The following poem is technically a gift from my daughter — I wouldn’t have written it had it not been for her. Maybe that sounds a little too sentimental, but it’s true.

When our daughter feeds she cups her mother’s breast like a football.
Like a football because that’s all I know to say when I see her hand
around the breast’s swollen end. I’d like to burn my language away
from male things, would like to say later when I’m holding her, see
this ball, forget this ball. You don’t need to throw a thing,
don’t need to learn the perfect spiral grip, how the index finger should rest
far back, how to throw overhand in a 12-to-6 clock face angle, snap down
with so much action in the elbow the wind in your ear cracks. But I’m made
of meat and leather. I’ve been beaten by my brothers into the grass,
have looked downfield at the blitz of red leaves only to be sandwiched
between brutes. A few face plants, dog shit on your chin and the stuff
of ball fields sticks. Now I’m doing the Heisman pose in the mirror,
baby girl tucked under my arm, my right leg suspended like blue
Shiva Nata-raja, the god who kills and makes the world. I have less
than a season to hold this dance still before my arm grows too short to hold
my daughter, before her legs twitch out of this mirror, before she dances
her own sweet destruction.

[First appeared in Rattle, issue 37, summer 2012]

I’m delighted to post the following three poems (with a very thankful nod toward William Carlos Williams) written by three of my very favorite local (Portland) writers, each of whom I’m happy to know. Their poems came from a prompt in which they chose four words from Williams’ The Red Wheelbarrow, then ran with their own poem from there. Have a read.

RED DEPENDS UPON WATER

so much waits upon
rain

ten thousand pewter
trunks

dry gray barrows of
bark

cinnabar leaves fractured red
wheels

ready and willing to
decay

— B. Campbell Ford

so much depends
upon

a white wheel
rolling

through a white sky
agitating

molecules until atoms breathe out
blue

so much depends
upon

a white wheel
mounding

scattered clouds
glazing

gray undersides
coral-red

so much depends
upon

a white wheel
tearing

through static
wool

freeing whorls of white
rain

loosening skeins of black
thunder

so much depends
upon

a white wheel
spinning

purple-black opaque silk
shielding

our eyes from the
plasma-

maddened Midas
touch

of the white-wheeled
sun

— Pattie Palmer-Baker

WHITE RAIN DEPENDS, WHEEL

the world depends
upon

the wheel turning
steadily

moving the earth
surely

keeping the seas
contained

maintaining mountains’ upright
positions

sending flowing rivers
seaward

always the wheel
turning

earth and sky
singing

all systems dancing
gaily

world radiant in
white

from hot sun
shining

and cool rain
shimmering

wheel keeps turning
turning

— Mary K. Moen

–

Day 10 brings us a poem from Shaindel Beers, “After a Photo of a Chechen Girl on a Train,” from a collection entitled The Children’s War: Poems on Children’s Artwork of War. The poem appears in the most recent issue of Corium Magazine. The photo to which the poem relates is included below.

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEM

Working with images as prompts is a wonderful way to access poetry. Shaindel takes it a few steps further, working specifically with images of children’s art, as they describe their relationship and view of war through drawings, paintings and pictures. In the following poem, the child herself is the image, and the poem communicates the narrative that’s going on behind the girl’s pensive, wondering stare, and the outcomes for which she is being prepared.

After a Photo of a Chechen Girl on a Train

I am four, almost five, and I am beautiful.

I have my red hat, my red coat; I ride

on my mother’s lap. People smile at me.

I make them happy. When my mother looks

at them, they look away. My mother has

brown eyes. I have blue. I have only seen

my father in pictures. We have to practice

my mother says. Where are we going?

To visit Grandma in the country.

What will you do there?

Help Grandma gather eggs and be brave

even if the hens peck me.

Ride Doishka, the pony. I look out the window

at the wildflowers speeding by.

And you mustn’t cry says mother if we get there

and there is no Grandma, no pony.

**

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.

**

The following piece is in response to Read Write Poem’s prompt #90 – an image of a street performer balancing a flaming star. Rather than accessing the scene, making my way down that street or even turning into the performer, I waited for the picture to lead me to a title, via the first words it prompted. Those words were “laser light show”.

LASER LIGHT


Smith decided we should drive to DC for the weekend light show.
It had been ten-years since he, Patrick and I
were there together. A reunion of sorts.

Patrick lived in Arlington. We called on the way.
He told us to leave him alone. He had Reserves next weekend.
He wanted to take it easy. By the time
we showed at his door he couldn’t do anything
but offer up his couch and spare cot.

Smith brought acid. He didn’t tell us about the acid until
we were already half-drunk from a few hours
at a Tiki bar along the Potomac drinking Mexican beer.

