POEM: "If The Universe Be Curved Not Flat"

If The Universe Be Curved Not Flat

Please remember the apple rain
the speedfilled dawn at falling dream
the scent the image left behind

leave the red signs in the junkyard
leave it to the mothers of China
leaving their Masters behind

include the moving clouds
including as many objects as they can
include the underside of this house

if the universe be curved not flat
against time or set or box of matches 
if anything should exceed its direction

jigsaw pieces see all things flash
the sound an old barn door makes
listen to almost the taste of apples

the photo down (as in a book)
the photo up (as on the wall)
the photo round (as on a planet)


© 2013 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Water"

Water


One day water looks like death
Inviting the concentrated minute
But my hair has spun too wild
In the winds ever to be still again
Clothed (I am always clothed)
To inch under the appearance
Of what looks placid and blue
The cold shock and the slowing
Descent is not as painful as
The first rude intake of water
Mother I thought she'd forgive
My father come to rescue me
And memory would be stored safe
Trees just swaying (time is staying)
Before I was not drawn to water.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Dorothea Lasky Poem

The Birth

The birth isn't about poetry

It is about screaming pain on a Sunday
Hailing a cab and head racing
To the hospital, now so close to the new apartment

I had a baby inside of me
But no one expected it to happen so fast
Or then at least they said they didn't
Maybe they expected it to happen so fast
All along

Alone in the waiting room I shook and shook
And the blood ran down my legs
Later with the magnesium
I thought of the many permutations of the bald head
Pale, pickling fish skin, glowing with scales

When she came out, she was dark and full of hair
No blood, but born in the caul
Like the other magical realities of my past accomplishments
When she came out she cried and it sounded like me
But passed me, into her new reality

Now 3 weeks later, they say I am still not an erotic object
So I wander the park in the snow with my friend
We light candles and pray to the darkness
We light the park on fire and the police come and find us

When they take us to the jail, I say no, it's not right
I am a mother after all
They say, but where is your baby
And I say, no no, my baby my baby
They say, yes yes, look at your beautiful baby

I say, I do, I do
Look, look, and listen
My baby my baby
She's here

(2015)

POEM: "So What If Memory Isn't True"

So What If Memory Isn't True


I found an old scalpel a new blade
she carefully shaved my corns
as gently as her dear mother’s

We drank like magicians we smoked like fish
strange of kind her mahou tsukai
how she put geomancy in the air

She walked out after a fight about my photos
a balance of probabilities she was crazy
(though most likely I was too)

She was a goddess she was so pristine
my poetry was dirty in the shower
she rubbed me down like a horse

Tried to scrub the naysayer off me
she got some here missed a little there
then she refused to have sex for a year

Fires raged on the Kobe streets
she was young she was lost in the great earthquake
so what if memory isn’t true.

© 2014 Rob Schackne

A Randall Jarrell Poem

The Woman at the Washington Zoo

The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I....
              this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my grave, with no
Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,
The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief—
Only I complain.... this serviceable
Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses
But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,
Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining
In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death—
Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
And there come not to me, as come to these,
The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas' grain,
Pigeons settling on the bears' bread, buzzards
Tearing the meat the flies have clouded....
                                                                Vulture,
When you come for the white rat that the foxes left,
Take off the red helmet of your head, the black
Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man:
The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,
To whose hand of power the great lioness
Stalks, purring....
                             You know what I was,
You see what I am: change me, change me!

(1960)

A Gary Snyder Poem

A Maul for Bill and Cindy's Wedding


Swung from the toes out,
Belly-breath riding on the knuckles,
The ten-pound maul lifts up,
Sails in an arc overhead,
And then lifts you!

It floats, you float,
For an instant of clear far sight—
Eye on the crack in the end-grain
Angle of the oak round
Stood up to wait to be split.

The maul falls—with a sigh—the wood
Claps apart
    and lies twain—
In a wink. As the maul
Splits all, may

You two stay together.


