My Poems Won’t Change the World Read online

  MARK STRAND WITH GINI ALHADEFF

  Oh really, she’s with somebody?

  So she’s with somebody.

  Is she really with somebody?

  I guess she’s with somebody.

  So she is actually with somebody?

  Well then, she is, she’s with somebody.

  So you’re saying she’s with somebody?

  Okay, then, she’s with somebody.

  MARK STRAND WITH GINI ALHADEFF

  But those kids with twisted legs

  moving so menacing and self-absorbed,

  haughty sisters, timid wives,

  why did I not see them, where were they now?

  One by one they passed in front of me

  entering the theater; I at the door

  stood staring openly

  searching for what she would have loved,

  ready to love it too if I could find it.

  But none of them was beautiful to me,

  not one, and though I tried to force myself

  they were awkward, gray, crude, fat.

  Convinced I would have quickly learned

  I made myself be her and acted like her.

  But too much searching makes one’s look too tight;

  love that’s translated never turns out right.

  JONATHAN GALASSI

  In the seething almost Indian heat

  of an exaggerated July in the city

  the remaining inhabitants cautiously

  sit at length in the cafés

  looking for air that is not there.

  In my closed house, with nothing to do,

  I busy myself with your face

  which coolly enters the war

  of my thoughts and leaves intact,

  as though it were a rubber blob

  that even if it’s pushed or squeezed

  always goes back to its original shape,

  the inert buoy of the mind

  which the more you push it down

  the more it pops back up.

  MARK STRAND WITH GINI ALHADEFF

  No, love surely isn’t a feeling,

  it’s an obsessive line of thought

  about the mystery of how we learn.

  I take in your face and hold it fast

  but then I lose it quick as a wink, and take it back,

  I add and subtract, I register

  each shade of change: a tightrope-walking thought

  always about to fall—

  love doesn’t hold.

  ROSANNA WARREN

  Stopping suddenly, no destination

  at the top of stairs

  that no longer led me anywhere

  I held the banister

  and raised my eyes. Ah what was

  the oval fervor of that portal,

  shut and absorbed in its condition?

  Like a foreigner I gaped at it

  my look now given to prayer

  the rest of my body slack

  rising like spirit to my mouth.

  To conserve the strength of my idea

  I sat down on the stairs

  and said aloud: “It’s strange, it’s strange.

  And I’m not leaving here until

  I understand. It’s strange, so strange.”

  But I got lost more violently

  in a white languor with no history

  a memory before all other memory

  like an original mélange

  in which cells could wander

  that still had not agglomerated

  into the human present that we are. And finally

  empty of thought I nearly gave in

  fully to this broad nostalgia

  that took me far away with it

  and deprived me of my own chronology.

  But my heart’s vile laziness

  that’s only capable of superstition

  soon encased that impetus in a name

  and the spacious, nameless heat

  took the form and cold

  of its last shut refuge.

  And I found myself in the dark of love.

  JONATHAN GALASSI

  How I was there and maybe there was a river

  and this summer light unexpectedly ceased

  gently darkened by nervous newly arriving delicate

  clouds. Yes the river was there

  and the gray fresh air. And as I

  trampled time, as there was in fact

  no time, locked as I was into

  each day, soaking it in, and these surfaces of personhood,

  these scattered limbs,

  arms faces legs,

  showing themselves to us,

  showing us how it is to be there, in that piazza, how to

  cross its space open to sun and then

  reenter shade, having undergone time,

  to be as they are,

  except that if I look at them,

  there, in that instant,

  they are rescued from history

  where I greet them.

  JORIE GRAHAM

  The sadness of creaking limbs!

  To be reminded again and again

  of the skeleton, which the flesh,

  as long as it lasts, mercifully covers.

  MARK STRAND

  Fresco of the underwater night

  sunk in a knot of figures

  surrounding the actor, keeper of words;

  hunger and quarry of longing

  at two p.m., the middle hour

  without prayer that doesn’t presume

  but labors strangely over the afternoon’s

  hugeness, crowded hugeness

  of healing that drifts off;

  and your focused silence bent on

  taking my sun, my virtuous sun,

  thanks to which I am what I am

  in daylight, I am in the world

  with others, others almost like me.

  JONATHAN GALASSI

  How sweet it was yesterday imagining I was a tree!

