A Mark Doty Poem

A Green Crab's Shell


Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like–

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
–size of a demitasse–
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened
into this–
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.


(2012)

A Kris Hemensley Poem

"to come away with Hesiod"


to come away with Hesiod
and leave the rock as though to rocks
the tree to trees and dwell on other things

imagine the injunction
to leave the mint to its own devices
amongst the dust & stones in the shadow
of rocks or tree-roots hard as rocks

imagine poems like tended mint
or poems like wildest mint which survives
the oblivion of feckless gardeners
until plucked by knowing fingers
after the fiercer heat’s abated

imagine poems left to their own devices
as poets gorge on air & airy thoughts
& figures — the idea cuts me
to the bone of a sobriety earned
at the expense of the airiness Hesiod
was commissioned to name

but who wouldnt seize a staff of bay
or ash or gum and trade common or
garden cough for lungsfull of song
taking the world in one’s stride
careering towards heaven?


(1998)

POEM: "La Magia"

La Magia


How can formulas be literature?
I love that. I laugh and give myself up
To the extra breath, side-step the beggar
Who is quite interested in my loot.

I’m watching you while something else
Is spreading like an eager plant
When the conditions are right.
The moon is bright. Maybe no pines.

Seeing all the forms of things
How they change before your eyes
Wait a bit for the lights and the darkness.
You watch the F1. The directions are on TV.

Take this poem. Stop and look awhile.
It has only my wallet on its mind
Sitting in an Italian restaurant
Walking down a street back home.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "The Atoms Of Books"

The Atoms of Books


3. If reader wants to keep book and buy it:
 i) Supply name of book store.
 ii) The library cannot sell books to individuals. The books are the  property of the Library Board.
4. If reader says he pays taxes and the book belongs to him:
 i) State that the Public Libraries Act makes books property of the Library Board.
                        
                Chinook Regional Library Procedures Manual (2007)


Running up the path to the treasure house
I always maxed out the borrowing limit

The craters of the moon, insects, stories
Of people who lived differently than me

Geography and history, Greek myths
Astronomy and atoms, the pyramids

Tycho Brahe, his noses, magic moose
Telescopes and heliocentrics of sad

The blue-stocking's reprimand
This is not appropriate for your age

Once I even cried to show her that it was
And a guy said, Jesus give the kid his book!

Pliny the Elder, Pompeii, Alexandria
The Cairo Geniza, my forefathers, herself

On a carved page suddenly discovered
Where silence is no longer special virtue

Now books cannot sit squarely upon a shelf
With furred pages, the silverfish and worms

Growing older & more important in the shade
Happily replenishing the nutrition of words.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Carl Dennis Poem

 

Change


Just yesterday my poem lamenting the power
Of time to sweep away all trace of the beautiful
Seemed done at last, but the light this morning
Shows it to be a sketch, evidence that my vision
Cleared as I slumbered, that my sense of beauty
Grows in the night like corn or bamboo.

Maybe a poem in praise of time
Ought to be next on my agenda,
The time required for seeds to open,
For leaves to push out on tender stems.

Yesterday, the teacher didn't believe the excuse
Her student offered for missing his appointment—
A tire gone flat on the Thruway—but today
His story seems almost convincing,
Suggesting how quickly the bruise to her ego
Has begun to heal, the first small step
From the tiresome realm of insult and umbrage.

Yesterday the lover couldn't commit himself.
Today he wants to write his beloved
A check for a million dollars,
Though the time hasn't come, he admits,
For her to cash it.
Meanwhile, though he has nothing,
Whatever he has is hers.


(2012)

POEM: "Almost A Haiku"

Almost A Haiku 

But even then
I've got one more question
Are we there yet?

