(Poem #153)Undelivered Mail Dear Daughter, Your father and I wish to commend you on the wisdom of your choices and the flawless conduct of your life Dear Poet! Where is the full-length manuscript you promised us? Your check is waiting The presses are ready and the bookstores are clamoring for delivery Darling, This convention is tedious beyond belief: the hotel is swarming with disgustingly overexposed women far too young to have dignity or any minds at all Dear Patient: The results of your blood tests reveal that your problem stems from a diet dangerously low in pizza and chocolate Dear Mom, You were right about everything and I was an idiot not to listen |
Undelivered Mail -- Rhina P. Espaillat
Unharvested -- Robert Frost
(Poem #152)Unharvested A scent of ripeness from over a wall. And come to leave the routine road And look for what had made me stall, There sure enough was an apple tree That had eased itself of its summer load, And of all but its trivial foliage free, Now breathed as light as a lady's fan. For there had been an apple fall As complete as the apple had given man. The ground was one circle of solid red. May something go always unharvested! May much stay out of our stated plan, Apples or something forgotten and left, So smelling their sweetness would be no theft. |
We Should Talk about This Problem -- Hafiz
(Poem #151)We Should Talk about This Problem There is a Beautiful Creature Living in a hole you have dug. So at night I set fruit and grains And little pots of wine and milk Beside your soft earthen mounds, And I often sing. But still, my dear, You do not come out. I have fallen in love with Someone Who hides inside you. We should talk about this problem--- Otherwise, I will never leave you alone. |
The Rites of Manhood -- Alden Nowlan
(Poem #150)The Rites of Manhood It's snowing hard enough that the taxis aren't running. I'm walking home, my night's work finished, long after midnight, with the whole city to myself, when across the street I see a very young American sailor standing over a girl who's kneeling on the sidewalk and refuses to get up although he's yelling at her to tell him where she lives so he can take her there before they both freeze. The pair of them are drunk and my guess is he picked her up in a bar and later they got separated from his buddies and at first it was great fun to play at being an old salt at liberty in a port full of women with hinges on their heels, but by now he wants only to find a solution to the infinitely complex problem of what to do about her before he falls into the hands of the police or the shore patrol -- and what keeps this from being squalid is what's happening to him inside: if there were other sailors here it would be possible for him to abandon her where she is and joke about it later, but he's alone and the guilt can't be divided into small forgettable pieces; he's finding out what it means to be a man and how different it is from the way that only hours ago he imagined it. |
Self-Improvement -- Tony Hoagland
(Poem #149)Self-Improvement Just before she flew off like a swan to her wealthy parents' summer home, Bruce's college girlfriend asked him to improve his expertise at oral sex, and offered him some technical advice: Use nothing but his tonguetip to flick the light switch in his room on and off a hundred times a day until he grew fluent at the nuances of force and latitude. Imagine him at practice every evening, more inspired than he ever was at algebra, beads of sweat sprouting on his brow, thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye, the quadratic equation of her climax yield to the logic of his simple math. Maybe he unscrewed the bulb from his apartment ceiling so that passersby would not believe a giant firefly was pulsing its electric abdomen in 13 B. Maybe, as he stood two inches from the wall, in darkness, fogging the old plaster with his breath, he visualized the future as a mansion standing on the shore that he was rowing to with his tongue's exhausted oar. Of course, the girlfriend dumped him: met someone, après-ski, who, using nothing but his nose could identify the vintage of a Cabernet. Sometimes we are asked to get good at something we have no talent for, or we excel at something we will never have the opportunity to prove. Often we ask ourselves to make absolute sense out of what just happens, and in this way, what we are practicing is suffering, which everybody practices, but strangely few of us grow graceful in. The climaxes of suffering are complex, costly, beautiful, but secret. Bruce never played the light switch again. So the avenues we walk down, full of bodies wearing faces, are full of hidden talent: enough to make pianos moan, sidewalks split, streetlights deliriously flicker. |
Some More Light Verse -- Wendy Cope
(Poem #148)Some More Light Verse You have to try. You see the shrink. You learn a lot. You read. You think. You struggle to improve your looks. You meet some men. You write some books. You eat good food. You give up junk. You do not smoke. You don't get drunk. You take up yoga, walk and swim. And nothing works. The outlook's grim. You don't know what to do. You cry. You're running out of things to try. You blow your nose. You see the shrink. You walk. You give up food and drink. You fall in love. You make a plan. You struggle to improve your man. And nothing works. The outlook's grim. You go to yoga, cry and swim. You eat and drink. You give up looks. You struggle to improve your books. You cannot see the point. You sigh. You do not smoke. You have to try. |