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 26 brings us Portland-area poet Celeste Thompson, with a poem entitled “Looking for Whales.”

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEM

After a day spent searching, the poem’s narrator settles back into evening only to spot what may or may not be a whale. It’s a question of faith, and Celeste brings us to the brink quite naturally.

Looking for Whales

On the troller Mr. Max, green swells
slap-fling us airborne for a split second.
Salt spray mists our lips, our hair,
and we grip the rails smiling,
searching. I scan the horizon for hours,
looking for the telltale spray
from the Gray Whale cow
and calf seen swimming in the area,
but we see nothing.
Later in our hotel room you ask for silence
while the cello plays Adagio in G Minor.
This is my favorite part.
Just then I look outside the window and see a spray,
or is it the surf hitting a rock?
I feel the warm thrill
of believing in something I can’t see below the surface.

**
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 16 brings us two poems from Paulann Petersen, “Traveler,” and “Basin,” both from her collection Kindle (© 2008, Mountains and Rivers Press).

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEMS

Paulann’s work can absolutely envelop a reader, and set them floating in whatever jet stream a particular poem provides. In both “Traveler” and “Basin,” we find ourselves in a place of new beginnings, not yet certain of our footing, and still coming to terms with the terrain. Yet we go forward with a sense of safety and familiarity, as if remembering a previous pass through.

Traveler


Cast ashore
like some fleck of wood
brought here from afar
by the sea,

you reel — stunned
to breathe this reek of
strange urine, strange perfume
thick in saffron heat.

Here you are, foreign one,
familiar with only
the moon and stars,
a cloud-scraped sky,

the lidless eye of sun.
Take heart: only what floats
could be carried
as far as you’ve come.

**

Basin

On a walk, your face catches
some of the rain — a bit
of river, mill pond, lake
coming around, slanted down.
Caught on your tongue,
raindrops taste sweet,
an ocean in its mild disguise.

What you gather into yourself
comes from as far away
as the whole world’s girth,
from as close as what you
can reach. Your upturned hands
could cup to hold part of it—
carried with you: this earth’s
steady recompense.

**

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 nine brings us two poems from David Biespiel, “The Ex Lovers Close Down the Hawthorne Boulevard Bars on the 1000th Night of the War,” and “Mississippi God Damn,” both from his latest collection, The Book of Men and Women (© 2009, University of Washington Press). “Mississippi God Damn” previously appeared in Poetry.

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEMS

The Book of Men and Women hinges on the power, frailties, musings and failings of relationships, whether man’s relationship with himself, the comings and goings of a couple, or how we relate with the infinite. The fight-or-flight mentality of a given situation — the tug and push between people and energies — is on display in “The Ex-Lovers,” and the poem’s cadence and music balances against the actors’ wanderings. Meanwhile, “Mississippi God Damn” reads like the quick whip of heartbreak and lost chance as told by a drifter who takes off through a series of back pages.

The Ex Lovers Close Down the Hawthorne Boulevard Bars on the 1000th Night of the War

In this city of puddles they smirk and roam, boast and weep. Their

    gobbledy-gook is as good as code,

Their names retrofitted with fear, their condition all headache.

There are parables for this behavior, a proper blab, and none more

      rapacious, none more true

Than the teary king, his picture hanging from the billboards and

      bridges. The teary king,

Divine, jacked-off, peevish, unharmed, like a hideous garden heavy

      with lavender.

Most nights they’re livid. They’re lifters. They pilfer and dance with

      stern faces, cagey

With their suckled scat, unshaken by the drill, until the cask goes

      bottoms-up.

That’s when they go starkly through the streets and play their dark

      bodies like cards

And frighten themselves — he with his mopey joy, she with her long

      braids,

Their lappets dragging in the gutters, as they dart in the alleys like

      botched and dreamy punks.

