Tuesday Poem, Lee Miller, Hitler's Personal Residence, 1945, by Melissa Shook

Lee Miller, Hitler's Personal Residence, 1945,
Photograph by David Scherman

Taking into account a childhood in Poughkeepsie,

high fashion modeling,
the throat Man Ray savored, his jealousy,

her Egyptian husband, sun-warmed breasts
and luncheons with the surrealists,

Picture this vivacious artist, collaborator, inspiration,

portrait photographer, war correspondent

Slipping off her shirt in the bedroom where Hitler once
stood naked,

Folding it onto the woven rush seat of the stocky chair
where he sat or draped his robe,

Lowering her flesh toward the porcelain surface he had
lain against,

Lifting and bending her arm to touch a washcloth
to her chin, echoing the gesture,

On the sculpted nude female on his dresser, perhaps
having turned it toward the camera,

For this portrait taken on the day, the very day,
she's photographed the liberation of Dachau.



A poem from "Magritte's Rider," a chapbook published by www.puddinghouse.com

Tuesday Poem, "Men," by Bert Stern

Men

Kenny's bad boy's across the street,

washing his car, a black Camarro

with V8 engine, white letter

tires, and Holly carbs,

just like his dad's.

Sundays, they both drive out

to car shows, but my show's

just out the window, where the cars

lie dreaming like black cats.

Around here, people are

their cars, even the heap

another father and son lie under

in their driveway chop shop

next door to Kenny's.

As for Angie, the kid

washing his Camarro, I know

his dirty little secrets. I saw him

on the avenue yesterday, outside

his car, laid back against the burnished

hood, telling a brown-skinned girl

to get in. Instead, she tossed

her black hair and walked away,

he still yelling as she moved

fast down the street, already

half a block away. For a moment

he froze in wrathful astonishment,

then, like a flash, his u-turn

trails stink of burnt rubber.

I saw him catch her, drag her in

almost before she could scream,

and they're off to where I don't

want to think about.

I know there's karma somewhere,

but across the street, as Angie wipes

a chamois over the car's flanks, his face

is open and innocent as a child's.

Watching him, I shake my head.

Maybe he'll get better as years

press down on him. Or maybe,

just now, he's touched as I am

by the clear sky of Mary's blue

hanging over us, as if to soothe

our frayed angers and heal

the bruised heart of the girl,

naked, defenseless against us.

by Bert Stern

from his book, Steerage

published by Ibbetson Street Press

Bert is Milligan Professor Emeritus at Wabash College and chief editor, retired, at Hilton Publishing. He and his wife, Tam Lin Neville, co-edit a small press that publishes books by poets over sixty. He also teaches at a program in Boston for people on probation.

He has a long list of credits, reviews and poems which have been published. His critical study, Wallace Stevens: Art of Uncertainty, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1965.

Steerage, his first book of poems, may be purchased from Ibbetson Press.

In my most vague and peculiar way, I've been trying, without doing much of anything, to get in contact with Bert Stern. Of course, a friend had left his e-mail in my e-mail box a month ago, but I didn't notice. Finally, I did it and he's given me permission to use his work which I will do for the next few weeks on Tuesday Poem.

Bert is a most charming and gregarious man, often to be found at the Bagel Bard's meeting place at Au Bon Pain in Somerville on Saturday mornings. I hope to see him there this week.

Tuesday Poem, LITTLE MIRACLE IN LAKELAND, Melissa Green

LITTLE MIRACLE IN LAKELAND

Clouds and mist enshroud Lake Morton,

shawling cypresses knee-deep in shallows,

leaving a silver beaded net in the palm trees' hair.

We sit on a dewy bench, my sister and I,

immobilized by five excitable ibis

wading near us. A Little Blue Heron

hunches and shakes itself.

A lone pelican stares and looks away.

Black and white Muscovy ducks are laughing,

wattle-red wens mottling their faces.

A homely wood stork with its punk cut

can't look at us at all. A Great White Heron

tweezes a spiny fish, holds it, snaps

its pincer beak, holds it, snaps it

to a final soft swallow. Cruciform,

an anhinga stands on a rock to dry its wings.

Out on the water, two white swans gossip

and a black swan hurries its cygnets to school.

We barely breathe. After twenty-five years,

we sit calmly, without guilt or envy or injury.

Suddenly from the First United Methodist Church

behind us, a joyous carillon begins. The larger birds

hunker awkwardly and fly out of the left-hand frame.

