POEM OF THE DAY BY MARY RUEFLE

Four Anecdotes From the Life of Dang Yo-une

I

He stood outside the gates of Lhasa for four days

singing I fall upon the thorns of life,

I bleed, but the berries are delicious

if you remember to wash them.

II

The surface of his coca-cola sparkled so—

atoms of joy leapt from it like salmon in mid-stream!

He drank, then wiped the fish off his lips.

III

Wearing the pussy white suit of an astronaut

he tried to mount his horse

who pushed him baroquely

till he fell rococo and lanced.

IV

Innumerable horses race insanely

into the peak of battle

unaware Admiral van Euckhuysen is a tulip.

Dang, too, pretended he was a cat

and buried a bone.

-Mary Ruefle

POEM OF THE DAY BY NICK FLYNN

Alan Dugan Telling Me I Have
A Problem With Time

He reads my latest attempt at a poem
and is silent for a long time, until it feels
like that night we waited for Apollo,
my mother wandering in and out of her bedroom, asking,
Haven't they landed yet? At last
Dugan throws it on the table and says,
This reads like a cheap detective novel
and I've got nothing to say about it. It sits,
naked and white, with everyone's eyes
running over it. The week before
he'd said I had a problem with time,
that in my poems everything
kept happening at once. In 1969,
the voice of Mission Control
told a man named Buzz
that there was a bunch of guys turning blue
down here on Earth, and now I can understand
it was with anticipation, not sickness. Next,
Dugan says, Let's move on. The attempted poem
was about butterflies and my recurring desire
to return to a place I've never been.
It was inspired by reading this
in a National Geographic: monarchs
stream northward from winter roosts in Mexico,
laying their eggs atop milkweed
to foster new generations along the way.
With the old monarchs gone (I took this line as the title)
and all ties to the past ostensibly cut
the unimaginable happens--butterflies
that have never been to that plateau in Mexico
roost there the next winter. . . .I saw this
as a metaphor for a childhood I never had,
until Dugan pointed out
that metaphor has been dead for a hundred years.
A woman, new to the workshop, leans
behind his back and whispers, I like it,
but the silence is seamless, as deep
as outer space. That night in 1969
I could turn my head from the television and see
the moon
filling the one pane over the bed completely
as we waited for Neil Armstrong
to leave his footprints all over it.

by Nick Flynn

POEM OF THE DAY BY WANDA COLEMAN

The Saturday Afternoon Blues

can kill you

can fade your life away

friends are all out shopping

ain’t nobody home

suicide hotline is busy

and here i am on my own

with a pill and a bottle for comany

and heart full of been done wrong

i’m a candidate for the coroner, a lyric for a song

saturday afternoons are killers

when the air is brisk and warm

ol’ sun he steady whispers

soon the life you know will be done

suicide line i can’t get you

best friend out of town

alone with a pill and a bottle

i drink my troubles down

the man i love is a killer

the man i love is thief

the man i love is a junky

the man i love is grief

some call saturday the sabbath

it’s the bottom of the line some say

whether last or first, my heart’s gonna burst

and there ain’t no help my way

here with a pill and a bottle

and a life full of been done wrong

i’m a candidate for the coroner, a lyric

for a song.

-Wanda Coleman

POEM OF THE DAY BY CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

POVERTY

la colera de pobre
tiene dos rios contra muchos mares.
— César Vallejo

Vallejo wrote that with God we are all orphans.
I send $22 a month to a kid in Ecuador
so starvation keeps moving on its bony burro
past his door—no cars, computers,
basketball shoes—not a bottle cap
of hope for the life ahead . . . just enough
to keep hunger shuffling by in a low cloud
of flies. It’s the least I can do, and so I do it.

I have followed the dry length
of Mission Creek to the sea and forgotten to pray
for the creosote, the blue salvia, let alone
for pork bellies, soy bean futures. Listen.
There are 900 thousand Avon Ladies in Brazil.
Billions are spent each year on beauty products
world-wide—28 billion on hair care, 14 on skin
conditioners, despite children digging on the dumps,
selling their kidneys, anything that is briefly theirs.
9 billion a month for war in Iraq, a chicken bone
for foreign aid. I am the prince of small potatoes,
I deny them nothing who come to me beseeching
the crusts I have to give. I have no grounds for complaint,
though deep down, where it’s anyone’s guess,
I covet everything that goes along with the illustrious—
creased pants as I stroll down the glittering boulevard,
a little aperitif beneath Italian pines. But who cares
what I wear, or drink? The rain? No, the rain is something
we share—it devours the beginning and the end.