© 2012 Rob Schackne

An Ada Limón Poem

Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America


It's a day when all the dogs of all
the borrowed houses are angel footing
down the hard hardwood of middle-America's
newly loaned-up renovated kitchen floors,
and the world's nicest pie I know
is somewhere waiting for the right
time to offer itself to the wayward
and the word-weary. How come the road
goes coast to coast and never just
dumps us in the water, clean and
come clean, like a fish slipped out
of the national net of "longing for joy."
How come it doesn't? Once, on a road trip
through the country, a waitress walked
in the train's diner car and swished
her non-aproned end and said,
"Hot stuff and food too." My family
still says it, when the food is hot,
and the mood is good inside the open windows.
I'd like to wear an apron for you
and come over with non-church sanctioned
knee-highs and the prettiest pie of birds
and ocean water and grief. I'd like
to be younger when I do this, like the country
before Mr. Meriwether rowed the river
and then let the country fill him up
till it killed him hard by his own hand.
I'd like to be that dog they took with them,
large and dark and silent and un-blamable.
Or I'd like to be Emily Dickinson's dog, Carlo,
and go on loving the rare un-loveable puzzle
of woman and human and mind. But, I bet I'm more
the house beagle and the howl and the obedient
eyes of everyone wanting to make their own kind
of America, but still be America, too. The road
is long and all the dogs don't care too much about
roadside concrete history and postcards of state
treasures, they just want their head out the window,
and the speeding air to make them feel faster
and younger, and newer than all the dogs
that went before them, they want to be your only dog,
your best-loved dog, for this good dog of today
to be the only beast that matters.


(2012)

POEM: "So What"

So What
                      
                            I.M. Miles Davis

The so what starts slowly
whether new-born fan or me
after 50 years of listening
to hope sunk down deep still
I can’t describe the entire song
maybe the so whats are just bookends
& if between swings a chorus
of what actually matters
then so what if it matters?


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Bei Dao Poem

 

The Answer


Debasement is the password of the base,
Nobility the epitaph of the noble.
See how the gilded sky is covered
With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead.

The Ice Age is over now,
Why is there ice everywhere?
The Cape of Good Hope has been discovered,
Why do a thousand sails contest the Dead Sea?

I came into this world
Bringing only paper, rope, a shadow,
To proclaim before the judgment
The voice that has been judged:

Let me tell you, world,
I—do—not—believe!
If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet,
Count me as number thousand and one.

I don't believe the sky is blue;
I don't believe in thunder's echoes;
I don't believe that dreams are false;
I don't believe that death has no revenge.

If the sea is destined to breach the dikes
Let all the brackish water pour into my heart;
If the land is destined to rise
Let humanity choose a peak for existence again.

A new conjunction and glimmering stars
Adorn the unobstructed sky now;
They are the pictographs from five thousand years.
They are the watchful eyes of future generations.


(1988) tr. Bonnie S. McDougall (1990)

POEM: "Hills"

Hills


On the moment of hillside
greeting insects trudging up
the footsteps are breathless
you say I climb to get away
frosted rockets and motor
summit or summon heights
on a hill of a million hills
a billion bumps upon our lives
blue skies or the dark skies
in different suspension
feet never touching home
the easy path to the edge
a ridge after water butterflies
finally ended here are crows.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Mars & You"

Mars & You

                             for Toru Takemitsu


Launched from a million miles away
landing as if it was in your backyard
information always sent from love
from me flows what you call time
like your curiosity lands on schedule
your hair smells as sweet tomorrow
& everything you ask has no answer.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A D.H. Lawrence Poem

 

Pomegranate


You tell me I am wrong.
Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?
I am not wrong.

In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek
     women.
No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate-trees in
     flower,
Oh so red, and such a lot of them.

Whereas at Venice
Abhorrent, green, slippery city
Whose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes.
In the dense foliage of the inner garden
Pomegranates like bright green stone,
And barbed, barbed with a crown.
Oh, crown of spiked green metal
Actually growing!

Now in Tuscany,
Pomegranates to warm, your hands at;
And crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns
Over the left eyebrow.

And, if you dare, the fissure!

Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure?
Do you prefer to look on the plain side?

For all that, the setting suns are open.
The end cracks open with the beginning:
Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?
No glittering, compact drops of dawn?
Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument,
     shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.
It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.