(1983)

A Charlotte Smith Poem

On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic

Is there a solitary wretch who hies
  To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow,
And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes
  Its distance from the waves that chide below;
Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs
  Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf,
With hoarse, half-uttered lamentation, lies
  Murmuring responses to the dashing surf?
In moody sadness, on the giddy brink,
  I see him more with envy than with fear;
He has no nice felicities that shrink
  From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,
He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.

(1783)

POEMS: "Poems Of There's No Tomorrow"

Poems Of There's No Tomorrow

                                              These words say this
                                                  and these words don't.

                                                  Louis C.K.

I.

No it's hell and it seems

the guitar is warped the effort

reaches a point I don't care anymore

do the work write like a motherfucker

it pans out there will be a harbour

only not the one I steered for

no there will be strange music

waiting between a promise and a pity
and do I believe that I'll be joyful
monkeys dancing on the pier

and a woman wearing a set of eyes

who brings some wild soup to share

the sun like it belonged to no one else

II.

Yes it's a bizarro poem

and hatred for this art

and everybody who does it

makes for heavy reading

after the first thirteen faces

yes there's the itches and scratches

when next week the car crashes

it's totalled and although I'm OK

the poem in the backseat is injured

now bizarro means it's nothing

this poem crawls away from me


III.

Water calligraphy
it's not flowers or light
might be a level head
could be a madman
wishing to debate
the invisible
it disappears as soon
as sense arrives
I walk past smiling
that there was ever joy
how does anyone
write to evaporate
passing readers
see the water see the air
watch the brush
it stays it leaves
the bucket the piss
he moves away
people disperse
he wrote a little

© 2015 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Hardly A Poem"

Hardly A Poem

But I love comics for their timing...
It’s a summer day, you’re lying in bed
Your mother walks in, you’re jerking off
With a magazine, and just as you come
She says something so perfect, so off-hand
What are you doing to that magazine?
Respect. Poets spend years working on
Their material before they can do that.


© 2015 Rob Schackne

MUSIC: Ben E. King, "Stand By Me" (1961)

Well...if the mountains should crumble to the sea there's nothing will catch up with us just as long as you stand by me...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTd2ylacYNU

A Tracy K. Smith Poem

I Don't Miss It


But sometimes I forget where I am,
Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,
Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven't left,
The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall.
Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.
And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is
I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like.
Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe
In May, in seasons that come when called,

It's impossible not to want
To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,
Knowing perfectly well what they know.


(2007)

BOOK COVERS: Gustave Doré (1884) / Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven" (1845)

   Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;
   For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
   Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door—

An Evie Shockley Poem

du bois in ghana

at 93, you determined to pick up and go—
and stay gone. the job nkrumah called you to,
to create, at last, your encyclopedia africana
              (encompassing a continent chipped

like wood beneath an axe, a large enough
diaspora to girdle the globe, and a mere four
thousand years) was either well-deserved
               sinecure or well-earned trust

that your health was as indestructible as
your will. my mind wrestles with possible pictures:
the victorian sensibility, the charcoal wool
              formality of your coats and vests, the trim

of your beard as sharp as the crease of your
collar—how would these du boisian essentials
hold up to sub-saharan heat? would
              your critical faculties wilt in accra’s

urban tropics as i’ve read that westerners’
are wont to do? dr. du bois, i presume
you took the climate in stride, took to it,
              looked out your library’s louvered windows

onto a land you needed
neither to condemn nor conquer,
and let the sun tell you what you already knew:
             this was not a port to pass on.

