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Click on the blue title to go to poem Mark McGuire-Schwartz ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Sleep Late and 10 other Short Poems 1 Ambition Sleep late. Read War and Peace. Go to the gym. Jog there, and bicycle back. 2 Know Thyself Drive to a far away place where no one knows you. 3 Preparing for Depth Dig a hole there, deep in the forest. Remember the spot. When the hole is deep enough, place nothing in it. Nothing. Fill the hole back up. Remember to remember where it is, In case you need it later. 4 Return Take the basil and run. 5 Impossible Just be yourself. 6 Smarty Pants At sad movies, he cries. He tries to avoid those Sentimental, romantic movies Commonly known as chick flicks, because He knows he will cry. At funny movies, he is bored, Until the tears Roll down his cheeks. Mark McGuire-Schwartz 7 Everlasting Love Still, he keeps a bag packed, And the car Running. 8 Publication I want my poems to be earthy, So I write them on the bottoms of rocks. I want my poems to be known everywhere, So I write them on leaves, And release them Into the wind. 9 Apology in Advance Write a poem about a drummer, ferociously banging brass spheres. He always uses cymbals in his work. 10 So They Said I cannot work, I cannot sleep I am obsessed. They warned Me it would come to this. 11 Making quilts I am using you. You are Thread in my hands. All your joy, Your dreams for the accomplishments of children. Your ability to control time. Your knickknacks and grapefruit. I sew you into a square. 11 again Eleven short poems. A poet’s dozen. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Desert Storm Let us be fed by heaven’s manna not these MREs under this ashen sky what green can grow? Sand rimes our eyes and all we can see are shadows sliding in darkness black on black. Who is the enemy? That child, this car, those barren trees doorways of fire and everywhere the rasp of weeping grates. When sandstorms blow there is neither sky nor land just this shriveled skin and there is no god the people are led by passionate fools who wail and wail… and we are stalled upon a hill or in the rubble of the streets parched and dreaming of rain on a vast field of corn. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Coming Home In a couple hours I will shave and shower and grab my jacket and flag and head downtown to be a face in the crowd, a hand waving, a hand waving a flag for Bravo Company riding down downtown on a fire truck. Finally home! And the hands waving and the signs not like the signs before. So Welcome Home Troops! Bravo, Bravo Company! And the flags waving and the yellow ribbons waving and the hands waving the flags and the ribbons being taken down and the cheers, Hurrah! and the hats coming off and the mothers crying a little and my hat off and some dads saluting and my hand waving and the trucks wailing -- all this as sure as there is a war. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ October In East Haddam This first night a man makes sense of the thick darkness crawling outside his window, where his reflection looks at him, just in front of the blazing lamp. The silence hums like a power line suspended above the mouth of the town, its heart an old tune the man knows, as if a gift for only him, that sharp notes extend. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Lenard D. Moore Eyeing It My sister Angela dashes indoors, tells me to hurry to the pier where the wedding party will gather. When we reach the edge, we stop, eye the fifteen-foot long alligator floating like a knotted log, black and wide as a canoe; its eyes bulged like two unshelled black walnuts. A woman grabs her three daughters, takes them away, tells them they cannot outrun the alligator who faces them in the deep dark current of the New River. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Quiet for a Sunday With your needle, my thread I’ll sew us up together again. I’ll make dinner, five courses, I’ll even cook meat. But first before I preheat the oven I need to hear you say I’m sorry. But it’s quiet for a Sunday. The kit is under the bed, the covers over my head. The steak still at the market, your voice too far on the night stand. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Southeast Light Mohegan Bluffs rain into the sea. They bury mariners and kelp that drift with tideswell against the cliffs. Lard oil burns on the surface, lights the black eyes of crabs and the impudent oysters stubbornly attached by their beards, fifty-five feet from the cliffs’ brink. They are the stumbling block to Providence and the Sound. The pictured women lean forward, drawn to salty magnets of husbands. They smell the waves on their breath, their hair foamy. See the moon blown out of joint by gale. The foghorn tells an inconsolable story. My glass comes to rest on the laminate coaster. I move the lighthouse further back from the edge of the table. There is little cost for such safe passage. