POEM OF THE DAY BY KEVIN RABAS

Fall Up

Gunkle and I had this big mirror between us, hefting it
into the back of his blue pick up truck. Gunkle’s part retarded,

a giant in blue jeans and green Crocs, wearing a white t-shirt
with battery acid on it. His glasses are thicker than my thumb.

So, we grab hold of this monster mirror, and it glints,
and we both look into that mirror, noticing the clarity
of that blue sky and those green sycamore leaves reflected
so perfectly that is appears you could just dive on into that mirror
and sink into the sky, and we think the same thing.

“You could fall up,” Gunkle says, “and just keep on falling.
Nothing would stop you.” And that was the way of it.

Gunkle’s mind was now my mind, and I was in that mirror
falling on up through those white smoke clouds

headed towards an orange sun.

Gunkle and I stacked box bed springs on top the mirror,
and some branches from out front, and I could hear that large mirror crack,
but I think Gunkle and I could still see it—
that vision of sinking into sky, drowning

with only the sun to hold us up.

-Kevin Rabas

POEM OF THE DAY BY CHARLES BERNSTEIN

Pompeii

The rich men, they know about suffering

That comes from natural things, the fate that

Rich men say they can’t control, the swell of

The tides, the erosion of polar caps

And the eruption of a terrible

Greed among those who cease to be content

With what they lack when faced with wealth they are

Too ignorant to understand. Such wealth

Is the price of progress. The fishmonger

Sees the dread on the faces of the trout

And mackerel laid out at the market

Stall on quickly melting ice. In Pompeii

The lava flowed and buried the people

So poems such as this could be born.

 -Charles Bernstein

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POEM OF THE DAY BY IRIS APPELQUIST

just my 19th nervous breakdown

it was daytime and i realized i feared
being in the sun. then, when it was
nighttime, i noticed that the moon was
menacing me. i could not determine
whether this was the way it had always
been, and i’d always just cockroached my
way through the daytimes and the
nighttimes…or if my being so thoroughly
terrorized had materialized with suddenness.

with help and, in large parts, luck, the daytimes
and nighttimes were made into different
beasts altogether, and i was able to coerce myself
into believing that these altogether different
beasts were nothing to be afraid of.

-Iris Appelquist

POEM OF THE DAY BY LOUISE GLUCK

Vita Nova

You saved me, you should remember me.

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes

and then unused, buried.

Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes—

as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident—

By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green
pieced into the dark existing ground.

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

- Louise Gluck

POEM OF THE DAY BY STANLEY MOSS

Bright Day

I sing this morning: Hello, hello.

I proclaim the bright day of the soul.

The sun is a good fellow,

the devil is a good guy, no deaths today I know.

I live because I live. I do not die because I cannot die.

In Tuscan sunlight Masaccio

painted his belief that St. Peter’s shadow

cured a cripple, gave him back his sight.

I’ve come through eighty-five summers. I walk in sunlight.

In my garden, death questions every root, flowers reply.

I know the dark night of the soul

does not need God’s eye,

as a beggar does not need a hand or a bowl.



-Stanley Moss

POEM OF THE DAY BY T.R. HUMMER

After

After the explosion, no one knew what to do
For the boy who'd stood closest
to the abandoned leather briefcase.
By some miracle, he was the only one injured. It erupted
In an incense of sulfur and nails as he made his way
To steal it. Holiness has an aura, everyone knows that,
But why would terrorists bother to murder a thief?
The ethics of this question paralyzed everyone in sight
While the boy, unable to breathe, watched God wandering
The station in a business suit, asking occasional strangers
Have you seen my briefcase?
There was something urgent in it.


-T.R. Hummer