Favorite Poems

[IntoTheLight]

Any author, any poetry genre.

I'll start....

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The Invitation - Stephen Dobyns

There are lives in which nothing goes right.
The would-be suicide takes a bottle of pills
and immediately throws up. He tries
to hang himself but gets his arm caught
in the noose. He tries to throw himself
under a subway but misses the last train.
He walks home. It is raining. He catches a cold
and dies. Once in heaven it is no better.
He mops the marble staircase and accidentally
jams his foot in the pail. All his harp strings
break. His halo slips down over his neck
and nearly chokes him. Why is he here?
demands one of the noble dead, an archbishop
or general, a leader of men: If a loser
like that can enter heaven, then how is it
an honor for us to be here as well--
those of us who are totally deserving?
But the would-be suicide knows none of this.
In the evening, he returns to his little cloud house
and watches the sun set over planet Earth.
He stares down at the cities filled with people
and thinks how sad it is that they should
rush backwards and forwards as if they had
some great destination when their only
destination is death itself -- a place
to be reached by sitting as well as running.
He thinks about his own life with its
betrayals and disappointments. Regret, regret--
how he never made a softball team, how his
favorite shirts always shrank in the wash.
His eyes moisten and he sheds a few tears, but
secretly, because in heaven crying is forbidden.
Still, the tears tumble down through all those layers
of blue sky and strike a salesman rushing
between Point A and Point B. The salesman slips,
staggers, and stops as if slapped in the face.
People on the street think he is crazy or drunk.
Why am I selling ten thousand ballpoint pens?
he asks himself. Suddenly his only wish is to
dance the tango. He sees how the setting sun
caresses the cold faces of the buildings.
He sees a beautiful woman and desperately wants
to ask her to stroll in the park. Maybe he will
kiss her cheek; maybe she will love him back.
You maniac, she tells him, didn't you know
I was only waiting for you to ask me?

---------- Post added 11-22-2009 at 02:33 AM ----------

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For My Lover, Returning To His Wife - Anne Sexton

She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.

She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.

Let's face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.

She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees the oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,

has placed wildflowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter's wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,

done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.

She has also carried each down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person,
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.

I give you back your heart.
I give you permission--

for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bi_tch in her
and the burying of her wound--
for the burying of her small red wound alive--

for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother's knee, for the stockings,
for the the garter belt, for the call--

the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.

She is so naked and singular.
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.

As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.

[Catchabula]

I have no words..................................

[IntoTheLight]

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Still Life - Veronica Morgan

With oxygen simmering and morphine peaking,
you sleep, as far as I can tell,
from my seat before the window view,

a Cezanne, flamed with raw leaves,
where boulders break the hillside surface,
flashes of their mica on mica intent

and dusky as our communication
dodging love by the timed coffee mugs
and primary colors of our past.

So often, that green-steeled desire
has caught us up short with one another.
Such history hardly matters now.

You'll wake to fuss about this child or that,
knock over the cough syrup, point out
the right Scrabble letter, up on the ceiling

and wonder about that steep hillside,
so distant, so near, like my dreams,
my holding what has never been and is always.

---------- Post added 11-22-2009 at 08:10 PM ----------

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Like Deer Our Bodies - Wayne Dodd

All the way home the ground
Fog rises and swirls

Around us, snow turning to air
As we breathe, as we drive

This familiar road
Back through February

Home. Houses, whole hillsides of
Trees bulk beside us, seen

Only in memory.
Like deer our bodies,

Silent togather in secret
Grass, do not

Speak but dream
Still, beneath the hovering

Cold, of food
And ease among friends. Soon

Together we will sleep once more
Our separate lives. And when

Tomorrow at first light we
Wake, each

Branch and blade on
Peach Ridge Road will flash

New ice: fog
Remembered, fog saved.

[IntoTheLight]

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Reign of Terror - Jim Hall

If they were pretty
or opened the door wide enough,
he would unlatch his raincoat and let
it spring out.
His eyes pleading
as if he were a beggar and this a withered hand.

Five said, "Jesus Christ!"
Most shrieked and bolted.
One laughed.
One cried.
And the last one invited him inside.

When the officers arrived
he mewled and denied it all.
They took him in.
The star witnesses assembled
but since no one had noticed his face
they were all forced to study
five dangling suspects.

Still there was no positive identification.
Certainly nothing that would stand up in court.