(1923)

POEM: "The Visit"

The Visit


One day in July
three men came

in the same suit
they were polite

we need ya to stay
on the other side

I asked them where
the other side was

see that corner well
don’t go there anymore


© 2012 Rob Schackne

An Arthur Sze Poem

 

Morning Antlers


Redwinged blackbirds in the cattail pond—
today I kicked and flipped a wing
in the sand and saw it was a sheared
off flicker's. Yesterday's rain has left

snow on Tesuque Peak, and the river
will widen then dwindle. We step
into a house and notice antlers mounted
on the wall behind us; a ten-day-old child

looks, nurses, and sleeps; his mother
smiles but says she cries then cries
as emptiness brims up and over.
And as actions are rooted in feelings,

I see how picking spinach in a field
blossoms the picker, how a thoughtless act
shears a wing. As we walk out
to the car, the daylight is brighter

than we knew. We do not believe
flames shoot out of a cauldron of days
but, looking at the horizon, see
flames leap and crown from tree to tree.


(2012)

A Philip Schultz Poem

At the Beach This Morning


There we were, Penelope,
my Border Collie mix, and I,
one godless the other faithful,
observing the fiery orange
at the left side of the horizon,
no bigger than my thumb, say,
shy in profile, exhausting another
of its ration of daybreaks,
while off to the far right
the ghostly white spider moon,
dangling by its dreamy thread.
That's when Lady P barked
at the blind man measuring
each step slowly emerging
out of the shadows, a duel
of balance and resolve. Indeed,
miles from town, how had he
gotten here? Head tilted toward
the waves, as if listening
to their instruction, his own
intuition. That's when, out
of the dunes, the deer came,
a buck, doe and three yearlings,
frozen in a jittery vigilance,
the wonder of their long elegance
turning to find us, Penelope,
obeying my call of silence, bursting
with an excitement the blind man
sensed, turning toward them,
their poise, their keenness,
each of us suddenly an industry
of looking, of not breathing,
a tiny fragile presence, colliding
scraps of discernment, each
suddenly vanishing back
into the bright vagueness
from which we came.

(2011)

A Gerard Manley Hopkins Poem

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme


As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
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 do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: 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.


(ca. 1880)

POEM: "Seppuku (1962)"

Seppuku (1962)
                                
                                  for Kobayashi Masaki

An infant lies sleeping upon a mat
Father to grandson, father’s daughter
The son-in-law’s a Confucian scholar
Or is it a thousand Tokugawa tales
Refuse promotion higher than private
Etched hard in deserving face, have it
Unfold according to plot, maybe not
Not least because black & white days
Hide luxuries like festival kimonos
On a night when the moon is full of blood
One revenge for a love we understand— 
Right now the cicadas are very loud.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Summer Note To Self"

Summer Note To Self


The little one is burnt and black
Motionless in a tree looks back

Rest on the cicada barrier
Arm cast lackadaisically over
The unnamed it didn’t matter

Wait a minute what’s she wearing
Why cast that way why is she there?

Bend time curl everything you know
Penetrate it like a remote cave
Save bats save yourself save light

Introduce yourself to Tommy Tomorrow
Say goodbye we were leaving anyway

Where music comes out so sweetly
Where summer comes from so loud
Rubbing rubbing the terms of reality.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Richard Hugo Poem (1)

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg


You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.


(1973)

A Richard Hugo Poem (2)

Glen Uig


Believe in this couple this day who come
to picnic in the Faery Glen. They pay rain
no matter, or wind. They spread their picnic
under a gale-stunted rowan. Believe they grew tired
of giants and heroes and know they believe
in wise tiny creatures who live under the rocks.

Believe these odd mounds, the geologic joke
played by those wise tiny creatures far from
the world's pitiful demands: make money, stay sane.
Believe the couple, by now soaked to the skin,
sing their day as if dry, as if sheltered inside
Castle Ewen. Be glad Castle Ewen's only a rock
that looks like a castle. Be glad for no real king.

These wise tiny creatures, you'd better believe,
have lived through it all: the Viking occupation,
clan torturing clan, the Clearances, the World War
II bomber gone down, a fiery boom
on Beinn Edra. They saw it from here. They heard
the sobs of last century's crofters trail off below
where every day the Conon sets out determined for Uig.
They remember the Viking who wandered off course,
under the hazelnut tree hating aloud all he'd done.

Some days dance in the bracken. Some days go out
wide and warm on bad roads to collect the dispossessed
and offer them homes. Some days celebrate addicts
sweet in their dreams and hope to share with them
a personal spectrum. The loch here's only a pond,
the monster is in it small as a wren.

