Your Sunday Poem Lotto

Once again, It's Pick A Poem Day.  Click on the link --   http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/080.html  --  and type in 027 in the little box.  That's  my pick for the day:  "Poetry" by Don Paterson, from "The White Lie, New and Selected Poetry, 2001," Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minn.

But this is also your poem day, so type in another number, any number and see what comes up.  That may turn out to be your poem for the day. If not, try another.  The website was set up with the help of Billy Collins, when he was our national Poet Laureate.  It's a treasure trove. And don't forget, Billy's got a new book of poetry out:  "Aimless Love," Random House. 

Your Sunday Poem

Short and sweet, this by Bill Knott, from "180 More, Extraordinary Poems for Every Day," selected by Billy Collins.

Poem

Fingerprints look like ripples
because time keeps dropping
another stone into our palm.

Your Sunday Poem

This one stopped me cold.  Never thought of that before.  And he's right. By Miller Williams from "Poetry 180, A Turning Back to Poetry," edited by Billy Collins.

Animals

I think the death of domestic animals
marks the sea changes in our lives.
Think how things were, when things were different.
There was an animal then, a dog or a cat,
not the one you have now, another one.
Think when things were different before that.
There was another one then.  You had almost forgotten.

Your Sunday Poem

Read a wonderful fragment in the Feb. 11 & 18th New Yorker, a review of an exhibit of surrealist drawings at the Morgan Library.  Peter Schjeldahl attributed to T.S. Eliot the comment that poetry is "a raid on the inarticulate," an extraordinarily apt observation.  Last week's poem had a delightful twist ending.  This poem has such an ending too, but this one is a good example why some poems should carry a warning label.  It's by Virginia Hamilton Adair and from "180 More," edited by Billy Collins.

Yea, Though I Walk

Stunted bush
beside the unpaved road
the shepherd often passes here
with his hundred sheep
their hooves churning the soft sand
the lambs bouncing as they follow along.

We walked under the palms
to see the shepherd lead
his traveling company
but they had gone by earlier
the dust had settled.

Under the stunted bush
a cool hollow in the sand
in it a lamb too lame to follow
a lamb with its feet wired together
lifted its little face.

Your Sunday Poem

This by Catherine Doty, from "180 More, Extraordinary Poems for Every Day," selected by Billy Collins. A good example of how poetry can give such unexpected pleasure.

Outside the Mainway Market

Every day, our mother says,
kids die on those goddamed things,
and she nods at the lone yellow horse
with the red vinyl bridle
and four black, shining hooves
like police hat brims.
Not only do we stop our five-part
begging, we walk wide around the beast,
though Mary brushes the coin box
with her sleeve.

Rigid in flight, the great horse's legs
flange out towards us.  Not one of us argues.
We hold onto our mother's coat, cross
several streets, touch the dog we always touch
when we walk home, fingering
his freckled snout.  Then we scream
and run in the yard while supper cooks,
and the sky shudders pale for some seconds
before it darkens, as if in that lavender moment,
three blocks away, a child drops
the reins and gasps as his shoes fly off,
and plumes of smoke rise
from the crown of his hand-knit hat.

Your Sunday Poem

Considering the gun debate raging on outside the doors, this poem by Billy Collins, from his book, "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes," seems apt. This book is available at your local bookstore in paperback, as are most of Collins' works.  Buy a book of poetry today. Make a poet happy.

Another Reason Why I don't 
Keep a Gun in the House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Your Sunday Poem

One of my favorite poets, Billy Collins, from his book "Picnic, Lightning," available in paperback in your local store. Support your favorite poets.  Buy one of their books today.

Looking West

Just beyond the flower garden at the end of the lawn
the curvature of the earth begins,

sloping down from there
over the length of the country

and the smooth surface of the Pacific
before it continues across the convex rice fields of Asia

and, rising, inclines over europe
and the bulging, boat-dotted waters of the
Atlantic,

finally reaching the other side of the house
where it comes up behind a yellow grove of forsythia

near a dilapidated picnic table,
then passes unerringly under the spot

where I am standing, hands in my pockets,
feet planted firmly on the ground.