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Fresh Catch And then there was the day my husband said he didn’t like to eat out anymore, who knew what might be picked up in a restaurant, and left me no choice but to shop at that fresh fish market where the only things caught are fillets of sole or maybe a lone clam. And then there was the blue-eyed fishmonger who showed me all he had to offer, expounded the joys of fresh water fishing. I felt a wave come over me, watched the palms of his strong hands cradle those lifeless creatures. And then I decided to pick up a little something extra, for later. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Bruised Sky I don’t remember so much about the total eclipse of the sun, but that I woke up early and, bleary eyed, sat at the table for a quick breakfast before standing in a lava field watching the sun rise. The dagger-like black lava hills, crowded with people with cardboard eye protectors tied tightly to their heads, looking like sci-fi monsters with hour-glass faces staring dumbly into the sky. How the cloudy gray faded into a bruise, swallowed by the furious hole, burning its halo into memory! Quickly the anticipation flipped into silence, sudden as the flash of white pain of a fierce pinch at the base of the thumb. The world becomes nothing but open light. And like the pinch’s instant release, so was our collected breath, instantly exhaled. The new light rushing through the clouds, returning the sky to blue. And when you had finally had enough of me, how I wished that you could disappear as quickly as the bruised sky. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dogged A dog follows me as if I had a better idea. Black, short-haired, a lab-cum-everything. I'd miss him in a crowd of tide-glossed rocks. Neither of us seems in a special hurry. My post office isn't going anywhere nor will his tree or kibble bowl or patch of flattened fuzz once known as squirrel. For a moment our strides almost match, and I'm tempted to pat his knee-high head, trace the smooth bump atop his skull. But somewhere I read dogs hate that and are only being tolerant of our love. It's best to walk apart like this, parallel but different, and make no bones about it. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Gravity Wells She is disconcerted over kittens, that Walmart moved to town forcing Buddies out of business and the Bransom family strained to keep their business open the youngest son dying in his thirties a heart attack as he worried about sales It’s the spirit of the times she asserts or rather, the zeitgeist, she says lazily from bed wearing nothing but dirty white socks as I take the kids to get donuts from breakfast and review the rate sheets for outsourced workers from India. We don’t make anything, we are conduits and consumers Sometimes she finishes my sentences with words not planned by me but are more clever and deeper yet I pretend those words were coming from my mouth our lives are pulled by gravity wells of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, David Deutchmann, My life is pulled by the gravity of my woman as she walks in her jeans and bra picking up clothes She gets mad when I’m mad that she’s mad at me for wanting to go to some highbrow function on the local university campus not fun for the kids she’s surprising, wonderful in theory, harsh in fact. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Queue Excuse me, but this IS the line for heart-break? I wasn’t sure. As we got closer I started to think we’ve been slowing along toward happiness, by mistake. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Marilyn Nelson When Truth I’ve been so far out on the gangplank of illusion I’ve had to crawl that last few inches back as below me truth bared its grinny hopes: He doesn’t love you. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ A Fragment Is You ask me how I could get through high school. Without learning what a fragment is. Go east. Across the foul-smelling river. To where the refineries belch and defecate. Passed the boarded-up Dollar Store on the corner where kids go get high. Passed the greasy windows of Al’s Bar and Grille. Go north a block and turn left. Passed the houses slouched on their lots like tired whores and used-up crack heads. That joyless-looking sagging building with three busted-out windows? With them ragged shrubs? That one there. Where you got a B by showing up most days, an A for staying awake. That’s my school. Where we went. With our broken lives. Where I never did catch on. To what a fragment is. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 2nd Place - 2008 Wallace Winchell Poetry Contest; Judge Vivian Shipley Mother In Traffic Today I’m pinball wizard and plain ol’ mom, rolling fender to bumper through carpool to piano lesson and market and home again, home again, jiggedy-jog. In the lush fuschia of this afternoon couples hold hips on sidewalks, sashay under live oaks, spring in love, and I remember when we held up traffic, pressed in the driver’s seat, tireless kissing while the light shone green. I could bolt from this maze, leap to a tabletop, shimmy, grind, shake my feet like pepper on your plate, luscious--if I didn’t need to mediate another upset in the backseat-- spilled drink, a lost doll, kicks and pinches two ways-- then behold the lambent eyes of our children, the paint-flecked wrists now risen to protest discipline and begin a new hand. My love, Desire, I feel it even when we both fall asleep on the couch. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Her Absence Shows in weeds infesting parched beds; in untamed roses twisting the trellis back; in blown peonies that drip gunk. My father is gouging the upper yard, transforming smooth, bottle-green expanse to minefield: pitted grave-ruts, cairns of busted stone he’s wrenched up from earth like rotted teeth. He’s forsaken upkeep, chain-sawing evergreens to stubs as iris gasp. Sworn off scrupulous care, he’s ceased pruning; seems to have forgotten her. Swiping sweat, he pauses to show me the new geraniums. I swear, these grew since yesterday. They’re called Elizabeth Ann . He blinks, quickly turning, back to stones. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 3rd place – 2007 Brodine/Brodinsky Prize; Judge Steven Straight The Robin It’s past noon, and she’s still at it, the incessant peck-and-hurl into the dining room window that woke me at six this morning. Even the cat has lost interest, but I need to understand such dedication, such persistence. Has she fallen for her reflection in the glass, come to desire her own perfection more than flight or spring, Narcissist with wings, or has she caught sight of the nest in my living room with the three bright blue eggs, and does she imagine she can hatch something from what is inside and misplaced? How long will she keep it up, this delicate battering? Come in, I want to say, It’s all right, I’ve had wild things here before, but she’d discover the eggs are hollow, that it’s a whole lot easier to get in than it is to get out. I could tell her that. Give it up, bird. Build your own nest. Give your lovely wild and feathered self to air, tree, a few warm blue eggs, another lush and generous spring. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ He Used to Rake Leaves fall Saturday mornings, the gasp of his green lawn tractor coming before you saw him, puffs from his Lucky Strikes staying when he was gone. Always the same joke when I waved to him: his legs kicked up, no hands on the wheel, a circus clown in a miniature car. Circling his house, he’d tip his John Deere cap to his wife pacing behind the curtains, juggling a phone, wine glass, cigarette, losing hair, teeth lost, fuzzy white slippers snapping at her heels. At the leaf piles he’d crouch arms outstretched, a strong man before the greatest of weights, and cradle the bundles to his chest like something sleeping or injured, laying them gently in the trailer, pressing, smoothing as if tucking a blanket. When his wife died, he moved to a cabin in Maine. In a postcard to me, he couldn’t believe the pine needles everywhere - on the lawn, deck, driveway. He lost count, all the black plastic bags he filled, stuffed in trash cans, worried the garbage man would leave them and take only the real garbage. But every Tuesday, with a snap of the wrist, the man hurled the bags, sometimes three at a time, a high, sweeping arc for the truck, smiling the moment the black balloons floated. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 st Place – 2008 Connecticut River Review Contest; Judge Kim Bridgford David A. Prodell Steaming off a 20 oz. coffee in the vineyard, hand pruners at rest, I lean back to share a post with a long-handled shovel. Grape canes elbow out along the trellis wires, the sinewy arms of farmers draped on fence rails watching cornfields whitecap with tassels. A half-eaten rabbit’s talon-stapled to an end post, handy work of the resident red-tailed hawk mapping rodent byways. Or maybe it’s a “Vacancy” sign from the northern harrier I’ve seen skimming the fallow pasture next door. Unlike other hawks, the harrier’s hearing is keener, its owl-like face a disk of stiff feathers amplifying and flagging locations of sounds – a corn kernel pinging down a vole’s throat, roadkill breakfast clatter of three crows, the creek’s mud-bubbling mumble, or this warm October sun patiently knitting from skeins of the seen and unseen, heard and unheard, the pattern of this day, its needles ticking as I slowly pull my wool sweater over my head. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1st place – 2007 Brodine/Brodinsky Prize; Judge Steven Straight Matins Words crawl into bed with me and speak of you even though though you are not here and the morning shines alone even then one is grateful for gods who appear when summoned or not summoned wordless as the bedsheet I lean against a world raucous in bomb-blasts, rapings, another bankruptcy for greed even then words creep in through the window thinking of sun shining equally in your face ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ After Amichai: Love Poem in 5 Couplets + 1 Line I want to know the word For your back in the morning, The word for the sound you make When my tongue goes along your breast, The word for my mouth On yours. The unknown language of bodies is vast. Stacks of dictionaries around our bed Are like the empty sheets When you are away: A symbol of what is missing.
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