Believe the couple who have finished their picnic
and make wet love in the grass, the tiny wise creatures
cheering them on. Believe in milestones, the day
you left home forever and the cold open way
a world wouldn't let you come in. Believe you
and I are that couple. Believe you and I sing tiny
and wise and could if we had to eat stone and go on.


(1980)

A William Stafford Poem

Cutting Loose
                          
                                for James Dickey


Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path - but that's when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.


(1983)

POEM: "Of A Saturday Arvo"

Of A Saturday Arvo


Raindrops don’t regret slow passage
Down windowpanes inconsolable rain
Today we spoke of the late Ching dynasty
The early Edo and of curiosity
How explorers do not extend their lives
How culture can look like an enemy
When junction boxes lie as buried
As Amelia’s silver bracelet in the sand
Li Bai too watches raindrops racing
Weaving the odds he survived the boat
Honoring glass compass and credulity
Till the storm was over it was dry again
There’s no telling where this tale is ending
Another glass is raised the nerve is steady
I wonder how we make things important.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "The Earhart Light"

The Earhart Light


He said he could see it bumping
Against the sea of lost aircraft
At one place on a coral atoll, adrift
Imagined Amelia's body recomposed
In the fish and sand and small breezes
That play about the edges of howland
But like the zephyr we never feel
The eyes and heart strain to know
That we who are left searching
Take deep breaths looking for buttons
Find an old regulator & come up for air
Our rescues from ourselves, I think
That rescue was always on the way
We had nothing more to do but wait.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Howard Altmann Poem

 

Desert Sounds


The iguana is still under the rock.
Blossoms unfurl scents over coiled snakes.
Saguaros arm their shadows
With the long legs of daylight.
And whose limbs got buried where
The grand inquisitor unearths deeply.

So it goes in the Sonoran desert.
Sky shows its teeth with cacti.
The mouth of civilization spits out sand.
Who are we, who are we?
The heart of the blue-throated hummingbird beats
Up to twelve hundred times a minute.

The palm-sized bird can play its hand backward too.
With good reason metaphors stay open past midnight.
When desert sounds coax silence into submission.
When darkness branches off.
O the miss in mystery; the hiss in history.
The tap in a child’s tapping: wake up, wake up.


(2012)

POEM: "Moon & Wine"

Moon & Wine
                      
                      for Rosemary

red wine
at midnight
my neck hurts

thank goodness
the moonlight
another glass

balance it
upon the table
just half-full

indoors tonight
see the moon
see me


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Jacek Gutorow Poem

 

Slur


The problem with boundaries: in the blink of an eye a dozen crows
lose their individuality and become a flock. Same as now:
frayed seconds disappear into quarters
that transfer their worth into the afternoon's account.
Time flows but space isn't any worse:
the flock of crows cuts the sky diagonally.
It's as if a new continent were emerging
to greet halfway the nascent cartographers
and their dreams. Sooner or later the flock will break up
into birds. The sea will crumble into waves.
The waves into drops. A delicate afternoon will be calculable
like harvested grain. The room will resemble
a clock without hands.


(2012)

POEM: "When Interrupted By"

When Interrupted By


When interrupted by
symbols of death
we are supplied
dogs that gnaw & run
the flowers that ride
on the casket, the many
interruptions of gunfire
the quiet mourning
terrified screaming
the processional
the one man rescue
the shock of the loss
of father or daughter
of comrade or son
heads up or heads down
goddamn every kind of bullet...


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Cathy Park Hong Poem

 

Engines Within The Throne


We once worked as clerks      
       scanning moth-balled pages
into the clouds, all memories
outsourced except the fuzzy
       childhood bits when
I was an undersized girl with a tic,
they numbed me with botox
       I was a skinsuit
of dumb expression, just fingerprints
over my shamed
       all I wanted was snow
to snuff the sun blades to shadow spokes,
muffle the drum of freeways, erase
       the old realism
but this smart snow erases
       nothing, seeps everywhere,
the search engine is inside us,
the world is our display
       and now every industry
has dumped whole cubicles, desktops,
fax machines into developing
       worlds where they stack
them as walls against
what disputed territory
       we asked the old spy who drank
with Russians to gather information
the old-fashioned way,
now we have snow sensors,
       so you can go spelunking
in anyone's mind,
let me borrow your child
thoughts, it's benign surveillance,
       I can burrow inside, find a cave
pool with rock-colored flounder,
and find you, half-transparent
with depression.


