Circle

Poetry does not get much better than the exceedingly fine example below...

Circle

Now are we saying goodbye?

I think so but can't be sure.

The last phone call but one

Left everything up in the air.

When you called last, did you mean

What you said when you said you meant 

To say that this call would be

The last if I didn't call?

In fact, I'm not sure at all

If you called or I called you back.

And did you say "goodbye,"

Or I say "good night" and you

Say "Do you mean ‘good night'

Or ‘goodbye'?" I think it was you.

And what were you trying to do

When you said, "You said we're through?"

How could that be since you

Were the first to bring it up?

I don't think it's what I said,

Though you keep saying I did.

In any case, now that you know

That you know what I meant to say,

Why don't you say what you mean?

I mean if you mean to say

That the last call was the last.

I think that that would be best.

If something is finished, it's just

As well to get up and go.

If you're interested still to know,

I like a slate wiped clean,

And if you would pick up the phone,

I'd tell you what I mean.

-- Howard Moss

You really have to love Moss's technique: he used the poem's form and structure to help tell his story. Not familiar with poem structures? No problem; he lays it all out for you. 

Really, quite brilliant!

-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist

It’s Sunday Morning in Early November

It's no longer early November, but it is still November, and I will love the poem below just as much no matter the day, month, or season. (I thought to quote this or that snippet as representative of the whole, but the entire poem is epigrammatic... and brief!)

It’s Sunday Morning in Early November

and there are a lot of leaves already.
I could rake and get a head start.
The boy's summer toys need to be put
in the basement. I could clean it out
or fix the broken storm window.
When Eli gets home from Sunday school,
I could take him fishing. I don't fish
but I could learn to. I could show him
how much fun it is. We don't do as much
as we used to do. And my wife, there's
so much I haven't told her lately,
about how quickly my soul is aging,
how it feels like a basement I keep filling
with everything I'm tired of surviving.
I could take a walk with my wife and try
to explain the ghosts I can't stop speaking to.
Or I could read all those books piling up
about the beginning of the end of understanding...
Meanwhile, it's such a beautiful morning,
the changing colors, the hypnotic light.
I could sit by the window watching the leaves,
which seem to know exactly how to fall
from one moment to the next. Or I could lose
everything and have to begin over again.
-- Philip Schultz

See what I mean?
-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist

In recognition of the (expected) fireworks that occurred last week in global equity markets, a little balance provided by the brilliant, and brilliantly pithy, poem...

Up and Down

Beverly Rollwagen

I don't know anything

for sure unless I look it up,

but sometimes I can figure

things out if I write them

down. So it's up and down

all day long. It's a good life.

Better than back and forth

or in and out which I find

constraining. I have up

and down in balance and

with my mother's death

have discovered the true

meaning of before and after.

I will comment re the equity markets soon...
-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist

Adding It Up

Okay, no question about it; I keep odd hours. But I can be so much more productive while the rest of the world sleeps or slumbers.

Meanwhile, I find these quiet hours ideal to catch up on reading, for work and pleasure. And when I come across a poem as excellent as the oh-so-apropos, Adding It Up by Philip Booth, I not only am glad to be awake, but sit bolt upright, antenna quivering...

Adding It Up

by Philip Booth

My mind's eye opens before

the light gets up. I

lie awake in the small dark,

figuring payments, or how

to scrape paint; I count

rich women I didn't marry.

I measure bicycle miles

I pedaled last Thursday

to take off weight; I give some

passing thought to the point

that if I hadn't turned poet

I might well be some other

sort of accountant. Before

the sun reports its own weather

my mind is openly at it:

I chart my annual rainfall,

or how I'll plant seed it

I live to be fifty. I look up

words like "bilateral symmetry"

in my mind's dictionary; I consider

the bivalve mollusk, re-pick

last summer's mussels on Condon Point,

preview the next red tide, and

hold my breath: I listen hard

to how my heart valves are doing.

I try not to get going

too early: bladder permitting,

I mean to stay in bed until six;

I think in spirals, building

horizon pyramids, yielding to

no man's flag but my own.

I think a lot of Saul Steinberg:

I play touch football on one leg,

I seesaw on the old cliff, trying

to balance things out: job,

wife, children, myself.

My mind's eye opens before

my body is ready for its

first duty: cleaning up after

an old-maid Basset in heat.