your 95th birthday photo found you bathed
in white cloth, cane still in hand, sharing a smile
with a head of state who knew your worth—joy
             that this nation’s birth occurred in time

for you to step out of a cold, cold storm
into outstretched arms. would your pan-
african dream have survived a dictatorial
             nkrumah, an nkrumah in exile? you took

the prerogative of age and died without telling,
without knowing. a half-century later, here
in the country where you were born, i look
             into a screen and watch as, near and far, a pan-

demic of violence and abuse staggers the planet.
we seed the world with blood, grow
bleeding, harvest death and the promise
             of more. when i turn bitter, seeing no potential

for escape, i think of the outrages you saw—wars,
lynchings, genocide, mccarthy, communism’s
failure to rise above corrupting power
             any better than capitalism had, the civil rights

movement’s endless struggle—and how
you kept writing and walking, looking
for what you knew was out there. your memory,
             your tireless radiant energy, calls me

to my work, to my feet, insisting
that somewhere on the earth, freedom is
learning to walk, trying not to fall,
             and, somewhere, laboring to be born.

(2015)

POEM: "Deux Trous Rouges au Côté Droit"

Deux Trous Rouges au Côté Droit

                                        Arthur Rimbaud et les milliards d’autres

How long since war first broke out
vexing the moment, the tipping point
deux trous rouges au côté droit
was it ten thousand years before
shouting turned into bombings
deux trous rouges au côté droit
deliberate bloodshed that repeated
walks of anguish for the rest of time
deux trous rouges au côté droit
the real rage of being human
going to the village well for water
deux trous rouges au côté droit
the sudden soldiers of sharp death
and then the ditches filled with rain?

                                                Anzac Day 25/4/15

© 2015 Rob Schackne

POEM: "But You See It, Don't You?"

But You See It, Don't You?

The clouds perfect, reflected

in a pristine watercourse. Sunny

and warm. Interesting breeze off the hills.
They (the old ones) sit outside in the sun.

But every place there is a shop, people

scattering sunflower seeds and waiting

for the next busloads of you and me.
And you wonder, why duplicate beauty

and why do it like that? It was just itself

and minding its own business, like a cat.

No point to anything but its own rest.

But if you can take a photo of something

the people want to look at, it's real money.
(Spirit was moved, it took a real deep breath)

Money that the perfect clouds tried to stop

with intemperate rain. They thunderstruck 

the village, asking for it to listen up and mop.
To no avail. The river grew rubbish. Plants died.

Today, they (the young ones) spend their days
snotting on the steps, or fast asleep. Tomorrow

it's about their phones trying to talk with ghosts.

© 2015 Rob Schackne

A Jiang Hao Poem

The Shape Of The Ocean

Every time you ask about the shape of an ocean
I should bring you two bags of ocean water.
This is ocean's shape, like a pair of eyes,
or the shape of ocean that eyes have seen. 
You touch them, as if wiping away two burning tears, 
as tears are the ocean’s shape, too, the clarity
springing from the same deep soul.
Putting the bags together will not
make the ocean wider. They are still fresh,
as if two non-fish will soon swim out.
You sprinkle the water to the sand of flour,
the bread, also, is the shape of the ocean.
Before you slice it with a sharp sail
it leaves, like a departing boat. The plastic bags
left on the table also have the ocean's shape, flat
with tides retreating from the beaches.
When the real tide goes away
there’s salt left, shaped as the ocean too.
You don't believe? I should bring you a bag
of water and a bag of sand, the shape of ocean.
You affirm, you deny; then you non-affirm,
and non-deny? Go on and try out yourself,
as this is your shape too. But you say
“I’m only the image of myself.”

(2003) Tr. Ming Di and Afaa Weaver (2009)

MUSIC: Grant McLennan, "Haven't I Been A Fool" (1991)

The late great Grant McLennan's perfect pop song. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTZK8MgA5tg

OK. OK. Here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ9096U897k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLaOs9eN710&index=2&list=RDsJ9096U897k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGUxZvuRe9k

A Fanny Howe Poem

A Poem For Ciaran

The stroll from my cell

along the path above the donkeys
past a door open, a door shut
and a strong smell of wood
and cigarettes ends where
music helps white marguerites
cut through the masonry.

Dark for words with a clicking wren
a yellow tit and over the clover a
shovel and a rustle of grain.
He's training calves with shouts and food
to follow him to another field
before the second bell.