The old stars tumble out of their bleak rooms like dice—
Box Cars, Snake Eyes, And-The-Horse-You-Rode-In-On . . .
not one metaphorical bread crumb in tow.
Not a single Saludo! from the patronizers
of the working class—Pharaoh Oil, Congress,
or The Commissioner of Baseball—all who will eventually
take the same trolley car to hell, or a slag heap
on the outskirts of Cleveland. I have an ATM card,
AAA Plus card. I can get cash from machines, be towed
20 miles to a service station. Where do I get off penciling in
disillusionment? My bones are as worthless as the next guy’s
against the stars, against the time it takes light to expend
its currency across the cosmic vault. I have what everyone has—
the over-drawn statement of the air, my blood newly rich
with oxygen before the inescapable proscenium of the dark,
my breath going out equally with any atom of weariness
or joy, each one of which is closer to God than I.

-Christopher Buckley

POEM OF THE DAY BY ALEXANDRA TEAGUE

The Heartland

In the beginning was snow, fluffy and colored
like cabbage. Pale green leaves of light
folded in toward the ground.

We who were from nowhere
changed zip codes often, moving
into uncertain weather. The sameness of change

never ceased to astound us. Blocks away,
the American Ice Company’s red bricks
melted to white. It was possible to believe

a whole city’s snow came from inside.
Sidewalks turned into tightropes. The sky waited.
We all had something we’d rather stayed buried.

We all had something staked on the thaw.
One morning, the mailbox backed up
with forwards, which overflowed

down the steps. We’d been located by names
that chapped our lips when we said them.
Ice hung from the gutters of the art museum

like sculptures. People paid to stay outside.
Shovels made soft sweeps, brushes
across the unalterable, as men poured salt

to our doorstep, a great evaporated sea.
The papers tallied up deaths
and reported freezing was variable.

In Houston, people start dying
when the temperature drops below thirty,
while in Anchorage, death starts

at minus five. We had become
the midpoint of a mortal geography.

-Alexandra Teague

POEM OF THE DAY BY JUAN RAMON JIMENEZ

The Name Drawn from the Names

If I have created a world for you, in your place,

god, you had to come to it confident,

and you have come to it, to my refuge,

because my whole world was nothing but my hope.

I have been saving up my hope

in language, in a spoken name, a written name;

I had given a name to everything,

and you have taken the place

of all these names.

Now I can hold back my movement

inside the coal of my continual living and being,

as the flame reins itself back inside the red coal,

surrounded by air that is all blue fire;

now I am my own sea that has been suddenly stopped somewhere,

the sea I used to speak of, but not heavy,

stiffened into waves of an awareness filled with light,

and all of them moving upward, upward.

All the names that I gave

to the universe that I created again for you

are now all turning into one name, into one

god.

The god who, in the end, is always

the god created and recreated and recreated

through grace and never through force.

The God. The name drawn from the names.


-Juan Ramón Jiménez

POEM OF THE DAY BY MARK HENNESSY

: the Ringleader: Symphony Pathétique

I was in the barber’s chair in the basement of Carnegie Hall
hanging with Tchaikovsky, the evening’s guest conductor
and a solid cat.

He was telling me Montezuma “quaffed” a hot mix of chocolate
and chili peppers from a gold chalice fifty times daily.

I told him I was embarrassed by the women at the supermarket
who gave out free food samples,
who wore the fear that I would stop
and speak to them like an apron.

Peter Ilyich told me that lightning strikes generated heat
greater than the sun’s.

I told him, from the side of my pinched lathery mouth, that I felt
the desire of the boys bagging groceries to be anywhere else
like a hairnet about my temples.

He told me that in remote China relatives buried things
imagined as useful to the corpse in the afterlife with their beloved,
and so dead unmarried women commanded high dowries.

“What if these grave-mates knew each other in life and bristled,”
he said, “what if they would have loved this?”

I told him about the guy at the end of the conveyor belt who called me,
called everybody, hotrod.

I told him, Tchaikovsky, that he, the bagger and car enthusiast,
told me, the ringleader, he worried about me.

I said that can’t be true, can it?

The conductor strode to the high window, pointed south.
“There at the cloudy top,” he said, “of the tallest edifices,
men will build dirigible stations, and men,” he said, “will ride
in wheelhouses to work, guy ropes whipping beneath
the gangway in the breeze. ”

I told him that when I was in the supermarket my new sobriety
fit like a wool suit in summer, that while looking at cans it hit me
that what I’ve lost, what I’ve given away, are the same.


-Mark Hennessy