Library of America 2025
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
Monday, April 28, 2025
SHIKI: THE GLASS CLOUDING ~
Glass Window Tanka
sickroom
the glass door
I peer through —
can see sparrows
flying to the little pine
shut in the sickroom
the glass window
winter sun shining in —
lucky buttercup
blooming
morning and night
ueno woods lie across
the glass window —
I'll never be
tired of seeing
shut in for winter —
clouds cleared
in the glass door,
and I can see
tabi socks drying
crystal, glass door
I look through —
the house across, the roof
I can see
shepherd's purse blooming
thought I'd see
snow — the glass
in the glass window
clouded, I did not
see snow
out the window
I can see
even insects —
panes of crystal glass
are miracles
shut in the sickroom
out the window
the glass window
on the clothesline
I can see a crow cawing
crow perched
on the line —
does it look through
the glass door,
see me writing and caw
always lying
down — O, blessings
to you who put in
glass for me,
crippled here
crystal carriage
in the piling
snow —
I don't think I'll go
to the silver fields
glass put in,
waiting for snow —
tomorrow I'll see
snow piled
on the trees
dawn, outside
I see the snow —
someone
wiped dew
from the glass
Ugly Duckling Presse
2024
Sunday, April 27, 2025
Saturday, April 26, 2025
Friday, April 25, 2025
THE ANTHOLOGY OF BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE POETRY ~
A treasure, truly.
Poets well drawn and well built biographies.
But, in the chapter "Affiliates" —
where is Cid Corman?
The University of North Carolina Press
2025
Night Landscape in Nelson County, Kentucky
ah, Moon, shine
thou as amber in thy
charred keg, hickory sky . . .
still as a still, steep
as a horse's face
JONATHAN WILLIAMS
A Piece
One and
one, two,
three.
ROBERT CREELEY
Calm down
what happens
happens mostly
without you
JOSEF ALBERS
from Twenty-Four Love Songs
20
When I heard the public story
of how they'd thrown away
their wedding rings, and how
the rings had been picked up
by the garbage men and taken
to the dump, and how laughing
finally they went out with flashlights
and found them that night I wondered
did they put them back on?
ED DORN
Imagine Inventing Yellow
Imagine inventing yellow or moving
For the first time in a cherry curve.
M.C. RICHARDS
Nine
It's not what
you think
it's something
else.
CYNTHIA HOMIRE
The Huron
I swam the Huron of love, and I am not ashamed,
It was many saw me do it, scoffing, scoffing,
They said it was foolish, winter and all,
But I dove in, greaselike, and swam,
And came up where Erie verges.
I would say for the expenditure of love,
And the atrophy of longing, there is no cure
So swift, so sleek, so fine, so draining
As a swim through the Huron in the wintertime.
RUTH HERSCHBERGER
Thursday, April 24, 2025
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
EARTH DAY ~
Earth Day
We met like this, on this day
and our life's work together
maybe who knows has saved it,
together with so many others
whose persistence stays the worst,
the few who do what they can
is enough; the love they bear
for all the living and the faint
translucent vision of a future
filled with sharing, a future
with men no longer on the take,
filled with planetary kindness:
those hopeful few, those brave
persistent few, a tiny band
that may have saved us all.
One Day
Listen! It's all so ordinary
mostly nothing happens
quotidian they call it
then one day grey fox
grabs a rabbit so quick
right outside my window
I watch her take off with it
and then we all return
to that ordinary day
_____________________________
Clifford Burke
Being Didactic
Desert Rose Press
2025
Monday, April 21, 2025
J.H. PRYNNE ~
Bloodaxe Books, 2024
___________________________________
Land Flown So Few
Now known nor new, one mend or mind attune
how so for more to do, where lend and saw
by law in sound, to fend or done where found,
to send in pair and bond, low or snow-bound,
land flown so few, as near to kind or there
and bind, appear by care in fund. Or end.
Sunday, April 20, 2025
Saturday, April 19, 2025
Friday, April 18, 2025
ROBERT FRANCIS ~
Summons
Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too hard persuaded.
_______________________
Robert Francis
A Certain Distance
Pourboire Press 1976
Thursday, April 17, 2025
NAJWAN DARWISH ~
To That Room
And I return to that town,
to that house,
to that room,
the bones of the dead beneath me;
they know me
though I do not know them.
I'm surrounded by the books and papers
of other dead;
I know them
though they do not know me.
This earth: the remains of strangers
naturalized by death.
I return
because one must return,
because the dead must rise again.
A Distant Country
How many bedrooms do I need
to get a bit of sleep?
How many chairs
to sit myself down?
How many roads
to walk back to you,
my distant country?
This time I've gone
and I'm not coming back.
Your job, now, is to slip out,
lovesick and afraid,
and come in search of me.
Lightning Writes Poetry
Lightning never sits down at a table
to write poetry,
yet it is poetry's only embodiment.
It lights up the whole universe
then disappears.
What poet hasn't dreamed
of becoming lightning?
As For My Singing
"Sing, sing before we slit your throat."
Did they think fear
would disturb my song?
True, I was scared of life,
but death
is the last thing I'm afraid of.
Why would a free man fear
to meet a friend?
So let our embrace be tinged with blood.
As for my singing in this moment,
I want it to be perfect.
My freedom lies in this:
No matter what they do,
the murderers still
cannot disturb my song.
______________
Najwan Darwish
No One Will Allow You Tomorrow
translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
Yale Univ. Press, 2024
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
A BOOK IN THE HAND ~
‘Book brigade’: US town forms human chain to move 9,100 books one-by-one
A small Michigan community banded together to help a beloved local bookstore move its stock to a new storefront
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
DUDLEY LAUFMAN ~
Little House Under the Hill
He said his grandma was a twin and she
and her sibling were born out of wedlock.
Their mother was a sister at that
place up on the hill. Folks there were
celibate. The twins were born in that
cottage hidden in the woods below.
They never knew their father, shame of it.
Could have been one of the brothers although
most of them were too old. Most likely
one of them hired hands come up from town,
the herdsman or that travelling farrier.
You never know, makes you wonder now,
how many of us here have kin that age
who sprung to life from that little cottage.
___________________
Of Course the Money Musk
Dudley Laufman
Wind in the Timothy Press
2025
Monday, April 14, 2025
Sunday, April 13, 2025
STONE WALL WORK IN MARCH ~
Here's a stone wall I built in March 2025 when two days of thaw slipped in for a moment and I got to work. I was widening a bar-way ten-feet and had to tear down the stone corner you see and rebuild. Tricky. The stone wall run in the background I built in the early 80s. The mound I'm standing on was leveled by shovel and all the stone pulled out of the ground and from an old stone wall in the way went into the new wall I am standing beside. The ground was still blocked with frost and going at it a little at a time each day removed the mound. Even before any of this work could be started there were two four foot high snow banks to shovel away and base ice to melt. Now three weeks later two full days of snow is back since March won't let go. Once it does, a full truck load of 3/4 stone will arrive and we'll get this bar-way looking pretty.
[ BA ]
photograph by Susan Arnold