That, too, I inventory:

the Puritan strain will out,

even at six a.m.; sun or no sun,

I'm Puritan to the bone, down to

the marrow and then some:

if I'm not sorry I worry,

if I can't worry I count.

Clever poem right up to those killer final two lines, which is when I sit bolt upright. Those two lines could have been a couplet, but are not; and how special is that final twist?

Anyway, back to work... counting, figuring, worrying, posting!

-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist

Diagramming Won’t Help This Situation

The poem below is not only excellent, but clever as well. To conflate sentence diagramming to the poem's text, from its meta sub-text, delivers a whole new context and meaning. Of course, any poem that includes grammar and syntax (lessons) would hold extra appeal for me!

The author's meaning is direct, but read the poem again to get its subtle shadings. One clue: pay attention to verb tense. (Oh, and that sledgehammer clue in line 3!)
-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist

Diagramming Won’t Help This Situation
by Kevin Brown

Grammatical rules have always baffled
me, leaving me wondering whether my
life is transitive or intransitive, if I am the
subject or object of my life, and no one
has been able to provide words to describe
my actions, even if they do end in –ly.

But now the problem seems to be with
pronouns: I am unwilling to be him
and you are unable to be her, so we
will never be them ~ the ones talking
about what they need from the grocery

store because the Rogers are coming for
dinner tonight; the couple saving for a
vacation, perhaps a cruise to Alaska or a
museum tour of Europe; the two who meet
with a financial advisor to plan their children's

college fund while still managing to set enough
aside for their retirement ~ and so we will
continue to be nothing more than sentence
fragments, perfectly fine for effect,
but forever looking for the missing
part of speech we can never seem to find.

A lot of stuff still left to collapse

A poem... while we all continue to wait on the shy readers to offer their market perceptions.

He Gets Around to Answering the Old Question
-- Miller Williams

He doesn't see as well as he thinks he remembers.
His fingers sometimes find it hard to bend.
He often can't find the name to go with a face.
Sometimes he doesn't hear but decides to pretend.

Weekends, week by week, are closer together.
Sometimes he has to sit down to put on his pants.
No lady seems to mind if he calls her Honey,
never grins nor even throws a glance.

Sometimes he's told himself what all this means.
"Every year some more of me is dead,
but there's a lot of stuff still left to collapse."
He started to laugh but talked to himself instead.

"Think of yourself as a plumbing system, a clock.
As soon as you're done, you start to come undone.
It's almost interesting when you pay attention,
how working parts stop working, one by one.

So now you've asked me the oldest question of all.
You want to know how I'm doing. I told you before,
I'm dying. Been at it for years. Still, I think
I could hang a few more calendars on the door."

Damn fine, eh?

-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist

Sometimes

The ugliness we humans can perpetrate on each other -- yes, the brutal ending to Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow's brief life still haunts me -- has me thinking dark thoughts. I need a lift every once in a while, and especially now, which the poem below provides.

Sometimes

Sometimes when day after day we have cloudless blue skies,
warm temperatures, colorful trees and brilliant sun, when
it seems like all this will go on forever,

when I harvest vegetables from the garden all day,
then drink tea and doze in the late afternoon sun,
and in the evening one night make pickled beets
and green tomato chutney, the next red tomato chutney,
and the day after that pick the fruits of my arbor
and make grape jam,

when we walk in the woods every evening over fallen leaves,
through yellow light, when nights are cool, and days warm,

when I am so happy I am afraid I might explode or disappear
or somehow be taken away from all this,

at those times when I feel so happy, so good, so alive, so in love
with the world, with my own sensuous, beautiful life, suddenly

I think about all the suffering and pain in the world, the agony
and dying. I think about all those people being tortured, right now,
in my name. But I still feel happy and good, alive and in love with
the world and with my lucky, guilty, sensuous, beautiful life because,

I know in the next minute or tomorrow all this may be
taken from me, and therefore I've got to say, right now,
what I feel and know and see, I've got to say, right now,

how beautiful and sweet this world can be.

-- David Budbill

-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist

First Marriage

You know how you're going along, getting along, moving through life -- thinking all the while that you are captain of your ship, Destiny? And then, wham!, something comes along to disrupt your course, and the house of cards (to mix metaphors) that was your orderly, ordered life comes tumbling down? And you are left standing there, amid the rubble, wondering, "What happened...?"