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Truck Stop: Minnesota - Stephen Dunn

The waitress looks at my face
as if it were a small tip.
I'm tempted to come back at her
with java
but I say coffee, politely,
and tell her how I want it.
Her body has the alert sleepiness
of a cat. Her face
the indecency of a billboard.
She is the America I would like to love.
Sweetheart, the truckers call her.
Honey. Doll.
For each of them, she smiles.
I envy them,
I'm full of lust and good usage,
lost here.
I imagine every man she's left with
has smelled of familiar food,
has peppered her with wild slang
until she was damp and loose.
I do nothing but ask for a check
and drift out into the night air--
let my dreams lift
her tired feet off the ground
into the sweet, inarticulate
democracy beyond my ears--
and keep moving until I'm home
in the middle of my country.

[Catchabula]

I tried to find a common denominator for these poems. Could it be melancholy? Life is to miss life, we're always late at the show. We're hitchhikers and God is the guy in the fat car, driving by and giving us poor fellas a contemptuous look. So we go on, and the rain is sad, and we are wet to the bone. What hope is there for hope? But we live...

[IntoTheLight]

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Skaters - Vern Rutsala

There are many tonight and the rink
is like a Breughel, such motion
and animation, at first glance
some busy microcosm.

Above the rink I lean on the rail,
my sleeve settling in the residue
of a sticky drink and on the rail
beside it, scratched: Letitia

loves Spud. Below, the skaters
circle craziliy, looking now like
a swarm but soon you begin
to see that two times stand out:

The helpless scarecrows so tenuous
and bad they command the attention
they fear--you can almost
here them pray for balance.

The others you notice of course
circle with such skill they seem
to fly. They skate with their hands
behind their backs and show

enormous deference by giving the inept
berths wide enough for ships.
In truth they're in their element,
a kind of royalty down there

but so good that they're benign.
Like royalty they know they need
the awkward to set them off.
One cuts an elaborate figure

of concern for a fallen child
showing he's not only good on skates
but good at heart. Another averts
what we're meant to believe

is a disaster with arms thrown up
and a nifty shift when a scarecrow
falls twenty feet away.

Thinking
of Letitia and Spud who were moved

to pledge their love right here, I realize
the Breughel swirl below just may be
a little version of the world though
all the gestures seem too large,

like a silent movie--mimed
danger and concern, pratfalls,
the rubber-kneed drunks, bad
music in the background

and love pledged in the balcony.

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The Substitute - L e s l _ i e Adrienne Miller

[NOTE: The author's first name is L _ e s l i e, but for some weird reason, the forum's censorware thinks that the name is a profane or suggestive word.]


We knew only that she was too pretty
for 8th grade English, and that she'd had
a baby, but never a husband.
This gave us every right to moral outrage
and meanness. Somebody passed a note:
Nobody answer her, and we knew how
this worked, how the girls who swelled
a bit at the waist and took on that pale,
stricken look became invisible to us
soon after. Too pretty, too willing.
We wondered how the school could have missed
what we knew. This one with her great sheaf
of blonde hair bound in a silk scarf,
her hips and stomach returned to maiden
slimness did not fool us. We knew
the threads of story caught from the mouths
of mothers over the fence at the Country Club pool,
whispers and glances when she came back
in the first bikini we'd seen on a woman,
and this only months after. No good, was all
my father said when I asked about the man
who left her. She was ours then,
for three weeks and a whole unit
of grammar. Simple choice: was/were,
she/her. We all looked out the window
at the mown hill, the adult world
driving down the afternoon; we traced
the hoops and lines of our game to keep
from looking into her eyes. Charlie
blew an obscene pink bubble, Shawn popped
his knuckles, and Kitty let go a whole
set of colored pencils. Somebody passing
in the hall squished their nose on the door
glass, and the substitute threw her hair
back over her shoulder like a heavy brocade.
Chester panted, Pete squirmed and banged
the locks of his spine down the chair back.
She couldn't go to the principal,
she couldn't single out the intractable ones,
so she huffed, rolled her queen's blue eyes,
and answered the questions herself,
looking out above us somewhere,
and taking the tail of hair back
into her hands again and again: lie/lay,
she/her, he/him, while the chalk dust
gathered in pillars of sunlight: ride/
rode/ridden-- We worked at our picture
of a man, swarthy, animal eyed, possibly
astride a motorcycle, cruelly muscled, steaming
bare chest. Scum, I thought, as I snuck
peeks at her creamy skin, the svelte navy skirt
she couldn't have worn when it happened.
I drew horses on all of my notebooks,
swelling their withers and flanks,
topping them with girls who filled
their hands with streaks of mane,
blissful, reckless, while the substitute
went on invoking correct pronouns,
agreeing verbs, and we/us, I/me,
dismantled her, her breasts, her lover,
her speckled scarves, and dainty feet,
and carried it away in doodles, reveries,
silence, to the great cache of our rich
and dangerous unknowing.

[Robert]

Alone by E.A. Poe

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun
that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.