Day 28 brings us Oregon poet Ellen Waterston, with a poem entitled “The Artist Feels Small,” from her collection, Between Desert Seasons (© 2008, Wordcraft of Oregon).

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEM

Artists and writers wake up to their unique callings every day, only to wake and wake again to new callings but never quite getting over the trick and difficulty of acknowledging, realizing and honoring the truth. In the following poem, our narrator flings a wide-angle lens out to the world, brings the view back to herself, then goes further inward, trying to capture the moment when this life as a writer began.

The Artist Feels Small

Pin-striped brokers wearing black market gold
watches negotiate timber contracts on Russian
forests over dinner in Prague. Medics in white lab
coats wipe fly eggs from the matted eyes of Somali
children under bed nets. Rail thin models giraffe
the Paris runways after a last drag of a Gitane back-
stage. Latino gangs with pierced tongues howl
at midnight in the empty streets of Albuquerque.
And in New York City exotic queens glue silver
feathers to their skin for the gay pride parade.

And I? I search the trash for words to describe,
pile behind me discarded lines, the refuse, the steaming
heap of redo forcing my plastic lawn chair
to the edge of a road lined with dusty date palms
that leads to San somewhere. A caballero on his skinny,
bare-hoofed mount quick-steps by.

I’ll do what I can to fledge a writer’s life of sorts
but these choices are hard. It started when I was small,
and downstairs heard others’ voices or, forgotten inside
my dark and airless playhouse in the middle of the living
room floor, listened in on their conversation. It started when
I stopped to watch the galloping river from a motionless
shore, listened to its instantaneous hello, good-bye.

**
A Poet a Day is a month-long celebration of poets and poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month. Writers reserve all rights to their work, and all work appears with their permission.

**

Day 27 brings us a poem from Oregon poet Mark Thalman. “Moving Into Night” first appeared in Poetpourri, and later in Verse Daily. The poem also appears in Mark’s full-length collection, Catching the Limit (© 2009, Fairweather Press).


THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEM

As with yesterday’s poem from Celeste Thompson, Mark puts us in the water again. In this case, the reader, along with the narrator, merge with the calm, placid scene of pale stars that dot the lake, and shove off into the coming darkness.

Moving Into Night

After dinner dishes have been washed and put away,
I walk down to the dock.

Clouds hover against snow-capped peaks.
The sun, already below the horizon, turns glaciers pink.

Shadows stretch across the hills
like blankets being drawn up for the night.

Along the distant shore,
one last fisherman trolls for kokanee…

Below my feet, trout meander between pilings
glide over dappled stones.

The moon rises. On the water,
it is shattered by each wave.

With cupped hands, I scoop up a brilliant shard
and wash my face with wet light.

Soon, the wind dies, and the moon is again whole.
Pale stars, floating lanterns, dot the lake.

I untie my boat, shove off,
and lifting the oars, row across the heavens.

**
A Poet a Day is a month-long celebration of poets and poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month. Writers reserve all rights to their work, and all work appears with their permission.

**

Day 23 brings us Brian Turner, with two poems from his second collection, Phantom Noise (© 2010, Alice James Books).

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEMS

In his first full-length collection, Here, Bullet, Brian took us into the world and psychology of 21st century combat, and guided us through a harsh desert landscapes fraught with military, civilians, causalities and hallucinations.

In Phantom Noise, he brings us home to the “clarity of rage” that punctuates our daily lives, and weaves threads between worlds until the “double-headed nails” in a hardware store become “firing pins,” and the opening and shutting of a cash register is the sound of “machine guns being charged.”

The first poem below, “Howl Wind,” comes and goes in an instant, but leaves a sour taste as we watch for the high angle of hell and wonder where the mortar will land. The second, “Insignia,” focuses on an unfortunately familiar war story, and Brian does a wonderful job serving as witness to it.

Howl Wind


                    I see people riding on shrieking horses,
                    steering clouds of sparkbelching fires
                    on their way to flame life out of you
                     —Mahd Al-Aadiyya (4000 BCE)

Launched from its tube, the mortar round
accelerates to the apogee of its flight,
rising fast to what the gunners call
the high angle of hell, the round
suspended over the city lights below,
where any one of us might find ourselves
deep within the very last day of our life,
but wholly unaware of the fact—unaware
that the steel-hard visitations of death
hang from the heavens above,
and if there’s someone we would kiss
good-bye, or a few words we’d rather share
than leave unspoken, then now is the time,
because just as missiles were hurled in fire
from catapults of old, a mortar round
howls a night wind over the city,
and just where it lands
we will see.

**

Insignia

                    One in three female solders will experience
                    sexual assault while serving in the military.