The poem below, First Marriage, helps say precisely that; its truth, my truth, scores a bulls-eye in my gut, my head, my heart.
-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

First Marriage

I made it cross country
In a little under three days.
The engine blew out

About a hundred miles north
Of San Francisco, where I'd
Hoped to start living again

With a woman I'd abandoned
Only a few months before.
The reasons I'd left her were

Wincingly obvious
Soon as I got back
To her, and it didn't take long

Before I again left her.
In a few weeks I'd meet
The woman who became

My first wife, the one
With whom I spent
Almost the entirety

Of my twenties. It took
About twenty years
Getting over her, after

We divorced at thirty.
Broke then, I took
A bus cross-country

And was back in the East
By Christmas, thinking it
Would take three years maybe

To put this one behind me.
But getting over her
Happened as we were

Both in our third marriages,
Both then with children,
Heading for our fifties.

She came cross-country
To tend to me when I had
Cancer, with a 20% chance

Of recovery. The recovery
From all she had been to me,
Me abiding with her as long

As I did, took place finally
When we, her sitting on my bed
And me lying in it, held hands

And watched ourselves watching
TV, something we'd never quite
Been able to do comfortably

All those years ago. So many
Things turn this way over time,
So much tenderness and memory,

Problems not to be solved
But lived, and I resolved
Right then to start living

Only in this kind of time.
Cancer gave this to me: being
Able to sit, comfortably, to get

Over her finally, and to
Get on with the fight to live while
Staying ready to die daily.

-- Liam Rector

© The University of Chicago Press, 2006

Windchime

What could be more appropriate on Valentine's Day than to share poetry -- especially an excellent love poem? And poetry does not often get much better than this poem, WINDCHIME, by Tony Hoagland, which speaks of love, yes, but from an unusual perspective.

btw, one tip to employ when reading poetry: read to the punctuation marks, and not to the end of lines. A trick that Hoagland uses especially well, and to excellent effect. Note the words he uses to end several lines (but not sentences!) of stanza #2 (hand, nail, teeth), which he mimics in stanza #4 (chest, forehead, mouth). And the indelible image of the mouth with the nail in it (sticking out of it!) that yet remains (eminently) kissable. All very clever, indeed. Ahh, love.

For you, SA.

Full Disclosure: Long love. And loving every moment of it.
-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

WINDCHIME

She goes out to hang the windchime

in her nightie and her work boots.

It's six-thirty in the morning

and she's standing on the plastic ice chest

tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,

windchime in her left hand,

hammer in her right, the nail

gripped tight between her teeth

but nothing happens next because

she's trying to figure out

how to switch #1 with #3.

She must have been standing in the kitchen,

coffee in her hand, asleep,

when she heard it—the wind blowing

through the sound the windchime wasn't making

because it wasn't there.

No one, including me, especially anymore believes

till death do us part,

but I can see what I would miss in leaving

the way her ankles go into the work boots

as she stands on the ice chest;

the problem scrunched into her forehead;

the little kissable mouth

with the nail in it.

-- Tony Hoagland

The last grain of sand

It seems that no matter how much or little I struggle and squirm, I cannot escape the many upsets that life besets upon us all. Really, is it too much to ask for some calm, some quiet, some serenity? Perhaps even to find happiness and contentment with(in) yourself...?

Enough bellyaching. I leave you with three brief poems that seek a common theme. Can you see it...?
-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Love Poem with Toast

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up,
the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something
the skin from aging,
the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

-- Miller Williams

Testament

So often it has been displayed to us, the hourglass
with its grains of sand drifting down,
not as an object in our world
but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
drifting down grain by grain,
sifting away - I'm sure everyone must
see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began, the mass
in the upper chamber, filters away
as love accumulates below. Now
I am almost entirely love. I have been
to the banker, the broker, those strange
people, to talk about unit trusts,
annuities, CDs, IRAs, trying
to leave you whatever I can after
I die. I've made my will, written
you a long letter of instructions.
I think about this continually.
What will you do? How
will you live? You can't go back
to cocktail waitressing in the casino.
And your poetry? It will bring you
at best a pittance in our civilization,
a widow's mite, as mine has
for forty-five years. Which is why
I leave you so little. Brokers?
Unit trusts? I'm no financier doing
the world's great business. And the sands
in the upper glass grow few. Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.

-- Hayden Carruth

Nothing Is Lost

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

-- Noel Coward