(2012)

POEM: "The Bar Life"

The Bar Life


She sits down too close to me
and orders a bottle of red wine
already loaded fast busting up
with her boyfriend on the phone
so she can tell me to fuck off
when I ask her if she’s OK
no that wasn’t what happened
twenty minutes later a guy shows up
they share a glass he’s smiling
then she tells him to fuck off
thank god for every small mercy
ringtone and she’s on it pissed off
my guess her parents I got my rights
rings off passes out suddenly on bar
stirs to tell the guy to fuck off again
who’s still grinning unaccountably
a new neurone in the morons club
ringtone again and she’s back at it
with some other poor bastard
sure she’s marginally beautiful
almost certainly terminally stupid
and inside the same universe tonight
some dumb things are going to happen.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "One Evening Minding My Own Business"

One Evening Minding My Own Business


For once for last for the ever that lasts
For them both in the sky someplace

Howards lead them into German bars
(But alas, they look like you and me)

The element conflicts with sensitivities
(Sometimes she’s a surprising beauty)

For once for last for the ever that lasts
For them both in the sky someplace

The local waitress is usually cruel
Our girl is nervous, spills something

Betraying her out-of-townism
In the different dialect & walk

Of course our Howard doesn’t notice
Confident he’s finally scored real big

For once for last for the ever that lasts
For them both in the sky someplace.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Fred Austerlitz In Shanghai"

Fred Austerlitz In Shanghai

When Welles & Hayworth let him
Slip the leash to see it for himself
Dancing through customs charmed
The pants off them or so they said
How can a man show such grace?
A job trading futures in Shanghai
Hoofing it with the bargirls at night
The Great Wall was his dancing mind
He gained weight drinking cheap beer
Practised his dream steps before bed
Eventually fell in with a country girl
He picked up enough Chinese to wow
Her parents & he danced a life for them
"The Cure Is Worse Than The Disease"
Their eyes shined big they thanked him
They poured him out a fiery cup of wine
He started to stammer a formal speech
Gazed at the sunset waited at the horizon
He pointed at his mouth then to his feet
Was unprepared for the wild applause.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "La Musica Divina"

La Musica Divina

                  Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta
                  più caramente; e questo è quello strale
                  che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta.                  
                 
                  Dante, Paradiso


Boethius makes a deal with music:
I feel most comfortable at night
Accept my arc, I leave you alone
A perfect island far from Rome
Points to the world’s dark ways
And every dawn I see the singer
Felled by an axe or an arrow
Music so naturally a part of us
We can’t be free even if we wanted
Prison another thing altogether.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Clive James Poem

 

Language Lessons


She knew the last words of Eurydice
In every syllable, both short and long.
Correcting his misuse of quantity,
She proved the plangent lilt of Virgil’s song
Depended on precision, while his hand,
Light as a mayfly coming in to land,
Caressed her cheek to taste the melody
Of such sweet skin, smooth as a silk sarong.

Give her the palm for speaking well, he thought,
But has she ever melted as she should
With no holds barred, or wept the way she ought?
His scraps of Greek, it seemed, were not much good.
He said the words for rosy-fingered dawn
And when she set him straight with laughing scorn
He spoke a tongue she barely understood,
Contesting her with kisses long and short.

In such a way they traded expertise
Until the day came it took half the night.
She gradually improved his memories
And he set loose her longing for delight.
The passion underneath the verse technique
She saw in its full force, and learned to speak –
Strictly, as always, but in ecstasies.
So finally, for both, the sound was right,

A compound language fashioned out of sighs
And poetry recited line by line.
Few lovers and few scholars realise
The force with which those separate things combine
When classic metres are at last revealed
As reservoirs where rhythms lie concealed
That sprang from heartbeats just like yours and mine,
Pent breath, and what we cry with flashing eyes.

In that regard they made a pretty pair:
He with his otherwise unhurried touch,
She with her prim and finely balanced air,
When they lay down together, came to such
An ending they were like a poem caught
In the last singing phrase of what it sought
To start with: to contain what means too much
Left lying loose. In something like despair,

Though it was joy, they would forget they knew
What anybody else had ever said
Of love, and simply murmur the poor few
Abstract endearments suitable for bed
Until they slept, and dreamed they’d never met
And none of this sheer bliss had happened yet.
One woke the other –which was which? –in dread:
Ah, Orpheus, what has lost us, me and you?