Your Sunday Poem

For a frosty morning in a time of crazy weather.  For thinking about living in the future we have made with our own busy hands, a catastrophe we are already starting to swim in.  This by Phillis Levin, from "Poetry 180, A Turning Back to Poetry," Selected and edited by Billy Collins.

The Blizzard

Now that the worst is over, they predict
Something messy and difficult, though not
Life-threatening.  Clearly we needed

To stock up on water and candles, making
Tureens of soup and things that keep
When electricity fails and phone lines fall.

Igloos rise on air conditioners, gargoyles
Fly and icicles shatter.  Frozen runways,
Lines in Markets, and paralyzed avenues

Verify every fear.  But there is warmth
In this sudden desire to sleep,
To surrender to our common condition

With joy, watching hours of news
Devoted to weather.  People finally stop
To Talk to each other -- the neighbors

We didn't know were always here.
Today they are ready for business,
Armed with a new vocabulary,

Casting their saga in phrases as severe
As last night's snow: damage assessment,
Evacuation, emergency management.

The shift of the wind matters again,
And we are so simple, so happy to hear
The scrape of a shovel next door.

Your Sunday Poem

This by Laurie Lamon,  from "180 More, Extraordinary Poems for Every Day," an anthology of contemporary poetry selected and edited by Billy Collins.

Praise

I heard the dogs before
I opened the door late, after work --
first Maude who was dancing
in praise of my arrival for all she knew
it was; presence without end,
the end of waiting, the end
of boredom --

    and then Li Po,
who, in the middle of his life,
learning to make his feelings known
as one who has carried breath
and heart close to the earth seven
times seven years, in praise
of silence and loneliness, climbed
howling, howling from his bed.

Your Sunday Poem

This by Judith Kerman, from "Poetry 180," edited by Billy Collins and part of the poetry 180 project.

In Tornado Weather

wet-ash light
blows across the road
I'm driving with my foot to the floor
sixty miles over flat midwestern highway
driving to hear poetry
the sky ready
to boil over, a lid clamped on
the pressure drops
flattens the landscape further
I watch the horizon for state troopers
think of the wind:
one hundred miles to the west it has
sliced the top off a hospital
smashed two miles of Kalamazoo
nothing anyone will read tonight
is wild enough

Your Sunday Poem

Shortly after being appointed United States Poet Laureate in 2001, Billy Collins created a website, www.gov/poetry/180   to give young people "the notion that poetry can be a part of everyday life as well as a subject to be studied in the classroom.  On the website, I ask high school teachers and administrators to adopt the program by having a new poem read every day -- one for each of the roughly 180 days of the school year -- as part of the public announcements," either read over a PA system or in school assembly or in each class.  The idea was that students could hear poetry daily without feeling it was something to be "studied," just enjoyed for the pleasure it brought.

Those poem have been collected into two wonderful paperbacks edited by Collins, called, "Poetry 180" and "180 More." They feature a wide variety of new voices, all brought together in two volumes, so you too can have a poem a day. This one is from "180 More" and is by David Graham.

The Dogs in Dutch Paintings

How shall I not love them, snoozing
right through the Annunciation?  They inhabit
the outskirts of every importance, sprawl
dead center in each oblivious household.

They're digging at fleas or snapping at scraps,
dozing with nobel abandon while a boy
bells their tails.  Often they present their rumps
in the foreground of some martyrdom.

What Christ could lean so unconcernedly
against a table leg, the feast above continuing?
Could the Virgin in her joy match this grace
as a hound sagely ponders an upturned turtle?

No scholar at his huge book will capture
my eye so well as the skinny haunches,
the frazzled tails and serene optimism
of the least of these mutts, curled

in the corners of the world's dazzlement.

Your Sunday Poem

Did you see the moon last night?  And early this morning?  Huge.  Gorgeous.  So near to earth, as if to peek down to say hello. Yesterday morning the air was like spring champagne.  This morning the smell of the sea has returned. It is still except for the faint sound of a rooster waking up the neighborhood a few blocks away.   This poem is by Billy Collins from his book, "Nine Horses."

Today

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

Your Sunday Poem

This by Billy Collins from his book, The Art of Drowning.

Dream

Last night I labored in a cold scriptorium
printing one large block letter at a time,
at work on some crucial document,
a lost epic, the diary of a famous aviator,
a translation from a language I do not know.