Broom loops over the buttercups.
These names
give birth to cones and needles, ferns
with mini-sacs of pollen attached.
It only takes one shot of spittle on green
for my brother to explain the sexual life
of the forest and honeybees.

Simon says he would like to live alone
in a cottage with a garden,
no humans, no obligations. Solitary
I prefer a pod while he likes hives.
We confess we both wear armor
outside our habitats.

Water was our first armor before our skin.
Then came the bristle of sunshine.
And a thickening of blood into oil
or syrup in the lower veins.

I hate the thistledown
covering my prototype now
interior layer cowering at power
or shout, but can laugh
with the one who has sap under
his skin pouring the bucket
the hand is carrying.

Brother, help me find an animal
who will rescue me from
sharp delirium of fear beyond armor
and my friends the birds
by an open window: to be clear
would be wonderful.
A sigh without the ghostly gasps
that accompany a certain voice.
Still I still do desire more
of the kind no one can see or hear.
Not that second, rasping breath of triumph.
Find me instead
more like the breathy Saint Bernard.
But a little dog
A cask of brandy hanging at his neck

(2015)

POEM: "When The Show Is Over"

When The Show Is Over


Special applause for
the sunset on guitar
the nightfall on drums
the after-party on bass
& Orpheus who's done
a runner with our money
thank you all for coming!


© 2015 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Pick A Flower, Any Flower"

Pick A Flower, Any Flower


The farthest star is moving
flowers strangely disappear
dans les champs de l'observation
le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés
it is well that we work the fields
we've looked closely at small things
a little dog with its tongue out
the beggar with her hand out
a sick man with his dick out
no prize for guessing wrong
risk sleeps upon the plains

but if it were finally possible 

I mean lasting relief from pain 

liberation from confusion 

would you actually do it?

© 2014 Rob Schackne

A Jennifer Militello Poem

Ode to Love

Place its toothpicked pit in water, watch the grist
of its insides grow. Witness its populous bloom,

honeycombed with rough. Its cobblestones grip
the heart in its mitt, a closed fist thickened

and gritty as silt. The swamp of the plumb beat
adamant as weeds. The dish of which is salted

by complexities or cries. It is a house in which
we cannot live, the quiver on the arrow

we cannot launch. It grows late over Nevada
as we watch. Strikes its gullies: we grow burnt

as a moth. Mimics a sleep of archives and
the small lies all forget. Mimics all laughter

broken by the time it leaves the mouth.
With its moving parts, its chimes, its gleam,

it muddies our archways, lying low, gives off
noise and steam; its mechanics clear the fence.

It must be wooed. Must be quieted. Hush. It must
be soothed. Has a snag. Has a bleed. A drape.

Flaps awkwardly, at its edges, a heron. At
its center, a wide bottom perfect with fish.

(2015)

A Marianne Moore Poem

He Made This Screen


not of silver nor of coral,

but of weatherbeaten laurel.

Here, he introduced a sea
uniform like tapestry;

here, a fig-tree; there, a face;
there, a dragon circling space—

designating here, a bower;
there, a pointed passion-flower.

(1921)

POEM: "Prologue d'un Conte de Fées"

Prologue d'un Conte de Fées

In that blue corner lies an exception
A pretty brief rose and a brief squirrel
But not just any corner of forgotten dust
Never to be found again, nor just any squirrel
Bushy-tailed, eyes gleaming, chewing nuts

Is this a containment of a natural situation?

Ah, but still more a box than a wrecked bed
Though less than a coffin (though much more)
It’s my old collection of lambent red, I speak
Of those years together, of all the time it took
To reassemble me, and when she saw it.