Alas, what is this madness? Out of sight
Like smoke mixed with thin air I seem to fly.
Although her form, when he switched on the light,
Was still there, he had heard her spirit die.
To bring it back, he swore that he would go
To hell for her. It would be always so,
For he would live forever and defy
The halls of Dis and the gigantic night.

Having heard this from him, she smiled again,
And in his arms came back to life as one
Returning to the mortal world of men,
Their ticking clocks, the race that they must run.
Believing in their love: that was the task
That these two faced. It seemed too much to ask,
So moved were they when all was said and done –
Knowing that it would stop, but never when.


(2010)

POEM: "Movie"

Movie


After calculating the return on
2 cats 2 rats a noisy dog & a goat
The rain continued to keep out
Others in peril of their bones
I remember someone like you
Before one shot scraped it silly
After it left you ants pouring
Down your head seconds to plan
Before the 2 beards walked in
Determinate threat was present
Before you saw a clean way out
Though it was an afterthought
Before you used the knife.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Why He Hates Dreams"

Why He Hates Dreams
                                              

                                            after Michael Chabon


1. They are without conscience

2. They skip the important bits

3. They look very weird & stupid

4. They make you wake up & think

5. They want you to go back to sleep

6. They always resume differently

7. They amuse themselves with your woes

8. They keep you tightly frozen

9. They have you flying all over the place

10. They’ve got you wearing pyjamas

11. They leave your dick hanging out

12. They offer you some girl called Suzie

13. They give you one called Etheria

14. They insert people you’ve never met

15. They add jokers you wish you could forget

16. They deafen you to the knock at the door

17. They are difficult to remember

18. They tell you that you’ll see her again

19. They finish with no real point



© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Les Murray Poem (1)

 

The Conversations


A full moon always rises at sunset
and a person is taller at night.
Many fear their phobias more than death.
The glass King of France feared he’d shatter.
Chinese eunuchs kept their testes in spirit.

Your brain can bleed from a sneeze-breath.
A full moon always rises at sunset
and a person is taller when prone.
Donald Duck was once banned in Finland
because he didn’t wear trousers,

his loins were feather-girt like Daisy’s
but no ostrich hides its head in sand.
The cure for scurvy was found
then long lost through medical theory.
The Beginning is a steady white sound.

The full moon rises at sunset
and lemurs and capuchin monkeys
pass a millipede round to get off on
its powerful secretions. Mouthing it
they wriggle in bliss on the ground.

This heart of a groomed horse slows down.
A fact is a small compact faith,
a sense-datum to beasts, a power to man
even if true, even while true –
we read these laws in Isaac Neurone.

One woman had sixty-nine children.
Some lions mate fifty times a day.
Napoleon had a victory addiction.
A full moon always rises at sunset.
Soldiers now can get in the family way.


(2010)

POEM: "Footprints"

footprints go
shower to
living room
they stop in
the bedroom
it was there
a moment ago
her clothes hide
perfections
the shoes hide
invisibles
not there now
copyright
twenty-twelve
everyone

A William Carlos Williams Poem

 

It Is A Small Plant

  It is a small plant
delicately branched and
tapering conically
to a point, each branch
and the peak a wire for
green pods, blind lanterns
starting upward from
the stalk each way to
a pair of prickly edged blue
flowerets: it is her regard,
a little plant without leaves,
a finished thing guarding
its secret. Blue eyes—
but there are twenty looks
in one, alike as forty flowers
on twenty stems—Blue eyes
a little closed upon a wish
achieved and half lost again,
stemming back, garlanded
with green sacks of
satisfaction gone to seed,
back to a straight stem—if
one looks into you, trumpets—!
No. It is the pale hollow of
desire itself counting
over and over the moneys of
a stale achievement. Three
small lavender imploring tips
below and above them two
slender colored arrows
of disdain with anthers
between them and
at the edge of the goblet
a white lip, to drink from—!
And summer lifts her look
forty times over, forty times
over—namelessly.

