In the Headlights

Bloody Men

by Wendy Cope, from Serious Concerns (Faber and Faber)

Bloody men are like bloody buses
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear.
You look at them flashing their indicators,
Offering you a ride.
You're trying to read the destinations,
You haven't much time to decide.
If you make a mistake, there's no turning back.
Jump off, and you'll stand there and gaze
While the cars and the taxis and the lorries go by
And the minutes, the hours, the days.

[Via The Writer's Almanac]

[Image from Double Decker Bus to Brighton]

Gate C22

I've just been browsing through The Writer's Almanac.  But after reading a couple dozen poems, the one I wanted to share was still today's offering:

Gate C22   

by Ellen Bass.  From The Human Line.

At Gate C22 in the Portland Airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed.  Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna, in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young.  His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose.  But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again.  We were all watching--
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses.  We couldn't look away.  We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face.  Whe he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as if he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you,  no matter
what happened after--if she beat you or left you or
you're lonely now--you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

A Poet on Poetry

I very much enjoy the poetry of Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States.  But don't hold that against him.  He is an excellent, insightful and very funny writer (and reader) of his own works.

So how could I not print this poem, which is today's featured poem on NPR's The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

The poem is called "Sonnet", from Sailing Alone Around the Room.  I'm pretty sure he reads it on Billy Collins Live, A Performance at the Peter Norton Symphony Space which, to my mind, makes his perfect-pitch poetry even better.  This poem reminds me of having to write a 500-word, or a thousand or, heaven forbid, two-thousand-word essay, and using as much filler as possible, to fill the quota without actually doing much work.  Better yet, a two page essay, where you not only used filler, but wrote as large as you'd dare, skipped spaces between paragraphs, and generally had the same goal.  Collins's goal here is to get 12 lines of poetry done. 

Without futher ado, here's "Sonnet":

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one, just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines'
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on there while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blowout the lights, and come, at last, to bed.

  [Men in tights via the Very Merry Seamstress]

The Turtle

The turtle lives twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.

-Ogden Nash

I like this little rhyme, as I do most of Nash's catchy ditties.

Most people do.  In 2002, he was commemorated by the U.S. Postal Service which issued a stamp that features six small poems in the background, including "The Turtle."

And if you are curious, as I was, about a turtle's shell, it is made up of bony plates that are covered with scutes made of keratin, the same protein that makes your hair and nails.

The Turtle Puddle tells us this and answers many more burning turtle questions...but not Nash's.

Nash was a humorist and poet, a lyricist, a radio and TV guest and a baseball fanatic.  He is most known for his limericks and poetic puns and world play.

We all know some of  his rhymes, the most famous of which is, I think:

Candy is dandy,
but liquor is quicker.

The Cat

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

from These Are My Rivers

The cat
licks its paw and
lies down in
the bookshelf nook
She
can lie in a
sphinx position
without moving for so
many hours
and then turn her head
to me and
rise and stretch
and turn
her back to me and
lick her paw again as if
no real time had passed
It hasn't
and she is the sphinx with
all the time in the world
in the desert of her time
The cat
knows where flies die
sees ghosts in the motes of air
and shadows in sunbeams
She hears
the music of the spheres and
the hum of in the wires of the houses
and the hum of the universe
in interstellar spaces
but
prefers domestic places
and the hum of the heater

*    *    *    *

Me too
my cats too
by the heater
in the sun
they can do it all
but why bother
to prove anything

{Via The Writers Almanac]

[Image via The Paw Path Cat Blog]

Starfish

by Eleanor Lerman

from Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds, from Sarabande Books 2005

LC sent us this poem, which was featured on Writer's Almanac earlier this week.  It is lovely, and speaks volumes.  To me, at least.  Enjoy, relax, eat the pie.

STARFISH

This is what life does.  IT lets you walk up to
the store and buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee.  It lets you choose the way you have your eggs, your coffee..  Then it sits a fisherman down beside you at the counter who says, Last Night,
the channel was full of starfish.  And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud.  Reeds
speak to you of the natural world:  they whisper,
they sing.  And herons pass by.  Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment?  Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing.  There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated cxareless abandon,
owned a chilly heart.  Upon reflection, you are
genueinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become.  And then life lets you go home to think
about all this.  Which you do, for quite a long time.
Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out.  This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky.  (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.)  Because you
were born at a good time.  Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you.  Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.
So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert.  (Pie for the dog, as well.)  And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

[Image via Inky Circus]

The More Things Change

The more they stay the same.

