R Y B by kizer-shelton

Y R B 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Sweet Machine........................................................................8 I Have Just Picked Up a Man..................................................14 Meditations at Lagunitas........................................................16 The Moment.........................................................................20 Menstruation at Forty.............................................................21 What the Living Do..............................................................24 kitchenette building..............................................................26 Lost Fugue for Chet...............................................................30 Facing It................................................................................34 As Kingfishers Catch Fire.......................................................36 Ars Poetica............................................................................37

Sweet Machine Sweet Machine: Poems (HarperCollins iiiiiPublishers Inc, 1998) I Have Just Picked Up a Man Please (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2008) Meditations at Lagunitas Twentieth-Century American Poetry iiii(Wiley-Blackwell, 2004) The Moment The Living and the Dead (Knopf, 1984) Menstruation at Forty Live or Die (Houghton Mifflin, 1970)

Sources

What the Living Do What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998) kitchenette building Selected Poems (Harper & Row, 1963) Lost Fugue for Chet Star Ledger (University of Iowa Press, aai2006) Facing It Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) As Kingfishers Catch Fire Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and iiiiiProse (Penguin Classics, 1985) Ars Poetica Black Life (Wave Books, 2010)

Red

MARK DOTY

Sweet Machine Glisten fretting the indigo of a plum, silvered chalk of moth-wing dust: the young man on the subway platform —twenty maybe—seems almost powdered, he is so dirty, the dust lighter than his skin, which is still, by a slight stretch of the imagination, lovely. Though it’s odd to think of him that way, this shirtless kid in hugely oversized jeans that fall, when he stands, around his thighs, exposing his skinny ass. He yanks the waistband up, sits down again, and begins to writhe, palms roaming,

uncontrollable, over his own face, his close-cropped hair and ears, down to his flanks, hands disappearing inside the big jeans, scratching and rubbing, until he collapses, exhausted, head hanging between his knees, and after a few seconds starts it all up again. Does he want to rub his own skin away? Then I understand: what’s powdering his flesh is his flesh, the outest layer of himself rubbed to palest chalk. He repeats his stream of violent tableaux these might be positions of transport, of ecstasy, except he’s miserable, I guess, and it’s two in the afternoon, 96th and Broadway, and all of us waiting for the local watch, how can we help it? Crackhead, 9

somebody says, but it’s a whisper, a question, and nothing answers our troubled fascination: nothing to do but watch the pity and terror of these poses. The express comes and goes, and the brutal series grows more synaptic: these might be flashes of the pornographic, or classical attitudes, rough trade posing as a captive slave for Michelangelo. Our context’s neither intimate nor academic, and nothing’s supposed to be so real in the common nowhere of the on-the-way-to, while we wait for the 1 or the 9, strangers and witnesses pressed knee to hem, back to shoulder on the platforms and cars. This month, on the broad haunches of the buses, another sleek boy’s posed in multiple shots, black underwear and lean belly laved by rivulets from a shower or stream. The photographees 10

left him headless, his gestures multiplied on builders’ makeshift walls, page after page of blank torsos already beginning to be inscribed: on a yard of silvery muscle six feet from Seventh Avenue someone’s scrawled, in black marker: I am a sweet suck and fuck machine. Take me home. Big buses nose through the streets, one after the other, bearing the model of what we’re supposed to want, and do, what we’re meant to see and need but not, unless we have the money, touch. He doesn’t have the money, my boy on the platform, and I wish .... What? I don’t know. Just today, in traffic, one of those buses eased by my taxi window: a taut wet waist bound in black elastic, huge, luminous emulsion inches from my face. The endlessly reprinted boy —is he?—could almost be this man, 11

whitened by his own degrading skin, dark stone wearing the dust of the quarry. He’s rubbing himself to flour, he’s giving his name back to airy nothing, I’m figuring him on the varnished bench. Moth, plum—hear how the imagery aestheticizes? He’s nothing as fixed as marble, and he touches himself not for pleasure but because he can’t stop. What unthinkable train is he waiting for? That boy on the billboard, the headless boy, could he stop touching himself? We’re all on display in this town, sweet machines, powerless, consumed, just as he consumes himself with those relentless hands, scratching his barely hidden center,

hanging his head between his knees, spent, before he jerks himself up and starts all over again.

JERICHO BROWN

I Have Just Picked Up a Man A boy really, And I am not fucking him. I am driving My car, not parking. And I’m taking him There to the diner On the other corner. We will sit and trade names. He won’t tell his real one, but I’ll read to him. He will shake his head Or nod; he may not understand. I have just picked up a man

And if he is afraid, he’ll talk. Or if he is hungry, he’ll listen. But either way, I’ll read him Some poems, glance at myself In his eyes, and in the moments Before I drop him anywhere He wants to go, Neither of us will be alone.

ROBERT HASS

Meditations at Lagunitas All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clownfaced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, 16

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Yellow

SHARON OLDS

The Moment When I saw the dark Egyptian stain, I went down into the house to find you, Motherpast the grandfather clock, with its huge ochre moon, past the burnt sienna woodwork, rubbed and glazed. I went deeper and deeper down into the body of the house, down below the level of the earth. It must have been the maid’s day off, for I found you there where I had never found you, by the wash tubs, your hands thrust deep in soapy water, and above your head, the blazing windows at the surface of the ground. You looked up from the iron sink, a small haggard pretty woman of 40, one week divorced. “I’ve got my period, Mom,” I said, and saw your face abruptly break open and glow with joy. “Baby,” you said, coming toward me, hands out and covered with tiny delicate bubbles like seeds. 20