  (1919)

An Anselm Berrigan Poem

 

Poem For Circulation

Things surrounding things
fill my Wicked Tuna grid

heart with a swishy austerity-like
intention. I cut my post-fleshy

forearms & bleed a serious parallel
echo chamber reading everything

to approve of nothing. I massage 
my anterior cruciate ligaments

to celebrate a hard won royal flush.
This mind is slick-like and easy-like

and music-like and gesture-like
and, as I am the dappled heathen

you've been given internal permission
to dismiss from your sacrosanct

barricades and bounty systems,
coy, and shit-like. A second first-person

recapitulation does not defiantly
buy shape rightly here. Sane

continuity is your trashy blues
making progress out of heart's lack.

How should I know you're not
there bleeding, respectably

to conclude a moist relentment
and make my evil labors clear?

(2012)

POEM: "All Summer In A Day"

All Summer In A Day

Parade of fading dreams

see the children etched in

acid treatment of school-bags

bosses sigh already know

their recruits are unready

though Eleanor may demur

still playing at the seaside

left at the edge of the world

to taste the fire and the pity

to learn that the starfish

is neither fish nor star

& every day changes a little.

© 2012 Rob Schackne

An A. Van Jordan Poem

  

Old Boy

         (Park Chan-Wook, 2003)

If one rainy night you find yourself
leaving a phone booth, and you meet a man
with a lavender umbrella, resist
your desire to follow him, to seek
shelter from the night in his solace.
Later, don't fall victim to the Hypnotist's
narcotic of clarity, which proves
a curare for the heart; her salve
is merely a bandage, under which memories 
pulse. Resist the taste for something still 
alive for your first meal; resist the craving 
for the touch of a hand from your past. 
We live some memories,
and some memories are planted. There's
only so much space for the truth
and the fabrications to spread out 
in one's mind. When there's no more 
space, we grow desperate. You'll ask 
if practicing love for years in your mind, 
prepares you for the moment,
if practicing to defend one's life
is the same as living? You'll
hole up, captive, in a hotel room
for fifteen years and learn to find
a man within you, which will prove 
a painful introduction to the trance
into which you were born. Better
to stay under the spell of your guilt,
than to forget; you've already released
your pain onto the world; don't believe
there's some joy in forgetting. 
There's no joy in the struggle to forget. 
And what appears as an endless verdant field, 
only spreads across a building's rooftop;
your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,
which secures you in a suitcase in this field. 
A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggage 
like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?
You remember when you were the man
who fit those clothes, but you've forgotten this 
world. Even forgotten scenes from your life, 
leave shadows of the memory,
haunting your spirit 
until, within a moment's glance,
strangers passing you on the street,
observe history in your eyes. Experience
lingers through acts of forgetting, 
small acts of love or trauma 
falling from the same place. Whether
memory comes in the form of a stone
or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.
A tongue—even if it were, say, sworn 
to secrecy; or if it were cut from one's mouth;
yes, even without a mouth to envelop 
its truth—the tongue continues to confess.


(2012)

An Alan Shapiro Poem

 

Flowerpot


I lay back on the carpeted bottom step
Of the stairwell that like a well extended
Darkly up to the window near the ceiling,

Up where the Chinaman under the wide-brimmed hat
That hid his face pulled the flowerpot that held
No flower across the sill no one could reach.

There was a television on somewhere
Above me, and the doomsday clock was ticking,
Someone was saying. Someone was saying something

About a blockade and a quarantine,
Who would blink first, lose face, or push the button.
A fat man banged a shoe against a desk.

The Chinaman however didn’t care.
Pulling his flowerpot of absent flowers,
He was content to be a clot of darkness

Brightening the moment late sun caught the glass—
The hat tip first, and then the hat, the arms,
The rickshaw of the flowerpot he pulled.

And everywhere within the light’s slow fall
Infinities of particles were falling
Into the flowerpot they’d never fill.


(2012)

POEM: "The Phrases (II)"

The Phrases (II)


The honest sentiment, the romantic
& pure sound you chased all your life

Miles said Don’t waste any phrases
You want key changes & discord

How could she say Don’t waste my time
When she really meant Give me your best

(But given the stakes, how could
She even know what she said?)

Around you the invisible senses swarm
Occasionally one is a fly on your skin

You revisit all the times you wasted
The lights change colour. You cross.


© 2012 Rob Schackne