Category Archives: poetry

Tall, Dark, and Handsome

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He shakes my tidy box of labeled dreams
until its bows are undone, a timid musician
in designer jeans who explains the economy
in a way that makes sense.  He offers to drive,
steers with one hand while he seeks  a certain song,
redefining my ideal until it is far more important that
a man can talk finance, sing softly in the driver’s seat,
and delicately raise one eyebrow into a perfect arch
like a cartoon villain or a famous work of art.

eyebrow_520

This is just A boy, not THE boy the poem is about. 🙂

Mary’s Song by Luci Shaw

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Luci Shaw is an incredible poet, and she has a book entitled Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation, which I love to pull out around Christmas and Easter.  Here is one of my favorite of her Christmas poems:

Mary’s Song

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest …
you who have had so far to come.)
Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices,
the whisper of straw, he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
all years. Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught
that I might be free, blind in my womb
to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.

The LightdeviantART by ~ninebreaker

The Light
deviantART by ~ninebreaker

reading like a rocket

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Just finished re-reading The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis, and I so dearly love the part where “the King’s poet with two fiddlers stepped into the middle of the circle”:

Aravis and Cor prepared themselves to be bored, for the only poetry they knew was the Calormene kind, and you know now what that was like.  But at the very first scrape of the fiddles a rocket seemed to go up inside their heads, and the poet sang the great old lay of Fair Olvin.

Mmm, I love that– “a rocket seemed to up inside their heads.”

It made me think, How do I feel when I hear or read an amazing story?

Incredible stories rush my heart like a beautiful phantom.  They satisfy this incredible longing for beauty in me– and then stretch that part of my soul, increasing my appetite for enchantment.

How about you?

magic

Gala at Death

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As I wrote yesterday, sometimes heaven scares me.
Here was an attempt to process my thoughts while in college:

Gala at Death

Consequently, my poems all died—even those unwritten—
when I realized that Revelation promises the annihilation of my pages,
that I will not be archived in Heaven’s library,
my words jacketed in celestial gold.

So now the hollow worth of writing’s result faults me
for delighting in my bookcase of sale-annex idols,
bothered by heavenly boredom—
nothing to read but the Bible for a slow eternity.

The apocalyptic book humbled my hands, but bowing, I knew
I’d wear white to the funeral.  There all poems everywhere
then died to me—how easily paper curls and burns.
But literature’s epitaph reads, The Author of Life Wins,
and that graveyard is where writers worship God.

a poem I wrote

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I wrote this back in college, but I was thinking of it recently when I was up north at my summer camp.  The poem is about a boy with whom I shared one wonderful week– and after that, things fell apart.  In college, this was my assessment of the situation (which, for the record, took like three years to heal from.  One week, then three years.  Boys.)

Invitation

It appears to be about the temperature,
the way your body reacts to the sun,
how you kissed my hand and left.

You sang raw songs aloud, white flags
you spited for the sake of the sun,
a clumsy surrender to the afternoons,

later blaming the northern countryside for
the way it slows your blood,
allowing more time to warm.

And so you dressed your hurts in city shade,
where haste is the liquor to rinse your mind
of that summer and the way your hands were soft.

I left St. Paul and welcomed the day’s damage
because of the lessons that leak into open sores.
I make the most of my summer wounds.

But I want you to know—I would have helped you adjust:
dark faces shadowed by a background of pines,
only the moon with no warmth of its own.

Remember, dear, the northern nights are cold.

when half-gods go

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I remembered this past week a poem that used to matter a lot to me in college, especially for its ending lines.  I discovered it around a time of my life when I was clearing a particular boy out of my romantic life– a boy I was very close to, one I cared about a great deal, who was one of my best friends at the time.  He was marvelous and hilarious and gorgeous, but I knew he wasn’t the right one.  He was what Emerson refers to below as a “half-god.”  I couldn’t settle for a half-god.  Because when half-gods go, the gods arrive.

Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the muse;
Nothing refuse.

‘Tis a brave master,
Let it have scope,
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope;
High and more high,
It dives into noon,
With wing unspent,
Untold intent;
But ’tis a god,
Knows its own path,
And the outlets of the sky.
‘Tis not for the mean,
It requireth courage stout,
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending;
Such ’twill reward,
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.

Leave all for love;—
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more thy heart behoved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor,
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, for ever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.
Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
Vague shadow of surmise,
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free,
Do not thou detain a hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Tho’ her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Still waiting for that Mr. Right!!!!

 

Date a Girl Who Reads

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Date a Girl Who Reads by Rosemarie Urquico

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent.  Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

9 years later

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… I finally finished the poem that I starting writing right around college graduation in May 2003.  I hope it makes sense to you.  Some people have gotten confused by it.  Hint: there are 3 characters in it, not 2.

THE CALL

When the sky burst like a balloon, the rain soaked the hikers
for ten wild minutes that shivered like forever.
It was like a gift, he said, or like a holy baptism.
Or it was like a scene in a story you would write.
And when the call was dropped, she phoned to tell me,
who pictured this boy or that on a cell phone in the mountains,
smelling clean like Appalachian rain and wanting me to know.

we can all do with a little more Billy Collins in our lives

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Aristotle
by Billy Collins

This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her, your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes –
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unsolders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward’s child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle –
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall
too much to name, too much to think about.

And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair, and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

 

another Narnia poem

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… since I’m the biggest nerd you know.

SUSAN OF NARNIA

You cannot convince me that you have wholly erased
the lamp-post, the summer constellations, the Lion Himself.
You were there, saw the knife, heard the table crack like a giant’s plate.
When your great desire stood before you like a golden beacon,
how could you turn from joy to other invitations?
I refuse to believe that you have plucked from your deepest heart
righted wrong, vanished sorrows, the very death of winter.
You will awaken one day, I am sure, when pain claps your heart,
when British railways tear up your world of nylons and lipstick.
Grief will bring you back to solid ground, to your first love.
After all, once a queen, always a queen.