The surface of the lake is all commotion and bright wings:

the smaller startled birds are paddling into a flotilla

led by the swans, and even the water is coming in

in rhyming pinions. The ducks are bobbing their rumps

in time to the bells, and ruffling wings keep landing,

swimming into place, filling the water in a vee formation,

and migrating birds keep swimming for the other shore

as though they'd been called.

                                  I wondered then which

was  more astonishing -- the way the clouds rolled up

the scrim of mist from the proscenium and the birds

pulled down the sun, uncurling to the rhythm of the bells

its brightening watered silk behind them -- or my sister and I,

our holding hands, as though we'd always done it.

by Melissa Green

I'm sorry that I was so slow in responding to Mary McCallum's wonderful request for a poem from Melissa Green. Our time differences were about half an hour off....but here, at least, is the poem.........from her book, Daphne in Mourning, soon to be published by the Pen & Anvil Press. 

Her first book of poems, The Squanicook Eclogues, won the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America 1989 and the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Recently it was reissued by the Pen & Anvil Press. A second book of poems, Fifty-Two, was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2007. Color is the Suffering of Light: A Memoir was published by W.W. Norton & Co, 1995.

(I'm glad to have had a chance to present this particular poem about reconciliation (and perhaps forgiveness.) For me, typing it was a way of moving more deeply into the images, a privilege for me that unfortunately offers the chance that I haven't caught all my inevitable mistakes. They are mine, not Melissa Green's.)

Tuesday Poem, Patience

Patience

I can't sleep.

People chatter, dogs bark

The world blurs into the distance

Darkness walled in by stone

Beaten by voices, over and over

With fire and ashes nearby

I want to speak

My voice disappears, my strength vanishes

All right! It doesn't matter!

This world dislikes being spoken to, I don't care

The river water turns to ice

And life is life no longer

I do again what I did before

Close my ears, close my eyes

And wait for the calm that has to come.

                                                     

by Chairil Anwar, Translated by Burton Raffel and Nurdin Salam

Anwar, an Indonesian poet, was born on July 26, 1922 and died on April 29, 1949.

In writing about his work, James S Holmes says -- 

     "In his later years, at any rate, Anwar took his poetry like his life, where he found it: in anthologies or on the waterfront made little differences. And to the last he was overflowing with schemes and projects. In April, 1949, he told a friend that he wanted to go to Macassar, across the Java Sea on the island of Celebes, to note down sea chanties from the Buginese sailors. He had plans to translate Garcia Lorca. And he was thinking about the possibility of a trip to India and Europe."

     

In some way, this book came into my hands years ago. It's disappeared and reappeared a number of times, including last week when it took leave of me for a few days after I was so happy to have found it's splattered self while I was doing the systematic read-and-dismiss of books on my shelves during my vacation on the island of bed. 

Now I'm not entirely certain why his work appealed to me,(though I know why this particular poem was so relevant to my brooding thoughts which did not include any vision of the calm that had to come) but it did. As did the work of Denise Levertov. And much, much later, toward recent years, the poems of Raymond Carver.

Tuesday Poem, Patience

Tuesday Poem, "Parting from the Winter Stove

"Parting from the Winter Stove

               (A.D. 822)

On the fifth day after the rise of Spring,

Everywhere the season's gracious attitudes!

The white sun gradually lengthening its course,

The blue-grey clouds hanging as though they would fall:

The last icicle breaking into splinters of jade:

The new stems marshalling red sprouts.

The things I meet are all full of gladness;

It is not only I who love the Spring.

To welcome the flowers I stand in the back garden;

To enjoy the sunlight I sit under the front eaves.

Yet still in my heart there lingers one regret;

Soon I shall part with the flame of my red stove!

By Po Chu-I, 772, Born on the 20th of first month to 846, Dies in the eighth month. 

Another from "Chinese Poems" translated by Arthur Waley, a very old paperback that's lost it's spine, the pages wanting to scatter.

Tuesday Poem, "A Little Love"

A Little Love

Tell me you can manage without love

When you fling yourself into the barbed wire of life.

Tell me you can manage without love

When you stake out the stations of Calvary.

Tell me you can manage without love

When you bite on the green fruit of experience.

Tell me you can manage without love

When you celebrate eternal glories,

Or tell the beads of joy, of smiles.

Tell me that, tell me all that,

And I will tell you what your misery weighs.