She hides under a deuce n’ half this time—sleeping
on a roll of foam, draped in mosquito netting. Sandflies

hover throughout the night. She sleeps under vehicle exhaust
and heat, dreaming of mortars buried beside her, three stripes

painted on each cold tube, a rocker of yellow hung below.
It’s you she’s dreaming of, Sergeant—she’ll dream of you

for years to come. If she makes it out of this country alive,
which she probably will. You will be the fire and the hovering

breath. Not the sniper. Not the bomber in the streets. You.
So I’m here to ask this one night’s reprieve.

Let her sleep tonight. Let her sleep. Pause a moment
under the gibbous moon. Smoke. The gin your wife sent

from New Jersey, colored mint green with food dye
disguised in a bottle of mouthwash: take a long swig of it.

Take the edge out of your knuckles. Let it blur your vision
into a tremor of lights. The explosions in the distance

are not your own. In these long hours before dawn,
on the banks of the Tigris river, let her sleep.

In her dream, your eyes are pools of rifle oil.
You unsheathe the bayonet from its scabbard

while she waits. On a mattress of sand and foam, there
in the motor pool, she waits to kiss bullets into your mouth.

**

A Poet a Day is a month-long celebration of poets and poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month. Writers reserve all rights to their work, and all work appears with their permission.

**

Day 22 brings us Oregon poet Scot Siegel, with a poem entitled “Autumn Turns Through Stratified Wars.” The poem previously appeared in The New Verse News, October, 2009, and will appear in Scot’s forthcoming collection, Skeleton Says (© 2010, Finishing Line Press).

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEM

Scot starts off with a musing that seems very tied to the moment and place, but by the fourth stanza, we sense that we are about to shoot off elsewhere. Soon all color is gone from the sky, and sounds that a moment ago arrived in a breeze seem to come in a rumble. The poem concludes with a reminder that we are all being summoned to the same end.

Autumn Turns Through Stratified Wars

A few little leaves alight on the sleeper wind
lemon, iron-orange, vermilion
but there’s no dive-swiping gnat-catching tonight

Some songbirds sense the slack-season upon us
stillness readies the river, trees glimmer
and we lean uneasily into the quiet . . .

Three warblers balance on one blackberry cane
not ordinary warblers, yellow-breasted chats
gone silent in the breeze––

There’s no yellow chip; no whistle, caw, nor rattle
just three imperceptible heartbeats screaming
through silver thorns & bramble––

                    *

Is their night not unlike our country?
Somewhere, a raptor hovers, drags her talons
over Arab neighborhoods, while we lie awake . . .

In my wife’s eyes a blue flame flickers
World News, a helicopter turns, delivering
or receiving the dead . . .

We hardly notice midnight passing over
as we tilt and spin on the dreadful wing of a hawk
Who says she loves us?

Crows on our tail, relentless––
I think I hear one say:

          Come home

**
A Poet a Day is a month-long celebration of poets and poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month. Writers reserve all rights to their work, and all work appears with their permission.

**

Day 14 brings us Oregon poet Mary Hope, and her poem, “Equinox.”

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEM

This poem feels like an abstract still-life — a series of tactile images covered in an extra layer of color and drip. Do we linger with the snow, follow the finch, or stay with the blind cat as he gazes into a world “which is now shadow”?

Equinox

And it is done. Snow this morning, Doak Mountain a promise.
A yellow finch topping the cup of snow on the monk pine
and the blind cat Kiki, making his way across the lawn
as slow as a diver. The great bell of his head lifted,
he guides by sound and temperature, his body forever
taking him east, he crosses into the aspen grove, pauses to pat
a rock, walks across three more and then finds the large volcanic
slab, snowless, out of the wind. There he sits, gazing
at the world which is now shadow; how much depth or light
I can only guess. Face into the sun, eyes slits, birds
slowly forgetting he is not statue.

**

A Poet a Day is a month-long celebration of poets and poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month. Writers reserve all rights to their work, and all work appears with their permission.

**

Day 13 brings us two poems from Oregon poet, John Morrison. The first, “Black Bead,” comes from his first full-length collection, Heaven of the Moment (© 2007, Fairweather Books); the second, “Your Dark,” is a new piece he graciously shared with us.

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEMS

“Black Bead,” like Bruce Weigl’s poem, “Eddy,” takes us through the unspoken tenderness that exists between men. Here the narrator recaps an instance where his father relies on the tools he knows in order to relieve his son’s pain. “Your Dark,” meanwhile, harkens back to Peter Sears’ poem from Day 1, “We Can Help Each Other.” John addresses the questions posed in the other poem, and pushes readers forward into new considerations.

