crushed-emerald cape, flashing in front
of the kitchen window, quick as a thought, and just as elusive;
one blink, and he's gone. Try to show him to your mother,
who's come by for tea; she doesn't turn quickly enough,
doesn't see his throat, red as a stoplight, doesn't see him
dart in and out of the bee balm, honeysuckle, trumpet
vine. Her skin is thin as a folded roadmap; she's setting
off on a new journey. The tea trembles in its porcelain boat.
She is getting ready to board a great white ship
whose sails are already luffing in the wind;
the hawsers creak and groan, the crew
is ready to cast off. But she is still casting on,
yarn the color of spring grass, yarn the color
of heart's blood, knitting afghan squares
for the homeless. She sips her tea. He flickers
back into view, takes a long sweet drink.
He signals stop, then go; stop, then go,
both directions at once, confusing semaphores
that spark and crackle in the brilliant, merciless sun. 

Books for the Holidays

Did you get any poetry books for Christmas? If so, which are you most looking forward to reading?

I got a nice stack of poetry books from my husband and from my parents (yay and thank you!). Among them, a few that I am particularly excited to read are:

A Point Is That Which Has No Part by Liz Waldner. This won the Iowa Poetry Prize and the James McLaughlin Prize about a decade ago, and I've been wanting it ever since. It's title refers to a definition from Euclid's Geometry, which is what immediately drew my attention. I bought another book by Waldner in the meantime, but somehow I had never gotten this one. So excited to have it, I started reading it on Christmas afternoon. The University of Iowa actually offers the entire text online here.

Paul Guest's My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge is also a book I've been wanting to read, and now can.  Guest writes about his paralysis since a bicycle accident at age 12. As our family copes with devastating health issues, I find myself drawn more and more to Guest's poetry about struggles with the physical, written with poignancy, wit, and a realistic edge.

the true keeps calm biding its story by Rusty Morrison is probably the book I was coveting most this Christmas season, as I am in the throes of a poetry crush on Morrison, but didn't have this volume. But I've blogged about Morrison before...

So how about you? Did you get any particularly coveted books this holiday season?