A. Kanie (1952)

From the book, "French African Verse" with English translations by John Reed and Clive Wake

published by Heinemann, London, Ibadan, Nairobi

This is from a collection that a friend gave me when he sorted his books before moving to another condo. I particularly responded the two poems by A. Kanie which were included. I am not a grand fan of metaphors since they are so easy for me to step over and dodge around as I read and because I'm so plain spoken, but I found this piece and his other poem about racism clear enough to me to understand and deeply appreciate.

Anoma Kanie, Ivory Coast, published Les eaux du Comoe, Editions du Miroir, Paris, 1952.

 (I'm not able to include the proper accents on the e's in Comoe or Editions.)

Tuesday Poem, "The Real Story"

The Real Story

"I could never have slept

with him," you say

from three thousand miles.

"I'm not 

criticizing but you

must have 

hated yourself

to do it."

How can I tell her

what her father once was:

gifted, elegant,

pale brown skin,

that occasional smile.

I walked past him

through swinging doors

carrying heavy trays,

princess of faculty dining.

I remembered

who took coffee

with milk

and who drank tea;

he was prince of all the rest,

tables of students,

the waiters he commanded

with a nod.

He sat aloof but

in control.

You tell me, "He's bald

and old and ugly

of character.

He was gone before he went."

I want to

persuade you he was once

so fascinating

I never imagined

he'd even 

talk to me.

from "The Real Story," a chapbook, www.finishinglinepress.com

Tuesday Poem, Flowers and Moonlight on the Spring River

Flowers and Moonlight on the Spring River

The evening river is level and motionless --

The spring colours just open to their full.

Suddenly a wave carries the moon away

And the tidal water comes with its freight of stars.

By Yang-Ti, Emperor of the Sui Dynassty from 605-617

(Chinese Poems, edited by Arthur Waley)

Tuesday Poem, (The Reading, Museum of Fine Arts, October 2003

The Reading, Museum of Fine Arts, October 2003

Wearing the writer's quiet costume, Ferlinghetti quietly intones the rhythm

of The Beats whose words were trombones opening doors

and closing exits, floating on lucent light insanely dependent on the small 

thunder of their small houses as the sun roared

and threw shadows out of the night and souls of dark trees waved.

The lady next to me sighs each time he finishes a poem and stands quietly

waiting for the applause to stop. This eight-four-year-old-

poet-book-seller-publisher-activist-icon-remnant reads every god-dam

poem from an out-of-print book and then more from four

new ones, evoking Klempt's kiss, Chagall's horse, Monet's lilies giving

the impression he floated through life on them, Goya's disasters,

Gaugain, Picasso, Mondrian, etc. (Berthe Morissot tossed in) at the tail-end

of our twisted century as six gilded cherubs holding instruments

dance on the side wall and hundreds of us behold this poet's pleasant-pink

face, shiny bald head, neat white beard, skin wrinkling

on the back of his hand as he reads on, three more poems written since 9/11

before announcing himself as the advanced drumbeat

for the recall of Bush and everyone (cherubs included) claps wildly.

(Honorable Mention), 2009 Ellen La Forge Poetry Prize

"Tuesday Poem Project"

Fifth Floor Walk-U, 6th St., Avenue D

Stupid and twenty-six, head full of words,

I napped to escape -- earning a living,

raising a child, keeping the man with an Afro halo,

light brown skin, dancer's body and a painter's mind.

His sights were on San Francisco for a clean start or another woman,

but before he left me and our daughter,

there were worms, diapers and thick summer heat.

All day, kids screamed in the rubble below.

After dark, shadows of men scurried past the window, up the fire escape.

Our mattress lay on the floor I'd painted Chinese red.

Over my desk I taped a torn magazine reproduction --

the Magritte painting of a woman on horseback

shimmering in and behind tree trunks.

The crib was in the far room, past the room with no furniture,

past the narrow bathroom,

and the kitchen with no table or chairs.

One morning I found tiny worms

writhing at the bottom of the make-shift diaper pail.

Trembling, I rushed them and the baby uptown to the clinic,

"What does this mean?"

The sparkling doctor, middle class like me,

had never seen anything like it,

but worms meant medicine.

He prescribed three bottles of purple poison.

There was no persuading the father to drink it, but the baby

and I swallowed ours.

Magritte's rider's back was straight, her tight boots glistened.

M.S.

(published in "The Real Story", a chapbook,

Finishinglinepress.com.)