(Poem #77)The Player Piano I ate pancakes one night in a Pancake House Run by a lady my age. She was gay. When I told her that I came from Pasadena She laughed and said, "I lived in Pasadena When Fatty Arbuckle drove the El Molino bus." I felt that I had met someone from home. No, not Pasadena, Fatty Arbuckle. Who's that? Oh, something that we had in common Like -- like -- the false armistice. Piano rolls. She told me her house was the first Pancake House East of the Mississippi, and I showed her A picture of my grandson. Going home -- Home to the hotel -- I began to hum, "Smile a while, I bid you sad adieu, When the clouds roll back I'll come to you." Let's brush our hair before we go to bed, I say to the old friend who lives in my mirror. I remember how I'd brush my mother's hair Before she bobbed it. How long has it been Since I hit my funnybone? had a scab on my knee? Here are Mother and Father in a photograph, Father's holding me.... They both look so young. I'm so much older than they are. Look at them, Two babies with their baby. I don't blame you, You weren't old enough to know any better; If I could I'd go back, sit down by you both, And sign our true armistice: you weren't to blame. I shut my eyes and there's our living room. The piano's playing something by Chopin, And Mother and Father and their little girl Listen. Look, the keys go down by themselves! I go over, hold my hands out, play I play -- If only, somehow, I had learned to live! The three of us sit watching, as my waltz Plays itself out a half-inch from my fingers. |
The Player Piano -- Randall Jarrell
The Psychiatrist Says She’s Severely Demented -- Bobbi Lurie
(Poem #76)The Psychiatrist Says She’s Severely Demented But she's my mother. She lies in her bed, Hi Sweetie, she says. Hi Mom. Do you know my name? I can't wait for her answer, I'm Bobbi. Oh, so you found me again, she says. Her face and hair have the same gray sheen Like a black and white drawing smudged on the edges. The bedspread is hot pink, lime green. Her eyes, Such a distant blue, indifferent as the sky. I put my hand On her forehead. It is soft, and she resembles my real mother Who I have not spoken to in so many years. I want to talk to her as her eyes close. She is mumbling something, laughing to herself, All the sadness she ever had has fled. And when she opens her eyes again, she stares through me And her eyes well up with tears. And I stand there lost in her incoherence, Which feels almost exactly like love. |
Overheard In An Asylum -- Alfred Kreymborg
(Poem #75)Overheard In An Asylum And here we have another case quite different from the last, another case quite different -- Listen. Baby, drink. The war is over. Mother's breasts are round with milk. Baby, rest. The war is over. Only pigs slop over so. Baby, sleep. The war is over. Daddy's come with a German coin. Baby, dream. The war is over. You'll be a soldier too. Yes, we gave her the doll -- Now there we have another case quite different from -- |
Wild Asters -- Sara Teasdale
(Poem #74)Wild Asters In the spring I asked the daisies If his words were true, And the clever, clear-eyed daisies Always knew. Now the fields are brown and barren, Bitter autumn blows, And of all the stupid asters Not one knows. |
Two Tanka -- Otomo No Yakamochi
(Poem #73)Two Tanka From outside my house, only the faint distant sound of gentle breezes wandering through bamboo leaves in the long evening silence. Late evening finally comes: I unlatch the door and quietly await the one who greets me in my dreams. |
Introduction To Poetry -- Billy Collins
(Poem #72)Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means. |
Men at the Gates -- Gary L. Lark
(Poem #71)Men at the Gates They wait at the gates in flannel shirts and heavy denim pants. They wait for the gates to open, the whistle to blow signaling change of shift. They wait for the mill jobs to come back, with wages that will feed a family, wages to be proud of. They wait in the parking lot where one-stop-shoppers now, twenty-five years later, look through them like ghosts. They wait in a rain of gadgets and plunder, companies from somewhere else picking their pockets trying to sell them everything they don't need at bargain prices. They wait for the world to make sense again, where calluses grow on your hands and the soreness in your back means you're worth a damn. |
The Former Miner Returns from His First Day as a Service Worker (at a McDonald's somewhere in Appalachia) -- Mark Defoe
(Poem #70)The Former Miner Returns from His First Day as a Service Worker (at a McDonald's somewhere in Appalachia) All day he crushed the spongy buns, pawed at The lids of burger boxes and kiddie pacs As if they were chinese puzzles. All day long his hands ticked, ready to latch on Or heave or curl around a tool Heavier than a spatula, All day he rubbed his eyes in the crisp light. All day the blue tile, the polished chrome, said Be nimble, be jolly, be quick. All day he grinned while the public, with bland Or befuddled faces, scowled over his head And mumbled, whispered, snarled, and snapped. All day his coworkers, pink and scrubbed, Prattled and glided and skipped while he, All bulk and balk, rumbled and banged. Near shift's end he daydreamed - of the clang Of rock on steel, the skreel Of a conveyer belt, the rattling whine Of the man-trip, the miner's growl of gears As if gnarled, toothing at the seam. He makes his slow way home, shadow among Roadside shadows, groping back in himself For that deep, sheltering dark. He has never been so tired. His hands have never been so clean. |
A Wreath To The Fish -- Nancy Willard
(Poem #69)A Wreath To The Fish Who is this fish, still wearing its wealth, flat on my drainboard, dead asleep, its suit of mail proof only against the stream? What is it to live in a stream, to dwell forever in a tunnel of cold, never to leave your shining birthsuit, never to spend your inheritance of thin coins? And who is the stream, who lolls all day in an unmade bed, living on nothing but weather, singing, a little mad in the head, opening her apron to shells, carcasses, crabs, eyeglasses, the lines of fisherman begging for news from the interior-oh, who are these lines that link a big sky to a small stream that go down for great things: the cold muscle of the trout, the shinning scrawl of the eel in a difficult passage, hooked-but who is this hook, this cunning and faithful fanatic who will not let go but holds the false bait and the true worm alike and tears the fish, yet gives it up to the basket in which it will ride to the kitchen of someone important, perhaps the Pope who rejoices that his cook has found such a fish and blesses it and eats it and rises, saying, "Children, what is it to live in the stream, day after day, and come at last to the table, transfigured with spices and herbs, a little martyr, a little miracle; children, children, who is this fish?" |