  I had almost rooted in one place

  and grew in sovereign slowness there.

  I took the breeze and the north wind,

  caresses, blows—what difference did it make?

  I was neither joy nor torment to myself,

  I couldn’t detach myself from my own center,

  no decisions, no movement:

  if I moved it was because of the wind.

  JONATHAN GALASSI

  Everyone has a mystery,

  mine is headaches,

  why do they always reawaken love in me?

  Come, my love, come, I have a headache.

  Headaches maim memory

  if the head loses its memory

  there’s the heart to hoard memory,

  the heart is atemporal without history,

  you, my old sorrow, might turn into fresh joy.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  But you, are you Christians?

  So be it, you are Christians.

  At night one could be.

  So for this might

  it is thought to be life,

  this lateness, this aftermath … These bouquets of flowers

  left undelivered, in one fell swoop now

  felled, extinguished. So many flowers!

  And yet, one could …

  Exit, cross over, exceed, reach.

  JORIE GRAHAM

  I those isotopes don’t want to drink

  my thyroid I do not want to lose.

  Out of kindness it fell ill, to defend me

  from other more vicious unnatural attacks

  it shut its doors and in autarchy

  too madly it developed.

  And now modernly ungrateful

  I should suppress it as an illness?

  No, my friends I do not betray

  if they made a mistake out of too much zeal.

  Even if that were to make me well,

  and besides what a pity to die perfect.

  MARK STRAND WITH GINI AHADEFF


  Suddenly as if it were a cold

  love is back. It’s not a cold

  it’s a headache that takes away thought

  in my head and turns it into

  honey in my heart. But maybe it’s a soup

  that falling from a certain height

  melts my body into a warm emulsion:

  a body all moved being moved

  towards a very distant hub.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  I walked full of myself and very strong

  crossing the bridge disdainfully

  tough diamond sculpting the looks

  taut tight black cruel

  why should I care, I told myself, and you,

  don’t you dare even touch me!

  Behind two crazy old women I slowed down

  and overtaking one discovered myself

  between a woman weighed down by talking

  and another silently walking.

  Then with untouched fury I went forward

  past those lost lurching impediments.

  Suddenly a girl appeared

  at the streetlight across from me—a beggar.

  One in front of me, the others behind,

  the light wasn’t green so I looked at them.

  I complicated my sight. I was in the distance,

  but weakness made my legs go white.

  DAVID SHAPIRO WITH GINI ALHADEFF

  The season is inviting me. Which season is

  inviting me? I’d disappeared

  into the closed piazza of the marketplace.

  The market glistens early every morning,

  but then the fruit turns dark,

  late fruit and I move ahead,

  with my worn-out springtime step,

  amidst all this merchandise that calls me,

  I say hello and then hello and hello

  I open heart and mouth and then I close them.

  The heart opens a lot, it even rises,

  ah it rises too far and here I am dismayed

  inside a long-gone morning,

  and yet so close, my sister,

  twin of other times but always

  present, harvest that generously bends

  its back, that bends to me,

  I don’t take her and yet she insists

  on walking with me. It’s a morning

  of surrendering light, almost defeated,

  that when it isn’t seen can be surmised.

  I was in this morning and spread myself thin,

  my look neither dishonest nor truthful,

  and I saw both happiness and ruin.

  JONATHAN GALASSI

  One breath, partial but complete,

  so it is a thought emerges, rises,

  my thought, partial but complete,

  so it is born, so it shall be.

  JORIE GRAHAM

  If I turn my desk around

  my thoughts will take a different tack;

  the path to the sofa will be slower.

  Before when I was stuck

  I’d go to sleep without warning.

  I’d plunge into the cushions and my thoughts,

  dreaming themselves free, would graze

  here and there among countless blades of grass.

  MARK STRAND WITH GINI ALHADEFF

  These lovely sheaves of poetry I find

  abandoned at the first line or the second

  are like Beau Brummell’s cravats:

  the unsuccessful ones,

  his valet says. And yet

  it’s not just the maladroit first gesture

  that makes the failure, in the things themselves perhaps

  is an unwillingness to be revealed.

  They come to the window, but then, hostile, they remain

  like this, won’t open out. And if you force them

  they end badly too, there’s no art

  that will save them.