–


Mississippi God Damn

Here in this strumming light which the generations can’t downshift

      out of,

And with the land gushing its courtesies of iron, and the shallow

      mercies

Caustic or strangely gussied up like dogs with dark collars, I lose

      my rest.

And what druthers I had are just trouble now, unconditional, all

      in the air.

What’s got me upset are the dead. They go too slow. They’re

Just plain rotten — even a beating heart hardly tingles.

The crimes, the land, the lost second sight, the prayers—

None of these are picking the cotton out of the lies.

And no banter between the roots and the tombs.

And no thoughts boycotting the feelings. The old rooms,

The shadow towns, the rebel yelling, the Confederate daughters,

And the themes of homesteads get hushed in the months-long heat.

I’ve gotten too damn lazy to pluck a duplicate heart,

Unearth a body, a song, an I-just-don’t-know-what kind of fly.

That’s just the trouble — the genie’s not gentle, the stomach

Can’t stomach the risk of being right, good, unknown, me.

And if I race to the dry river where the bodies are pushing through,

The bones peering like children from behind a curtain of dirt, then

      who

Shall judge the living? And if that’s a test what frown is needed,

What game face does everybody know to put on? What hoof? What

      blood?

**

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 seven brings us Alison Apotheker, with a poem entitled “At One and a Half, Charlotte Wanders Off at a Concert on Kruger’s Farm,” from her first full-length collection, Slim Margin (© 2008, Word Press). The poem previously appeared in Oregon Literary Review.

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEM

There’s nothing fast about this poem, nor should there be. The narrative is tied to the anxiety of suddenly discovering your child is missing in an open public setting. Whether a minute or an hour passes before the eventual outcome, Alison piles tension upon tension as the narrator’s mind wanders from the unfortunate situation to shallow days to come. There’s a downright suffocation and out-of-breath quality that takes us deeper and deeper into worry, regret, and eventual release.

At One and a Half, Charlotte Wanders Off at a Concert on Kruger’s Farm


After a minute has passed
and she is nowhere
among the blankets snapped
and settled upon by picnickers
busy spreading hummus on their pitas
and humming along
to the off-key blonde up front,
This is how the story begins
is what you think.

That you can be aware of this
is how you don’t turn inside
out from worry, your heart
scarcely corralled against
all the endings you’ve ever heard,
and politely stop the band
and describe the blue dress,
the bare feet, which must be
chilly now that the sun
has dropped, and then you run

toward the crop sprinklers arching
across the sky like it’s a premiere,
the rows of tomatoes,
a red carpet you stumble along
with grass in your hair.
The crickets whir in your ears
like the clicking tongues of mothers.

There to the dusk surfaces
what you’ve believed from the day
your children left the dark pond
for land: they will lose their shoes,
their soles will blister.
They will wander without
allegiance, take up residence
on another woman’s quilt—
she will wash their cheeks, feed them fish.

You will be left to scour the groves
of honey apple trees and roadside gullies.
Black specks spin hurly-burly
before your eyes. Clouds speed by.
Your days, you understand,
will become as shallow
and unyielding as a sandwich bag.

Now a woman is flagging you down
from across the field. Your daughter
hasn’t realized she’s lost.
She’s pulling dandelions
and blowing their white wishes
into the breeze.

There they go, up, up, up,
struck dumb at the sheer luck of it.

**

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 six brings us Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic, with a poem entitled “Algorithm.”

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEM

Is there an effective method for carrying on through life? A finite sequence of instructions we can use to process and calculate our many fields? I’m not sure, and neither is Sage, though she gives us a wonderful way to chew on the topic with the following poem that lifts off the page (and screen, for that matter), takes flight in an instant, then sends us inward contemplating the bird “who stopped trying.”