Whatever it was, I cannot raise it now
from the deep harbor of sleep
where schools of fish nuzzle the keels of boats,
but I remember writing for hours in pencil
on immense sheets of unlined paper.

Like some Bartleby of the night shift,
my copying was endless,
and as always in dreams, there was someone
who was trying to interfere with me
and someone else, a vague figure

standing off to the side, who wanted to help.
I must ask you which one you were
when I get out of bed and go downstairs
where I can hear you making the tea,
turning the pages of the morning paper.

Your Sunday Poem

This from my favorite poet, Billy Collins, from his book, "The Art of Drowning."  Support your favorite poets.  This Christmas, give your friends books of poetry along with the usual poinsettia.

Days

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday

you whisper,
then holding your breast,
place this cup on yesterday's saucer
without the slightest clink.

Your Sunday Poem

This from Billy Collins, "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes."

             Memento Mori

There is no need for me to keep a skull on my desk,
to stand with one foot up on the ruins of Rome,
or wear a locket with the sliver of a saint's bone.

It is enough to realize that every common object
in this sunny little room will outlive me --
the carpet, radio, bookstand and rocker.

Not one of these things will attend my burial,
not even this dented goosenecked lamp
with its steady benediction of light,

though I could put worse things in my mind
than the image of it waddling across the cemetery
like an old servant, dragging the tail of its cord,
the small circle of mourners parting to make room.

Your Sunday Poem

Here’s why you should go out today and buy a least one book of poetry. You need to keep Billy Elliot (and other poets) supplied with pencils. From his book, “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes.”




Advice to Writers

Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spottlessness is the niece of inspiration.

The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.

When you find your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.

From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.

Your Sunday Poem

This from”Monologue of a Dog,” by Wislawa Szymborska. Ms. Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of seventy-three, a relatively unknown poet in her native Poland. In his introduction, Billy Collins writes, “The typical Szymborska poem, if such a thing exists, is a free-verse meditation couched in colloquial language. It begins with a stray fact or a mundane observation, then ascends to a heightened level of speculation. The shifts from zone to zone are engineered so smoothly that they often take place beyond the conscious awareness of the reader. She herself has said that attempts to estimate poetry or place a value on it often elude explanation: “ . . the fact that with one writer the words fall together into units that are alive and enduring and with another they do not is decided in a realm that’s not easily comprehensible to anyone. I suspect that this is a realm upon which the vicissitudes of life and the intensity of experience no longer have any influence.” Her comment points to the insufficiency of literary criticism and espouses a preternatural dimension for art.”

Yet another reason to read poetry; it speaks to and nurtures the preternatural – even when we think it doesn’t.

A Little Girl Tugs At The Tablecloth

She’s been in this world for over a year,
and in this world not everything’s been examined
and taken in hand.

The subject of today’s investigation
is things that don’t move by themselves.

They need to be helped along,
shoved, shifted,
taken from their place and relocated.

They don’t all want to go, e.g., the bookshelf,
the cupboard, the unyielding walls, the table.

But the tablecloth on the stubborn table
-- well-seized by its hems –
manifests a willingness to travel.

And the glasses, plates, creamer, spoons, bowls,
are fairly shaking with desire.

It’s fascinating,
what form of motion they will take,
once they’re trembling on the brink:
will they roam across the ceiling?
fly around the lamp?
hop onto the windowsill and from there to a tree?

Mr. Newton still has no say in this.
Let him look down from the heavens and wave his hands.

This experiment must be completed.
And it will.

Your Sunday Poem

If you try this, you’ll see exactly what Billy’s talking about. Interesting thing, perception, and what we think we see and how much of what we think we see isn’t there at all. It’s inside our heads. Made up. From his 1995 book, “The Art of Drowning” by Billy Collins.

Horizon

You can use the brush of a Japanese monk
or a pencil stub from a race track

as long as you draw the line a third
the way up from the bottom of the page,

the effect is the same; the world suddenly
divided into its elemental realms.

A moment ago there was only a piece of paper.
Now there is earth and sky, sky and sea.

You were sitting alone in a small room.
Now you are walking into the heat of a vast desert

or standing on the ledge of a winter beach
watching the light on the water, light in the air.