© 2015 Rob Schackne

An Elaine Feinstein Poem

The Medium


My answer would have to be music

which is always deniable, since in my
silence, which you question, is only a landscape
of water, old trees and a few irresolute
birds. The weather is also inconstant.
Sometimes the light is golden, the leaves unseasonable.
And sometimes the ice is red, and the moon
hangs over it, peeled, like a chinese fruit.
I am sorry not to be more articulate.
When I try, the words turn ugly as rats and
disorder everything, I cannot be quiet,
I want so much to be quiet and loving.
If only you wanted that. My sharpest thoughts
wait like assassins always in the dry wheat. They
chat and grin. Perhaps you should talk to them?

(1972)

POEM: "For The Territory"

For The Territory 

Lights out for the Territory 
one day (you know it's coming)
speaking with snakes as he crosses
the riverbank, and shakes the grass
and watches how the horizon moves

Carries a heavy old pack, a G.I. poncho
impermeable enough, and clothes around
a single book that keeps changing its words
the poetry of the world busy in a storm, cars
passing him by, sometimes the driver honks

Direction suggests itself in wind
the wind is directed by hope, which
could have been indicated by love, if it
hadn’t just started to piss down, if he hadn’t
just seen a bolt of lightning explode a tree

After a while he starts laughing hard
with what has to be a certain divinity, gods
just as wet and cold as he is, the Territory
receding and succeeding till the gray sun rises
and when he rounds the bend you’re waiting.


© 2015 Rob Schackne

painting: Mark Rothko, "Blue, Green and Brown"

MUSIC: Billie Holiday, "God Bless The Child" (1941)

If I'm going to sing like someone else 
then I don't need to sing at all 

Bless the day that you were translated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_1LfT1MvzI

http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/four-iconic-billie-holiday-performances-on-her-100th-birthday.html

MUSIC: Peggy Lee, "Is That All There Is?" (1969)

One look at her publicity photo and you'd think that butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. Then you might study her eyes, her nose, her mouth and her chin. Ignore the illusion. Here the great Peggy Lee interprets a Leiber and Stoller song, "If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing, break out the booze and have a ball..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M

A Frank Stanford Poem

Cotton You Lose in the Field

Some bad whiskey

I drink by myself
just like you
when this wind
blows as it does
in the delta
where a lost hearing aid
can be taken
for a grub worm
when the black constellations
make you swim backwards
in circles of blood
stableboys ruin their hands
for a while
and a man none of us
can do without
breaks his neck
jumping over some hill
chasing the fox
of a half-pint
and a fine-blooded horse
is put out of its misery
even the young sisters
of the boys we run with
we would give our fingers
to touch them again
but this war
seeps back into us
little insecticide
and the white cricket of those days
drags itself off the hook
there are no more fish
there is no more bait
the rivers are formed by the tears of sports fans
we try to pour a trail of salt
as if making a long fuse
with a gunpowder keg
we try to swim away from the gym
like slugs with gills
the girls from the other school
step off the bus
the clouds are weighed in at the gin
there is a pattern to all this
like a weave of a skirt
we all go crazy from looking

(ca. 1975)

POEM: "Over The Mountains, Blow!"

Over The Mountains, Blow!
  
                                              for Philip Levine                                               

                           "Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."
                             from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam


Charlie Parker, Bird, a cautious bird
though he was a man, with a tail of music

It is sixty years away. The updraught here
waiting for more filler, killer of time...

“…they later wrote, all that rising passion
a footnote to others,” wrote Philip Levine

(I wouldn’t feel bad either. A better man than me
walked him up the stairs, pulled off his boots)

That’s the problem. Rise, to hear it magnificent
then come back down, to find you can't play it

Lover Man, where did you go

   high as an Asian goose?

The others bang their pots and pans
to make sure some birds will never land

Certain flights will have nervous captains
and instruments lie at the bottom of the sea

After the Dial recordings and the gigs, Bird 
took his few dollars and didn't fly to NYC

(Probably a more dangerous place to score
but California had sunshine and oranges)

I lay me down, this could be my last one too
I would also have a memory more than a dream

A seagull decides it wanders off the sand
then the road decides it lands in feathers.


© 2015 Rob Schackne