ANNE SEXTON

Menstruation at Forty I was thinking of a son. The womb is not a clock nor a bell tolling, but in the eleventh month of its life I feel the November of the body as well as of the calendar. In two days it will be my birthday and as always the earth is done with its harvest. This time I hunt for death, the night I lean toward, the night I want. Well thenâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; speak of it! It was in the womb all along. I was thinking of a son ... You! The never acquired, the never seeded or unfastened, you of the genitals I feared, the stalk and the puppyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s breath. Will I give you my eyes or his? 21

Will you be the David or the Susan? (Those two names I picked and listened for.) Can you be the man your fathers are— the leg muscles from Michelangelo, hands from Yugoslavia somewhere the peasant, Slavic and determined, somewhere the survivor bulging with life— and could it still be possible, all this with Susan’s eyes? All this without you— two days gone in blood. I myself will die without baptism, a third daughter they didn’t bother. My death will come on my name day. What’s wrong with the name day? It’s only an angel of the sun. Woman, weaving a web over your own, a thin and tangled poison. Scorpio, bad spider— die! My death from the wrists, two name tags, 22

blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right— It’s a warm room, the place of the blood. Leave the door open on its hinges! Two days for your death and two days until mine. Love! That red disease— year after year, David, you would make me wild! David! Susan! David! David! full and disheveled, hissing into the night, never growing old, waiting always for you on the porch ... year after year, my carrot, my cabbage, I would have possessed you before all women, calling your name, calling you mine.

MARIE HOWE

What the Living Do Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

kitchenette building We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.” But could a dream send up through onion fumes Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall, Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms Even if we were willing to let it in, Had time to warm it, keep it very clean, Anticipate a message, let it begin? We wonder. But not well! not for a minute! Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now, We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

Blue

LYNDA HULL

Lost Fugue for Chet Chet Baker, Amsterdam, 1988 A single spot slides the trumpetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s flare then stops at that face, the extraordinary ruins thumb-marked with the hollows of heroin, the rest chiaroscuroed. Amsterdam, the final gig, canals & countless stone bridges arc, glimmered in lamps. Later this week his Badlands face, handsome in a print from thirty years ago, will follow me from the obituary page insistent as windblown papers by the black cathedral of St. Nicholas standing closed today: pigeon shit & feathers, posters swathing tarnished doors, a litter of syringes. Junkies cloud the gutted railway station blocks & dealers from doorways call coca, heroina, some throaty foaming harmony. A measured inhalation, again the sweet embouchure, metallic, wet stem. Ghostly, the hornâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s improvisations purl & murmur the narrow strasses of Rosse Buurt, the district rife 30

with purse-snatchers, women alluring, desolate, poised in blue windows, Michelangelo boys, hair spilling fluent running chords, mares’ tails in the sky green & violet. So easy to get lost, these cavernous brown cafés. Amsterdam, & its spectral fogs, its bars & softly shifting tugboats. He builds once more the dense harmonic structure, the gabled houses. Let’s get lost. Why court the brink & then step back? After surviving, what arrives? So what’s the point when there are so many women, creamy callas with single furled petals turning in & upon themselves like variation, nights when the horn’s coming genius riffs, metal & spit, that rich consuming rush of good dope, a brief languor burnishing the groin, better than any sex. Fuck Death. In the audience, there’s always this gaunt man, cigarette in hand, black Maserati at the curb, waiting, the fast ride through mountain passes, descending with no rails between asphalt & precipice. Inside, magnetic whispering take me there, take me. April, the lindens 31

& horse chestnuts flowering, cold white blossoms on the canal. He’s lost as he hears those inner voicings, a slurred veneer of chords, molten, fingering articulate. His glance below Dutch headlines, the fall “accidental” from a hotel sill. Too loaded. What do you do at the brink? Stepping back in time, I can only imagine the last hit, lilies insinuating themselves up your arms, leaves around your face, one hand vanishing sabled to shadow. The newsprint photo & I’m trying to recall names, songs, the sinuous figures, but facts don’t matter, what counts is out of pained dissonance, the sick vivid green of backstage bathrooms, out of broken rhythms—and I’ve never forgotten, never— this is the tied-off vein, this is 3 a.m. terror thrumming, this is the carnation of blood clouding the syringe, you shaped summer rains across the quays of Paris, flame suffusing jade against a girl’s dark ear. From the trumpet, pawned, redeemed, pawned again you formed one wrenching blue arrangement, a phrase endlessly complicated as that twilit dive through smoke, applause,

the pale hunted rooms. Cold chestnuts flowering April & youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re falling from heaven in a shower of eighth notes to the cobbled street below & foaming dappled horses plunge beneath the still green waters of the Grand Canal.

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

Facing It My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn’t dammit: No tears. I’m stone. I’m flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way—the stone lets me go. I turn that way—I’m inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap’s white flash. Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. 34

Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet’s image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I’m a window. He’s lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman’s trying to erase names: No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

As Kingfishers Catch Fire As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

DOROTHEA LASKY

Ars Poetica I wanted to tell the veterinary assistant about the cat video Jason sent me But I resisted for fear she’d think it strange I am very lonely Yesterday my boyfriend called me, drunk again And interspersed between ringing tears and clinginess He screamed at me with a kind of bitterness No other human had before to my ears And told me that I was no good Well maybe he didn’t mean that But that is what I heard When he told me my life was not worthwhile And my life’s work the work of the elite. I say I want to save the world but really I want to write poems all day I want to rise, write poems, go to sleep, Write poems in my sleep Make my dreams poems Make my body a poem with beautiful clothes I want my face to be a poem I have just learned how to apply 37

Eyeliner to the corners of my eyes to make them appear wide There is a romantic abandon in me always I want to feel the dread for others I can feel it through song Only through song am I able to sum up so many words into a few Like when he said I am no good I am no good Goodness is not the point anymore Holding on to things Now thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the point

Kizer Shelton Kizer Shelton 40 Kizer Shelton