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“Ghazal/Insomnia” (Ghazal is a melancholy type of Middle Eastern lyric poem with rhyming couplets and a refrain):
We lived in a block house. Day-lily, night-lily,
one window looking out, one window in.
Your voice tapped hollow every seam, each soft spot,
rang three bells in the three-hour-old morning.
And days closed down by rain, you almost sang.
That voice is hardly bearable that breaks--
the fox-orange of the flower in a slur of green.
Mother, that was hundreds of years ago,
in the century of pain. The lilies neither spin,
nor toil. Tomorrow, five bells at least, or none.
We lived in a block house. It is five a.m.
I’m here, you’re here with first light, coffee, and the rain.
We lived in a block house. Day-lily, night-lily,
one window looking out, one window in.
Your voice tapped hollow every seam, each soft spot,
rang three bells in the three-hour-old morning.
And days closed down by rain, you almost sang.
That voice is hardly bearable that breaks--
the fox-orange of the flower in a slur of green.
Mother, that was hundreds of years ago,
in the century of pain. The lilies neither spin,
nor toil. Tomorrow, five bells at least, or none.
We lived in a block house. It is five a.m.
I’m here, you’re here with first light, coffee, and the rain.
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"Cheer"
Like the waxwings in the juniper,
a dozen at a time, divided, paired,
passing the berries back and forth, and by
nightfall, wobbling, piping, wounded with joy.
Or a party of redwings grazing what
falls—blossom and seed, nutmeat and fruit--
made light in the head and cut by the light,
swept from the ground, carried downwind, taken....
It's called wing-rowing, the wing-burdened arms
unbending, yielding, striking a balance,
walking the white invisible line drawn
just ahead in the air, first sign the slur,
the liquid notes too liquid, the heart in
the mouth melodious, too close, which starts
the chanting, the crooning, the long lyric
silences, the song of our undoing.
It's called side-step, head-forward, raised-crown, flap-
and-glide-flight aggression, though courtship is
the object, affection the compulsion,
love the overspill—the body nodding,
still standing, ready to fly straight out of
itself—or its bill-tilt, wing-flash, topple-
over; wing-droop, bowing, tail-flick and drift;
back-ruffle, wingspread, quiver and soar.
Someone is troubled, someone is trying,
in earnest, to explain; to speak without
swallowing the tongue; to find the perfect
word among so few or the too many--
to sing like the thrush from the deepest part
of the understory, territorial,
carnal, thorn-at-the-throat, or flutelike
in order to make one sobering sound.
Sound of the breath blown over the bottle,
sound of the reveler home at dawn, light of
the sun a warbler yellow, the sun in
song-flight, lopsided-pose. Be of good-cheer,
my father says, lifting his glass to greet
a morning in which he's awake to be
with the birds: or up all night in the sleep
of the world, alive again, singing.
Like the waxwings in the juniper,
a dozen at a time, divided, paired,
passing the berries back and forth, and by
nightfall, wobbling, piping, wounded with joy.
Or a party of redwings grazing what
falls—blossom and seed, nutmeat and fruit--
made light in the head and cut by the light,
swept from the ground, carried downwind, taken....
It's called wing-rowing, the wing-burdened arms
unbending, yielding, striking a balance,
walking the white invisible line drawn
just ahead in the air, first sign the slur,
the liquid notes too liquid, the heart in
the mouth melodious, too close, which starts
the chanting, the crooning, the long lyric
silences, the song of our undoing.
It's called side-step, head-forward, raised-crown, flap-
and-glide-flight aggression, though courtship is
the object, affection the compulsion,
love the overspill—the body nodding,
still standing, ready to fly straight out of
itself—or its bill-tilt, wing-flash, topple-
over; wing-droop, bowing, tail-flick and drift;
back-ruffle, wingspread, quiver and soar.
Someone is troubled, someone is trying,
in earnest, to explain; to speak without
swallowing the tongue; to find the perfect
word among so few or the too many--
to sing like the thrush from the deepest part
of the understory, territorial,
carnal, thorn-at-the-throat, or flutelike
in order to make one sobering sound.
Sound of the breath blown over the bottle,
sound of the reveler home at dawn, light of
the sun a warbler yellow, the sun in
song-flight, lopsided-pose. Be of good-cheer,
my father says, lifting his glass to greet
a morning in which he's awake to be
with the birds: or up all night in the sleep
of the world, alive again, singing.
![Picture](/uploads/2/4/4/1/24419745/504902.jpg?499)
"The Foundry Garden"
Myths of the landscape--
the sun going down in the mouths of the furnaces,
the fires banked and cooling, ticking into dark, here and there the sudden flaring into roses,
then the light across the long factory of the field, the split and rusted castings,
across the low slant tin roofs of the buildings, across fallow and tar and burnt potato ground. . . .
Everything a little still on fire, in sunlight, then smoke, then cinder,
then the milling back to earth, rich earth, the silica of ash.
The times I can taste the iron in the air, the gray wash like exhaust, smell the burn-off,
my eyes begin to tear, and I'm leaning against a wall, short of breath,
my heart as large as my father's, alone in such poverty my body scars the light.
Arable fields, waste and stony places, waysides--
the day he got the job at the Wellbaum and Company Foundry he wept,
and later, in the truck, pulled the plug on a bottle.
In the metallurgy of ore and coal and limestone, in the conversion of the green world to gray,
in the face of the blue-white fires, I remember the fencerow, the white campion,
calyx and coronal scales, the hawthorns, cut to the size of hedge,
the haws so deep in the blood of the season they bled.
The year we were poor enough to dig potatoes we had to drive there,
then wait for the men to leave who let fires go out.
There'd be one good hour of daylight, the rough straight rows running into shade.
We'd work the ground until the sun was a single line.
I can see my father, now cut in half by the horizon, coming toward me, both arms weighted down.
I can see him bending over, gone.
Later, in the summer, I'd have painted the dead rust undulant sides of all the buildings aluminum,
which in the morning threw a glare like water on the garden.
Myths of the landscape--
the sun going down in the mouths of the furnaces,
the fires banked and cooling, ticking into dark, here and there the sudden flaring into roses,
then the light across the long factory of the field, the split and rusted castings,
across the low slant tin roofs of the buildings, across fallow and tar and burnt potato ground. . . .
Everything a little still on fire, in sunlight, then smoke, then cinder,
then the milling back to earth, rich earth, the silica of ash.
The times I can taste the iron in the air, the gray wash like exhaust, smell the burn-off,
my eyes begin to tear, and I'm leaning against a wall, short of breath,
my heart as large as my father's, alone in such poverty my body scars the light.
Arable fields, waste and stony places, waysides--
the day he got the job at the Wellbaum and Company Foundry he wept,
and later, in the truck, pulled the plug on a bottle.
In the metallurgy of ore and coal and limestone, in the conversion of the green world to gray,
in the face of the blue-white fires, I remember the fencerow, the white campion,
calyx and coronal scales, the hawthorns, cut to the size of hedge,
the haws so deep in the blood of the season they bled.
The year we were poor enough to dig potatoes we had to drive there,
then wait for the men to leave who let fires go out.
There'd be one good hour of daylight, the rough straight rows running into shade.
We'd work the ground until the sun was a single line.
I can see my father, now cut in half by the horizon, coming toward me, both arms weighted down.
I can see him bending over, gone.
Later, in the summer, I'd have painted the dead rust undulant sides of all the buildings aluminum,
which in the morning threw a glare like water on the garden.
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Sanley Plumly's "One of Us" recited by Elizabeth Kimmel | |
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