None of us needed acid at this point in our lives. Patrick
had done two tours in Iraq. Smith spent three-years
in prison. I was an absent father of two children
with different last names.

But we were all feeling good with limes in our beer, fireworks
going off for some nondenominational reason,
together in the nation’s capital remembering the world of 1999

when ours lives went by in a fury of jokes about the president
and thoughts about the end of the world.

Now we were three old lumps surrounded by a table of empties.
Patrick with his razorblade haircut, Smith who smoked
like he was trying to burn himself inside out, me
with the spare tire around my waste that wore like a retread.

We decided to walk through the Capital on our way to the show.
Smith wanted to go see Lincoln. Patrick said we couldn’t.
Jefferson then, the Washington Monument. Patrick said
none of that mattered now, it wasn’t on the way.
We passed all the lights and strange glows in the periphery,
statues kept awake under security and patriotic flares.

Two-hours with the acid in our system, Smith said lasers
were already teeming in his head. Patrick crouched behind things,
regretted the whole night, regretted whole other nights
that didn’t include us. Whole mornings and days too. A whole year
and one whole long episode that was so classified
the hallucinations had a hard time reaching it.

I hadn’t planned on being the smart one, rarely was,
but got us to the field and our seats. We blended in
like we were anyone else, just normal people who’d never
killed anyone or beaten someone to near death
with a bar of soap, had never knocked up
an old friend’s girlfriend then another, never
had to decide which one to send checks to.

Just normal guys riding out a strong trip waiting for the lights
to take our minds off the fact our minds were gone.
People nodded at us like they knew. Tapped their noses
because they saw our eyes and identified.

They couldn’t understand. Our ghosts were our own.
It didn’t matter if one of theirs chased them up a tree.
We were stuck with ours, so far from our skulls
that the only words any of us could mouth
where things like never again and can’t come down.

But there’s that point, like when the Space Shuttle goes up,
where you’re not sure if it’ll break earth’s glass face
and get out toward the moon. Right as the boosters
jump off and the ship’s all alone, just its crew
with rations and the one bathroom they share,
the bird edges a straight line against the sky
and is gone –

That’s where we were when the music fired on. All the world
except for cigarette tips got dark. Then lights zoomed to life
in a panoramic grid, made water out of thin air.
Behind the sudden brightness and noise,
the faintest cry of crickets set the universe soft.

–

This poem’s been vexing me since May 13, 2002, when I pulled an article out of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with the same title. I can’t find the article now – it’s in a journal somewhere. And my attempts to find the story online yielded the this.

This latest approach is fairly simple: a dead couple having an argument.


COUPLE EMBRACE IN TRAIN’S PATH


There we are. See, a hand, a lip, one thousand bones
scattered the moment we squeezed shut our eyes.

You’d like to head back? Fine. Go ahead. Seep
into your sister’s dream while she sleeps in your bed.
Visit my father’s mourning couch, the remote like a crest
in his lap.

I won’t be at the funeral. They can bury us however they want.
I’d rather not float close to the ground, buzz someone’s leg,
have them think I’m there.

The moral? There is none, just the tracks that led us here.
Kids-gone-bad type PSAs playing in a loop
against dim afternoon health class light. A film

in the Say No to Drugs series, still-shots from prom,
my hand around the mark in your arm you wanted to hide.

We were never good kids. Like anyone else
in that shit town we finally left. There was never enough
to keep us from the junk under Jones Bridge.

You’re the one who talked about hopping a train, riding
one long ride west. You said you didn’t care
where we got. Just that we got. I simply said

there was no use getting anywhere. We’d still be stuck
in these frames. And you agreed.

Let’s break the speed of light tonight. See what it’s like
drifting into stars. Find a planet with an opposite pull.
I told you I’d give you all of this. Why so afraid?

Who’s John Beecher? As best as I can figure, he’s an abolitionistic poet of early-to-mid 20th century working class folk. His work captures the soul and struggle of coal mines, mills, cotton fields – anywhere people happened to be working for next to nothing. He’s a member of the same family that produced Harriet Beecher Stowe, and was an activist, writer, and journalist straight up to his death in 1980.

I found an old beaten hard-bound copy of Report to the Stockholders & Other Poems in Powell’s. I’d never heard his name before, and was taken by the simple, yellowed dust jacket, the collection’s title, and the William Carlos Williams quote on the back. It was just sitting there lost in the Bs with a $5.00 tag on it and a note inside the cover from the book’s previous, and possibly first owner, which reads as follows:

“I enjoy sharing
my books as
I do my friends,
asking only that
you treat them well
and see them
safely home.”