  (O laziness, how spiritual you are!)

  JONATHAN GALASSI

  Therapy

  O give me a room in a hotel

  a little room a little room in a hotel

  yes, a room a room in a hotel

  a little room a little room in a hotel.

  (… and so it goes

  without end,

  until bored and exhausted

  I fall half-dead

  on any old bed

  even unmade, even dirty.)

  MARK STRAND

  What is lost is returned to me,

  what is far away is near me today.

  Whether you’re here, wherever you are, doesn’t matter today,

  today I am held within a honeyed dome

  that dampens and mingles the surging skein

  of sounds. I am inside

  and the outside enters me.

  J. D. MCCLATCHY

  FROM

  LAZY GODS, LAZY FATE 2006

  * * *

  Pigre divinità e pigra sorte

  My landscape, which I thought was limitless

  because disassembled and put back together again it gave me the illusion

  of always new most intricate forests

  of dense meadows, ruffled and unexpected,

  now having reached the edge I can see: a closed

  little vegetable garden, walked on and bare,

  suffocating perhaps by too much care. And so

  bare myself I’ll go into the unbroken world, even

  though I fear its crashing noise. Let it spread

  over me, I sweat and feel lost, lost to myself,

  a greengrocer to me, what’s the use of that?

  I’m the stranger finally surrendering and penetrable

  I give myself up I offer myself, no, in fact I pick up strange

  grasses I’d never seen before, that I will not render

  for scientific catalogues, I’ll only sniff them

  perhaps I’ll eat them, poisonous, intoxicating,

  or ineffectual, who cares, even this late

  I open to my new audacity.

  An open field, I’d always been invited,

  I could have gone there, why didn’t I?

  Even though if I think of it, yes, I remember now,

  I’m fairly certain I’d been there before.

  DAVID SHAPIRO WITH GINI ALHADEFF

  Here I am, I do my bit,

  though I don’t know what that may be.

  If I did I could at least let go of it

  and free of it be free of being me.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  Whoever boards a train is tested,

  neglects the body, trains the spirit,

  puts the senses to sleep, really sleeps

  or transfers them to a book, a newspaper,

  or blindly stares at a casual spot

  anything not to mix with the crowd.

  But in the white crude light

  everyone is the same,

  lost people simply offered up

  to what any residual eyesight

  might still glean perhaps

  of that strange surprising thing

  that once, not so long ago,

  was a face.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  Lame pigeon. Ridiculous

  lame crooked pigeon.

  When they have defects animals

  suddenly resemble humans.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  The more bored you are, the more attached you get.

  I’m so bored, I no longer want to die.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  Lazy Gods, Lazy Fate

  Lazy gods, lazy fate

  what don’t I do to encourage you,

  think of the chances I strain to offer you

  just so you might appear!

  I lay myself bare to you and clear the field

  not for me, it’s not in my interest,

  just so you might exist I become

  an easy visible target. I even give you

  a handicap, to you the last move,

  I won’t respond, to
you that unforeseen

  last round, a revelation

  of force and grace: if there were to be any merit

  it would be yours alone. Because I don’t want

  to be the factory of my own fate,

  cowardly workmanly virtue

  bores me. I had different ambitions, dreamt

  of other kinds of judgments, other harmonies: grander

  rejections, obscure predilections,

  the fringe benefits of undeserved love.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  This sabbatical time

  before a departure, this time

  stolen from time, this time not mine

  or anyone else’s, time of suitcases

  and delays, suspended luxury,

  generous margin,

  when daring and irresponsible I can do

  what my age wouldn’t permit,

  where the most neglected thoughts arise

  and are accepted, and between pajamas and a shirt,

  surrendering, majestically settles the possible,

  where I might even phone you and declare myself

  madly in love, this sole real

  involuntary time which we are given

  by the grace of departure, this

  is nothing but prayer.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  for Alice Ceresa

  Almost always when we hear that someone’s died,

  someone we liked but hardly ever took

  the trouble to seek out, we think:—but why

  didn’t we meet more often? Now he’s gone

  and maybe I never really let him know

  how much I admired him. It’s a poor affection

  that never becomes manifest in an act.

  Like in those dreams when a longed-for good arrives

  just at our fingertips, but we can’t reach it.

  And then, what a waste, every posthumous honor,