stays for a long time on each cornstalk

From today's post at The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

 

Autumn Waiting

by Tom Hennen

Cold wind.
The day is waiting for winter
Without a sound.
Everything is waiting—
Broken-down cars in the dead weeds.
The weeds themselves.
Trees.
Even sunlight
Is in no hurry and stays
For a long time
On each cornstalk.
Blackbirds are silent
And sit in piles.
From a distance
They look like
Something
Spilled on the road.

"Autumn Waiting" by Tom Hennen, from Looking into the Weather. © Westerheim Press, 1983.

I feel really stupid writing this, but I just finished the fifth and final season of The Wire, and I am just flat-out depressed. 

Like I just feel like the world is full of nothing, no hope.

It's fucked up that I feel this after watching television when this kind of shit happens every second in reality, but it's something I feel, I don't know.

his new, expensive shoes

This Morning

 

I wish I had tossed the roses,
rinsed the vase of stench,
soaped and scrubbed it clean.
That kind of end to it.
Not this chitchat
in the waiting room, our son
in the OR, again, being
saved. We too, again,
sitting it out, after years,
the same straight-back chairs.
You seem fragile, he says.
I cannot bear his beard,
his new, expensive shoes.

Barbara Helfgott Hyett

Rift
University of Arkansas Press

Back from SF.  I had a wonderful time, but I miss my mommy and Emmie terribly. 

It's so calming at home, too.  The water, the green. 

And now I won't have a home. 

I'm so excited--I start work on Thursday.  I'm nervous, but I can't wait.

Flew home today, sleepy and dirty.  Need a shower.  Good to see mom, Em.

a good way to fall is with a rope to catch you

I've thought about this, falling in love.

In a Beautiful Country

 

A good way to fall in love
is to turn off the headlights
and drive very fast down dark roads.

Another way to fall in love
is to say they are only mints
and swallow them with a strong drink.

Then it is autumn in the body.
Your hands are cold.
Then it is winter and we are still at war.

The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear
about how we live in a beautiful country.
Snow sifts from the clouds

into your drink. It doesn't matter about the war.
A good way to fall in love
is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,

then down you'll fall through lovely mists
as a body might fall early one morning
from a high window into love. Love,

the broken glass. Love, the scissors
and the water basin. A good way to fall
is with a rope to catch you.

A good way is with something to drink
to help you march forward.
The gold-haired girl says, Don't worry
 
about the armies, says, We live in a time
full of love. You're thinking about this too much.
Slow down. Nothing bad will happen.

Kevin Prufer

Poetry
October 2009

I had nightmares again last night.

Just a few minutes ago I was dreaming that the father's real estate agent wrote me an encrypted email. She called me a twat, said she knew what I was doing.

God, why is this still happening?

though you seldom achieve such grace

Today's post on Verse Daily:

Animal Lover

A horse rises in a balloon
full of writing.

You could ride it yourself
and get no farther than brother,

the animal inside clawing out.
You are an animal

though you seldom achieve
such grace, except in cars.

The animal that directs your dying
Over here! with the wilder cells

bunches in familial nests
very close to I said that.

But birds still fly as birds.
They blue themselves with sky

up-side-down in your iris,
the brain a penguin turning one egg

with its toes in such cold.
When the animals call out:

Human! Human!
you shout back:

I am nude enough.

Copyright © 2009 Terese Svoboda

whatever a moon has always meant

From today's The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor...one of my all-time favorites:

I carry your heart with me

by E. E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)

"'i carry your heart with me (i carry it in'" by e.e. cummings, from Complete Poems 1904-62. © Liveright Publishing, 1994

Happy B-day, Tim O'Brien!

In high school, The Things They Carried was required reading--I absolutely loved it. This is a bit from today's The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

"It's the birthday of Tim O'Brien, (books by this author) born in Austin, Minnesota (1946). His book The Things They Carried (1990) is a series of linked short stories about a group of soldiers in Vietnam, including a soldier named Tim O'Brien. The title story is one of the most anthologized short stories in contemporary American literature. It begins: 'First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.'"