Black Bead


Hunched like a grey bear over
my ten-year-old hand, my father spun
in his knobby fingers a drill bit
thin as a toothpick on my bruised thumbnail.

In the solitary game where I slammed
grey rock against grey rock, the rock
all our dry acre had in abundance,
I missed on my way to open the color

inside: sunrise, ochre, rust, willow green.
Under my thumb’s clear, fine shell
a thundercloud appeared in the pink sky,
a cloud that brooded, brooded but wouldn’t

rain, only throbbed darker. He never
offered what he knew, not the science
of winds, not constellations, not the curve
of the earth, but he would go quiet, lean in,

and try to fix anything. Clumsy about gentleness,
silver flashed in his hand. He whispered,
How brave you are, as he churned, then coaxed
out the pinhole a first bead of black blood.

**

Your Dark

     with a nod to Peter Sears

Is your dark never silky

like old port or soft as the underside

of a calendula petal with your eyes

closed, but is your dark more like a knobby

patch of summer tar mounded in

a pothole, the same tar the dumb

kid would twist off in a wad

to chew like Black Jack gum? I mean,

without any of the warm light

in that memory, just the oily,

shiny, black and sticky, a syrup

down your throat and nose, in ears

and eyes until you’re full

or swallowed or is your dark

more like mine, a black gravel

with a few, flickering grey

pebbles sifted in, all in

motion like a slow storm, a fine

emery cloth on your skin, a grim

spa, rejuvenating, yes, but no doubt

grinding me down.

**

A Poet a Day is a month-long celebration of poets and poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month. Writers reserve all rights to their work, and all work appears with their permission.

**

Day 12 brings us Pamela Steele, and her poem, “To the Woman Single Again,” from the collection Paper Bird.

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEM

Pamela leads us into the poem with a touch of dry, “Why me?” humor that punctuates a seemingly exhausting period of inquiry, bewilderment and self-doubt. From there, the poem takes us through a moment of reprieve and nighttime contemplation, then guides us into a morning filled with images, colors, and a sense of moving on.

To the Woman Single Again

Yesterday in the public library, a man stopped by the table
where you were reading Carolyn Forche, leaned down
and mumbled something with rubber band lips that you
asked him to repeat. A ribbon of drool fell from his mouth
as he said, Are you a boy or a girl? In your best library voice,
you whispered Girl, and he sidled away, leaving you distracted
and remembering how you complained to a friend about lesbians
in Kroger who stare at you and your butch hair
until she finally said, For God’s sake, put on some makeup
and earrings! Later, when you took off your coat in the diner,
a car salesman at the counter stared at your wild
breasts and you thought, I just can’t win.

Likely, there are nights when you fear you will always be alone,
wondering how you will manage the back stairs when you are old.
Tonight, put on some Dylan, maybe “Blood on the Tracks,” and pace
from the couch to the window and back again. Feel rough wood
beneath your feet. Forget about your hair and your father
who joked he’d need a whole wall in the family room
just for pictures of your husbands. Resist applying the Buddhist
principle of only so many breaths in a lifetime
to say, orgasms or the number of photos in which you are smiling.

In the morning, put on your coat, walk through the back door
and down the stairs. Follow the alley to the street where
a row of Victorians stand in scoured yards.
See past the littered hedges and ruined Christmas wreaths.
Find the purple crocuses floating on the dry grass.
Breathe. Wait. Breathe.

**

A Poet a Day is a month-long celebration of poets and poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month. Writers reserve all rights to their work, and all work appears with their permission.

**

Day five brings us Henry Hughes, with a poem entitled “Dark Spring” from his first full-length collection, Men Holding Eggs (© 2004, Mammoth Books), winner of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry in 2004.

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEM

Here we fall into the lull of a dark sea while a mix of images and sounds — two midnight crows, rats, starting cars, sharks — hurl away at us. Henry leads us in with an easy, rhyming gait, then tears the moment away in a sudden primal act that leaves us stranded helpless with a mournful, unattainable wish.

Dark Spring

The moon blind over spring tide,
Two midnight crows warm a budding ash
As rats cling and glove to hide
From cars started by a watchman’s flash.
In the Island Sound bladed sharks
Clasp and copulate with rolling rounds—
Twenty minutes joining in the dark.
Few would believe in this, though some must
Have imagined truth beneath the ark.
Only I saw the boy rip the female’s center
And four shark pups uncoil
In mixed blood. If I could just dive
these lights beneath the pier,
I’d drown reason, the last moon of my year.

**

A Poet a Day is a month-long celebration of poets and poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month. Writers reserve all rights to their work, and all work appears with their permission.

**