This poem, "Much Madness is Divinest Sense", by Emily Dickinson, is so applicable, especially these days.  It's amazing that Ms. Dickinson had such incredible insight;  she rarely ventured far from her home in Amherst.

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense, the starkest madness.
'Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane-;
Demur, --you're straightway dangerous.
And handled with a chain.

[Via Truxall.com]

[Image from LensToScreen]

Parable

by Richard Wilbur, from Collected Poems, 1943-2004, Harcourt, Inc.

I read how Quixote in his random ride
Came to a crossing once, and lest he lose
The purity of chance, would not decide

Whither to fare, but wished his horse to choose.
For glory led wherever he may turn.
His head was light with pride, his horse's shoes

Were heavy, and he headed for the barn.

[Via The Writer's Almanac]

[Beautiful bronze by Sandra J. Shaw, via Quent Cordair Fine Art]

Destinations

by Dorothea Tanning  from A Table of Content , Graywolf Press [Tanning was once married to Max Ernst, and was a writer, sculptor and painter in her own right.  Her art is featured in many museums.

Yesterday I saw some bears at the top of a waterfall.
They were watching salmon leap up from the cascade.

It was on television, and, moreover, part of an ad.
Not one of them, salmon or bears, was impressed

by the water's will, its weight, its wrath, its wall,
the salmon flying out from that knockout force

like careless birds flying from a field of silver wheat.
The falling water obviously had no intention of getting

in the way of a salmon's destination.  It was beautiful.
Trouble was, the bears were there with bear intentions.

Their heads bobbed up and down, perhaps admiring
every quiver and flash, their four feet as firmly planted

in water as the rock-face itself.  Now and then one of them
opened its mouth to let a fish dive into it.  That was the part

that made me think of my own headlong leaps and dives
when I thought there would be no mouths to receive me.

[Via The Writer's Almanac]

[Image from The Bear's Lair.  Photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen]

Remembering

Last year, on Memoria Day, I posted the famous poem by John McCrae, In Flanders Fields (...the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row.)

In most Commonwealth countries and some others, the poppy has become the symbol of Remembrance Day.  The date is November 11 (which is our Veterans Day) to commemorate the date of the end of World War I in 1918.  The last two years I've travelled to Scotland about that time of the year, and you can get paper poppies for a donation to wear on your clothes.  Sometimes it feels that you are in a sea of poppies.  In some places, they must be removed by 1100, the time of the official signing of the armistice:  the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918.

The poppy as the symbol for remembrance was conceived by Moina Michael who first wore one, then sold them to friends and co-workers, giving the money to help servicemen in need.  She penned a refrain in response to McCrae's poem:

We cherish too, the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led,
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies

While Veterans Day honors living veterans, Memorial Day (formerly Decoration Day) honors those who died in our nation's service, and is more like Remembrance Day.

Many communities honored war dead after the Civil War (indeed, they had much to mourn and honor).  Waterloo, New York, is recognized as the source of the holiday.  Though many other communities could have been, the official distinction of Waterloo was established in 1966 when President Johnson signed a Presidential Proclamation recognizing it as the birthplace of Memorial Day.

In 2000, President Clinton established a  National Moment of Remembrance -- a pause in what one is doing for a moment of silence or listening to "Taps"  to reflect on the ultimate sacrifice of those who died in war. 

They continue to die, as if the world had never learned a lesson from all the carnage and sorrow.

At 3 PM, please stop what you are doing and quietly remember.

"Memory" comes from Middle English or French, circa 1250, but that too stems from the Latin, mens, or mind and memor or mindful. This root is everywhere:  memory, memoir, remember, memento, memorial and immemorial, remembrance, memorabilia, just to name a few.

Finally, a quote from Mark Twain from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

"I am grown old, and my memory is not as active as it used to be.  When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not;  but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.  It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it."

[Image of Moina Michael linked through Memorial Day History]