Category: poetry

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Eternity – by William Blake

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

– William Blake

Blake was an early Romantic poet. Studying him at Vassar had a tremendous impact on me, although I’m sure Professor Beth Darlington had a lot to do with that as well. There’s an excellent biography of him at Poets.org. He was quite a radical for his days — among other things, he taught his wife to read and write and had her work side by side with him in his engraving shop. (Of course, he also used to wake her up in the middle of the night to sit with him when he wrote, so I doubt I would have found him an ideal mate). He created and perfected a style of printing that allowed him to reproduce the delicate watercolors he used to illuminate his own poetry. Vassar’s special collections contains one of the original editions printed using this method. I don’t believe it survived him.

Tricycle’s Daily Dharma quoted this poem recently. It’s an excellent illustration of the Buddhist principle of nonattachment and also a reminder that spiritual principles repeat themselves over and over again across cultures, races, and places.

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Marguerite Guzman Bouvard — Night Strides Across Borders

Excerpted from After Maillol

Night

Night strides across borders.
Hush, she commands the barking dogs,
the searchlights, the buckling barbed
wire fences. She cradles
the earth in her gleaming limbs
until the only sounds are those of mingled
breaths, the quick intake of the child’s,
the drawn out sobs of the aged
and the ill. Beneath her steady wings
soldiers dream of tilling fields,
prison doors slide open.

— Marguerite Guzman Bouvard
The Unpredictability of Light
Word Press. 2009: Cincinnati, OH.

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The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster

I was in high school and half in love with a boy from Texas. I was only half in love with him because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do with boys. Well, he was awfully cute. And I was 13 years old and full of hormones. Like me, he was a child of hippies. Unlike me, he was unabashed about it.

He pulled a slim volume from his locker — the locker so close to that other boy who got me into so much trouble. It had a yellow spine and a black-and-white photograph of a girl perched on top of a pile of rubble. It was called The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining Disaster, by Richard Brautigan.

“He’s a minor LSD poet from San Francisco,” he told me. “I thought you might like it.”

Even then, I was known for liking and writing poetry.

It was the first book of poetry anyone ever gave to me like that: spontaneous, easy. With the perspective of time, I can see that maybe he was as half in love with me as I was with him. We ended up embarking on a relationship far more intimate and complex than anything you’d see on Glee. It’s hard to say who broke my harder: him or the other boy I loved at the same time, in a more carnal, conventional manner.

But that’s a story for another time. Right now what I want to think about is that moment when he handed me this slim volume, the same one that sits on my desk beside me now, a little time traveler through the decades.

And the wonder of discovery when I first saw a poem like this in print:

The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster

When you take your pill
it’s like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
    lost inside of you.

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November Haiku: Yellow Leaves on the Ground

leaves against grey sky
winter’s chill but still yellow
carpeting the ground

standing on sunshine
while all around you winter
winches tight its grip

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Poem a Day November – Day 4

fate or concertinas – does it matter?
god or neurological – the miracle remains
can you hold the deep stillness
that observes and opens its heart
even as you return to the dance?

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Poem a Day November – Day 3

in praise of the still, small voice
that does not speak but grasps
you at the crux of your bones
and moves you into the day
when moments ago you thought you’d
spend all day afloat
on the ocean-bob of the couch

in praise of cupcakes and clarinets
in praise of the white pines
looming curved and sap-dripping
pinned by the wings of Aphrodite
to the world

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Poem a Day November – Day 2

for Lee Ann

clothed in ink and wreathed in shadow
alien life pushing through the thread of your own
offer up a cup of parcels: poems, carrots, shrimp heads
— chomp! — it accepts
or expresses displeasure in endless nausea,
jolting you through the interior as you travel
the two worlds, inside and out

what witch’s power lets you let it pass through you
without death but transformation?

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Poem a Day November — Day 1

Yes, I know I’m late. All I have to say about that is “fuck you, November.” Although October was more of a bitch this year than November so far.

I’m more of a poet than a novelist, so I’m doing what some poets have started to do, which is write a poem a day in November instead of the insane marathon of a 10,000 word sustained narrative.

I fully expect this month’s poems to be mediocre in quality. As Julia Cameron said, “rest on the page.” A single haiku is better than silence — at least in this scenario. If you want the good stuff, buy the chapbook. Assuming it’s ever actually published. [Update: It WAS published!]

still waters of the pond
turn the eye inward
leaves a carpet of yellow–
sun on the ground
turn the eye outward