CUTTINGS (later)

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it, --
The small waters seeping upward,
the tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

Theodore Roethke

MY GRAVE

Just outside Malaga, California,
lost among the cluster of truckstops
there is a little untended plot
of ground and weeds and a stone
that bears my name, misspelled,
and under the stone is dirt, hardpan,
more dirt, rocks, then one hundred
and one different elements
embracing each other in every way
they can imagine so that at times
they remind me of those photographs
I saw as a boy and which I was assured
were expensive and stimulating
and meant nothing. There are also
over a thousand beer bottle caps
one of my sons was saving until
he calculated he would never
reach a million and so quit. (Quit
saving, not drinking.) One document
is here, ceremoniously labeled
"My Last Will & Testament." My sister
so hated it she threw it into
the bare hole and asked that it be
shovelled under. Not one foolish hope
of mine is here, for none was real
and hard, the hope that the poor
stalked from their cardboard houses
to transform our leaders, that our flags
wept colored tears until they became
nothing but flags of surrender.
I hoped also to see my mother
a long distance runner, my brother
give his money to the kids of Chicago
and take to the roads, carless, hatless,
in search of a task that befits a man.
I dreamed my friends quit lying
and their breath took on the perfume
of new-mown grass, and that I came
to be a man walking carelessly
through the rain, my hair tangled, my one
answer the full belly laugh I saved
for my meeting with God, a laugh I
no longer need. Not one nightmare
is here, nor are my eyes which saw
you rise at night, barefoot and quiet,
and leave my side, and my ears which heard
you return suddenly, your mouth tasting
of cold water. Even my forehead
is not here, behind which I plotted
the overthrow of this our republic
by means of the refusal to wipe.
My journals aren't here, my right hand
that wrote them, my waist that strained
against so many leather belts and belts
of cloth that finally surrendered.
My enormous feet that carried me safely
through thirty cities, my tongue
that stroked and restroked your cheek
roughly until you said, "cat." My poems,
my lies, my few kept promises, my love
for morning sunlight and dusk, my love
for women and the children of women,
my guiding star and the star I wore
for twenty-seven years. Nothing of me
is here because this is not my house,
this is not the driver's seat of my car
nor the memory of someone who loved me
nor that distant classroom in which I
fell asleep and dreamed of lamb. This
is dirt, a filled hole of earth, stone
that says return to stone, a broken fence
that mumbles Keep Out, air above nothing
air that cannot imagine the sweet duties
of wildflowers and herbs, this is cheap,
common, coarse, what you pass by
every day in your car without a thought,
this is an ordinary grave.

PHILIP LEVINE

A Story

Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can't come up with one.

His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story, Baba, A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.

In a room full of books in a world
of stories, he can recall
not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy
will give up on his father.

Already the man lives far ahead, he sees
the day this boy will go. Don't go!
Hear the alligator story! The angel story once more!
You love the spider story. You laugh at the spider.
Let me tell it!

But the boy is packing his shirts,
he is looking for his keys. Are you a god,
the man screams, that I sit mute before you?
Am I a god that I should never disappoint?

But the boy is here. Please, Baba, a story?
It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one,
which posits that a boy's supplications
and a father's love add up to silence.

li-young lee

When You Are Old

When you are old an gray and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book ,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true;

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars

Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

William Butler Yeats

FIVE-YEAR-OLD BOY

My son at five is leaning on the world

the way a factory foreman leans on

a slow worker. As he talks, he holds

a kitchen strainer in his hand. At the end of the conversation, the handle is twisted;

the mesh burst-- he looks down at it

amazed. Mysterious things are always

happening in his hands. As he tells a story,

he dances backwards. Nothing is safe

near this boy. He stands on the porch, peeing

into the grass, watching a bird

fly around the house, and ends up

pissing on the front door. Afterwards he

twangs his penis. Long after the last drops fly into the lawn,

he stands there gently rattling his dick,

his face full of intelligence,

his white, curved forehead slightly

puckered in thought, his eyes clear,

gazing out over the pond,

his mouth firm and serious;

abstractedly he shakes himself

once more

and the house collapses

to the ground behind him.



Sharon Olds

Untitled

Boys kill frogs for sport,
but the frogs die in earnest.

Anonymous

from Leaves of Grass, I Sing the Body Electric [4]

I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is
enough,
To pass among them . . to touch any one . . . . to rest my arm ever
so lightly round his or her neck for a moment . . . . what is this
then?
I do not ask any more delight . . . . I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking
on them and in the contact and odor of them that pleases the
soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.