A David Hernandez Poem

At the Post Office


The line is long, processional, glacial,
and the attendant a giant stone, cobalt blue
with flecks of white, I’m not so much
looking at a rock but a slab of night.
The stone asks if anything inside the package
is perishable. When I say no the stone
laughs, muted thunderclap, meaning
everything decays, not just fruit
or cut flowers, but paper, ink, the CD
I burned with music, and my friend
waiting to hear the songs, some little joy
after chemo eroded the tumor. I know flesh
is temporary, and memory a tilting barn
the elements dismantle nail by nail.
I know the stone knows a millennia of rain
and wind will even grind away
his ragged face, and all of this slow erasing
is just a prelude to when the swelling
universe burns out, goes dark, holds
nothing but black holes, the bones of stars
and planets, a vast silence. The stone
is stone-faced. The stone asks how soon
I want the package delivered. As fast
as possible, I say, then start counting the days.


(2011)

An Emily Dickinson Poem

(472)


Except the heaven had come so near,
So seemed to choose my door,
The distance would not haunt me so;
I had not hoped before.

But just to hear the grace depart
I never thought to see,
Afflicts me with a double loss;
’Tis lost, and lost to me.

(ca. 1864)

A Ravi Shankar Poem

Lines On a Skull (Haiku Erasure of Lord Byron's "Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull") Start spirit; behold the skull. A living head loved earth. My bones resign the worm, lips to hold sparkling grape's slimy circle, shape of reptile's food. Where wit shone of shine, when our brains are substitute, like me, with the dead, life's little, our heads sad. Redeemed and wasting clay this chance. Be of use. (2012)

POEM: "Rondelet Aux Apaches"

Rondelet Aux Apaches


Get this thing on
maybe he struggles to keep up
get this thing on
she’s leaning over his table
he feels his future wed to breasts
her mind reaches for big monkey
get this thing on.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Larry Levis Poem

 

Fish
                                    
                                 for Philip Levine


The cop holds me up like a fish;
he feels the huge bones
surrounding my eyes,
and he runs a thumb under them,

lifting my eyelids
as if they were
envelopes filled with the night.
Now he turns

my head back and forth, gently,
until I'm so tame and still
I could be a tiny, plastic
skull left on the

dashboard of a junked car.
By now he's so sure of me
he chews gum,
and drops his flashlight to his side;

he could be cleaning a trout
while the pines rise into the darkness,
though tonight trout
are freezing under bits of stars

under the ice. When he lets me go
I feel numb. I feel like
a fish burned by his touch, and turn
and slip into the cold

night rippling with neons,
and the razor blades
of the poor,
and the torn mouths on posters.

Once, I thought even through this
I could go quietly as a star turning over and over
in the deep truce of its light.

Now, I must
go on repeating the last, filthy
words on the lips
of this shunken head

shining out of its death in the moon—
until trout surface
with their petrified, round eyes,
and the stars begin moving.


(1972)

A Charles Simic Poem

 

Butcher Shop


Sometimes walking late at night
I stop before a closed butcher shop.
There is a single light in the store
Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.

An apron hangs on the hook:
The blood on it smeared into a map
Of the great continents of blood,
The great rivers and oceans of blood.

There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.

There's wooden block where bones are broken,
Scraped clean–a river dried to its bed
Where I am fed,
Where deep in the night I hear a voice.


(1963)

A Horace Poem

Odes BkI:IX Winter

See how Soracte stands glistening with snowfall,
and the labouring woods bend under the weight:
see how the mountain streams are frozen,
cased in the ice by the shuddering cold?

Drive away bitterness, and pile on the logs,
bury the hearthstones, and, with generous heart,
out of the four-year old Sabine jars,
O Thaliarchus, bring on the true wine.

Leave the rest to the gods: when they’ve stilled the winds
that struggle, far away, over raging seas,
you’ll see that neither the cypress trees
nor the old ash will be able to stir.

Don’t ask what tomorrow brings, call them your gain
whatever days Fortune gives, don’t spurn sweet love,
my child, and don’t you be neglectful
of the choir of love, or the dancing feet,

while life is still green, and your white-haired old age
is far away with all its moroseness. Now,
find the Campus again, and the squares,
soft whispers at night, at the hour agreed,

and the pleasing laugh that betrays her, the girl
who’s hiding away in the darkest corner,
and the pledge that’s retrieved from her arm,
or from a lightly resisting finger.


tr. A.S. Kline (2003)

POEM: "3 Dog Senryu"

3 Dog Senryu


One time a monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?"
Joshu answered, "No."
Another time, a monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?"
Joshu answered, "Yes."


The patient trees bow
A stray dog is quizzical
Do we have our souls?

It's barely autumn
Already the bad haiku
Wind and leaves make friends

The patient trees bow
Stray dogs are barking again
Do we not have souls?


© 2011 Rob Schackne

A George Oppen Poem (II)

Ballad


Astrolabes and lexicons
Once in the great houses—

A poor lobsterman

Met by chance
On Swan's Island

Where he was born
We saw the old farmhouse

Propped and leaning on its hilltop
On that island
Where the ferry runs

A poor lobsterman

His teeth were bad

He drove us over that island
In an old car

A well-spoken man

Hardly real
As he knew in those rough fields

Lobster pots and their gear
Smelling of salts

The rocks outlived the classicists
The rocks and the lobstermen's huts

And the sights of the island
The ledges in the rough sea seen from the road

And the harbor
And the post office

Difficult to know what one means
—to be serious and to know what one means—

An island
Has a public quality

His wife in the front seat

In a soft dress
Such as poor women wear

She took it that we came—
I don't know how to say, she said—

Not for anything we did, she said,
Mildly, 'from God'. She said

What I like more than anything
Is to visit other islands...


(1967)

POEM: "Ledge Dark Somewhere"

Ledge Dark Somewhere
                                 
                                       I.M. Charles Bukowski


Maximum power is a river
it flows past wild rocks
something hits my ass   mon dieu

the Chauvet cave paintings
“celebrate the stupidity
of our endurance”   only wait

qu’est-ce que c’est   delinquencies
satisfactions have been reckoned
they look pretty damn small

consider the initiation of art
the Late Stone Age in France
goddamn there were rhinos

far back from the light
rockfall sealed the cave
careful   bear tracks   framed

si ça se peut   not my business
old wines stretch my brain
cat on the sofa   watermelons   summer


© 2012 Rob Schackne

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.


(2010)

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)