The name on the tag is Elizabeth Sale of Stark Street in Portland. I have no idea if Elizabeth is still in Portland or still amongst the living for that matter. Nor do I know how what used to be her book wound up at Powell’s. Obviously, I’m guessing she or an heir sold it – and I can’t say why I get the feeling Elizabeth Sale has passed on, I just do.

So someone, possibly Elizabeth, possibly someone else, sold this fine collection – original copyright of 1962, the actual book is the third printing by Red Mountains Editions, 1971 – got a dollar or two for it, or else simply donated it, and now it was in my hands. It was the perfect confluence of a few events: I had a gift card, it was a beautiful day, and the first poem I read, “Report to the Stockholders”, spoke to me and seemed to be speaking to and about our times. Amazing when a piece written half a century ago does that, but I suppose all writing should have staying power and continue to resonate years and decades later, not only so it makes sense when you lay it out over the period it in which it was written, but when you stretch it out over any period of time.

And with all that, I’d like to share a poem from the collection:

ALTOGETHER SINGING

Dream of people altogether singing
each singing his way to self
to realms on realms within
all singing their way on out of self
singing through to unity
kindling into flame of common purpose from the
      altogether singing

such singing once I heard
where black children sang the chants of work in slavery
of hope for life at last and justice beyond the spaded
      unmarked grave
the platform dignitaries
of master race stooping for the occasion
were suddenly shamed and shaken
by these fierce and singing children
chanting out their stormy hunger
for freeborn rights
still wickedly denied

again once
in packed and stifling union hall
where miners gathered and their womenfolk
I heard such singing
while outside in the listening street
men stood uneasy and shivering beneath their heavy
      uniforms
more firmly gripped their guns
though unarmed were the singers
save for the weapon of song
and once again
where followers of the ripening crops
along the hot relentless valley hemmed by cool mirage
      of high Sierras
square danced with riotous feet
outstamping fiddlesqueak and banjo’s tinny jingle
there came a quiet
and from the quiet
burst altogether singing
yearning back to lands whence these were driven
the known and homely acres
then lusting forward to the richness of unending rows
      and vines and groves
the treasure tended only
but some day to be taken and be rightly used
the prophecy sang forth

we can’t run up
to the old lady at the bus,
grasp her hand, but can
watch our way into her, peel
her clothes to expose
young flesh, see
how eyes flick
to a child she recalls
dead in his crib. take
the seat with her, know
her list, the friend
and meat she picks,
how she hates the cold,
is used to rain and fine
slow rides.

Some Nights comes from a poem called Sleeping Brainwaves, which was something I worked on a few years ago to help make sense of the occasional pre-dream, non-English chatter that would “play” in my head while I was trying to fall asleep. It wasn’t every night, but there was a spell where it happened more often than I would have liked. The only “rational” explanation I could come up with was that our brains are transmitters, each picking up distinct signals across timezones, meridians, continents, etc. Different episodes would tune in and out; eventually I’d latch onto one and drift straight into a dream. I decided to return to Sleeping Brainwaves after Courtney found the the first version while she was setting up her new home office. Neither feels done to me.

Some Nights

Some nights, static fuzz in my head
buzzes like shortwave,
nonstop Spanish talk,
Russians argue drunk,
a Latin priest at mass.

How these dregs of dream arrive
I can’t say, only soon
sounds form a tunnel
back to my father
dressing for work.

He explains how the knot in his tie
lines up with buttons
from collar to belt
where the buckle shines
for whomever signs off

on the raise due two years now
for looking sharp,
always punctual, quick -
a gift of sleep
he says some nights

while others
he’s as washed out as me,
dresses under too bright a light,
wonders back to something
he heard but didn’t catch.

Sleeping Brainwaves

I hear voices of old loves
at night, friends
some dead, family the same.

Ghosts that walk me over
to sleep, talk
from behind ears.
They open doors into dreams,
guide me to the bottom

as my own voice rushes past,
muffled in the din of the rest,
off to haunt friends
far off,

our brains
twisting at their stems,
affairs our bodies
never know.

Bars and breaks
are most common. A fork
at midpoint.
Everyone has chains.

Like poor Celia,
who fell off her bike
from a stone or glass
in front of my house,
hard to tell
how she wailed
like she’d been shot,
and her words between tears
in a slanted English
for the neighbors
to wonder
what happened
to the girl
splayed on my walk,
where was her mother
when this was going on,
why was that gringo
putting ice on her arm,
telling her
in a made-up language-
It’s OK,
the world’s OK,
there’s nothing to fear,
just a small scrape,
some blood,
you’ll be fine
for school tomorrow.
Run home now, but slow -
there are more falls
to come. I know.