Algorithm


Gravity borrows her name
from the bird who stopped trying.
He said the poem was a hinge,
that a bird fell into her womb
from the well. There is no law
that can convince me
otherwise. Call in
the scientists if you must
and name their theories
after themselves.
Our entire lives, after all,
are comprised of the world
looking back at us from beyond
our reach and saying this
is who you are.
Names the place markers
of what was last believed possible.
The dead tree leaps
across the water,
free of root.
I’m building up a tolerance
for the absence of proof.
Maybe there is some
straight line somewhere
confining us to the literal, but I
saw the bird’s fear as something
useful, her blindness a kind
of guidance.

**

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.

**

Because she’ll ask. She’ll want to know
if the team won. Not that she knows
the difference, but she knows
you want her to ask, and even if
you don’t want her to ask,
you expect she’ll ask because you expect
she expects you to expect her to ask.

So she asks. Did they win. Maybe she knows
by the look in your eyes, but if you’re home alone
listening, not watching, but listening
the way no one listens anymore, and if
you’ve been crying because baseball
sometimes makes you cry – if you’ve been crying
then she might have no idea
whether they’ve won or lost, because crying
goes both ways with baseball – if she sees
you’ve been crying she’ll certainly ask,
after she asks “What’s wrong?”, because
her first thought will be something’s wrong,
he’s on the couch crying, the radio is off,
the dog is snoring and he’s crying in the corner
of the couch, his drink is empty, just the bottom
of bourbon-yellow ice, and his eyes are red.

So she asks, “What’s wrong,” and you say,
“The game, that’s all.” You shake your head
and she shakes hers. “I’m sorry.” But you say,
“Oh no, it’s OK, they won.” “They did?” “Yes.”

“How?” She’ll ask how and you’ll tell her
as she buzzes through the living room
into her closet to strip from her pants and top,
a quick dance into house clothes, the pre-sleep wardrobe
of fleece on top of fleece for the Northwest’s fall.

“Well,” you say – you chink the ice around
in your glass and suck what’s left.

“They were down, you see, down by two,
then by one. They hung around. And in the ninth,
the big closer out for a save, he walks a guy,
hits another, the next guy pops out – there are
two outs now, see, and the leadoff guy…well,
that’s not important. A little guy – later, after the hit
it’ll be all set up for David and Goliath stuff.
But for the time, the little guy, before he turned
into David, took an oh-one pitch to the gap
in right. Both runners dashed home. That’s what
I imagine, at least, a dash – there are no dashes
on radio. Just swings and pops and the announcer
going crazy. All the dirt and dust gets swallowed
in the soft static. And you’re left with the win,
which is enough to make you cry, not because
you missed a thing, but because you sat and listened,
you never saw it coming and you knew all along.”


–

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.

–

My good friend Ryan Mayers sent me a scorecard that I kept when he, Donnie Sabs and I took in a Cubs game a couple of seasons ago. My scorecards are usually a mess, and this was no different – a mix of hieroglyphs, scribbles and meaningless notes that only I could understand. Reading one from two-years ago was a particularly entertaining exercise, and it gave life to the following poem.

SCORECARD


The psychic in the bleachers calls a leadoff homerun
because of the wind and the hitter’s hot streak.
She twinkles her nose like a cartoon witch
and spooks her friends. In the second, a man
with a red foam finger misses the mustard on his chin.
Clouds look like dolphins in the third. A kid points this out
to his father walking back from the john. In the fourth,
fans wave the runner home on a two-out hit.
He’s out by a foot. It’s our fault when the manager gets tossed.
A foul pop in the fifth becomes a struggle for turf.
Flying popcorn. An elbow to the eye. In the sixth,
we anticipate the ritual of the mound trot,
the pitching change. When last call
and the seventh-inning stretch collide, my friend recalls
what Ken Burns said – that Jesus died in the on deck circle.
The sun ducks away long enough in the eighth to lose ourselves
in the slow loft of the wrong team’s deep fly. That’s when
dolphin clouds turn into whales, the sky opens with a quick
sad rain. The last rally fades in the ninth.
The ladies one row ahead cheer for their boys
like Little League moms. All claps and first names.