One blood-drop trickles toward his wrist. Somehow
the grieving women missed it when they bathed,
today, the empty corpse. Most Christs return.
But this one’s flesh. He isn’t coming back.

When I get home, I’ll go in the kitchen
and place that beating hour on a cutting board,
put an edge on my cook’s knife,
and slice that bleeding hour in two.

I’ll grill the halves with olive oil,
red skin potatoes, Michigan asparagus, and a pinch of salt.

We’ll share a bottle of valpolicella on the patio.

*

My friend Murray has been rounding out his last days in Iraq. I aim to go see him in Vicksburg this summer, hear him give a reading, and share a bottle of something expensive. I’m crazy about his recent work, which I’ve found not only to cut close to the bone of my own experience, but to resist classification. His lines are unselfconscious. They speak their mind without apology. They do not look back, not even to wink. If a door is said to close with a poem’s ending, it fails to latch. There’s no click, just the screen door’s crack on its frame, and a boy’s shadow disappearing in the woods, and the wind rocking the hinges.

He’s kept a blog during his tour where he posts poems, photos, drawings, and other miscellany. See http://murrayshugars.blogspot.com/.

we hope my mother won’t see us, but later we don’t care,
we forget her. Suddenly she makes a noise
like a game show alarm and says Hey! Stop that!
and we put our hands out where she can see them.
Our mouths stay pressed together, though, and
when she isn’t looking anymore our hands go
back inside each other’s clothes. We could

go where no one can see us, but we are
good kids, from good families, trying to have
as much discreet sex as possible with my mother and father
four feet away watching strangers kiss on TV,
my mother and father who once did as we are doing,
something we can’t imagine because we know

that before we put our mouths together, before
the back seat of his parents’ car where our skins
finally become one-before us, these things
were unknown! Our parents look on in disbelief
as we pioneer delights they thought only they knew
before those delights gave them us.

Years later, still we try to be discreet, standing
in the kitchen now where we think she can’t see us. I
slip my hands down inside the back of his jeans
and he gets up under the front of my shirt.
We open our mouths to kiss and suddenly Hey! Hey!
says our daughter glaring from the kitchen doorway.
Get a room! she says, as we put our hands
out where she can see them.

*

In his daybook, George Oppen writes, “Surely there are situations in which it’s absurd to write poetry!” He had the worst of our collective capacities in mind–the slaughter of innocents, for example–to which poetry has no answer. Similarly, one is tempted to question his own happiness, that daily pursuit of delight, in the face of human suffering. Gilbert’s poem is an unusual defense of delight, even the kind of delight one finds in poetry. It takes stubbornness, he tells us, to accept our own enjoyment notwithstanding the world’s ills.

At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!

*

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

*

Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbours he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.

*

But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbours or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

*

If only more came to light, were soon made clear! Poetry, of course, is meant in part to bring about such clarity, unveil such light. Too often it does the opposite. Taha Muhammed Ali is among our living poets–though he lives far away, in Nazareth, running a souvenir shop with his sons–committed to the kind of emotional directness I find myself drawn to in poetry, the only kind of poetry that stands a chance of reawakening a general interest. There’s a nice piece by Gabriel Levin on the poet here, where you can also find a few other translated poems.

frivolous
I have neglected this obligation
or have been fulfilling it
superficially

beginning tomorrow
everything will change
I will start dying assiduously
wisely optimistically
without wasting time

(Trans. from the Polish by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire)

*

“The dance of poetry” ended, Rozewicz has said, after the concentrations camps. One of the preeminent Polish poets of the last century, Rozewicz’s poetic career has been in many ways a response to the aftermath of World War II. His poems are aesthetically straightforward, with little ornament. He has been called a “poet of silence,” but I don’t really know what that means. I had never thought about dying as a task one takes up, and with urgency. One among many others, it seems, and like so many other failed tasks, one feels compelled to begin over and over.

*

I asked Bob Murphy to make an appearance last week as “Guest Poet” for the literature class I teach at the Art Academy. He read this poem and a few others, and spoke with such eloquence and feeling about the tension between seeing and being seen, the wonderfully complex reciprocity our bodies are engaged in with the world around us. The poem comes from his extraordinary collection Life in the Ordovician (Dos Madres Press, 2007).

*

This poem first appeared in Smartish Pace in 2004, and I’m not sure which book of Kooser’s it landed in, but I found an edited version online with a couple recognizable alterations. The online version reads like this:

The fist’s weight is firm on the lid
of this rough old box of rock and sod
in which all the relics are kept,
the sermons, the prayers, the gossip.

By giving up “Nebraska” for “rock and sod”, it seems Kooser is willing to sacrifice specificity to gain a greater music. And perhaps replacing “skulls” with “gossip” makes the line more plausible. To be honest, I don’t know which version I prefer. It’s the buffalo nickels that carry the poem anyway. Only the bison remain faithful, offering their tithe to the Church of Rock and Sod.

How homely
it is, how
loosely belted,
like snot on a pretty
girl. How it
stands along a road
somewhere hot and
distantly in country,
shaking itself dry,
swept up in a
blaze of daylilies,
nothing but
sky overhead,
nothing on its
schedule
but Now:
good work.

Way to go.

*

This comes from Richard Hague’s Public Hearings, sent to me early this morning by a friend, “Comic Relief” in the subject line. A reminder not just that word play is good fun, but that I have friends awake earlier than I with my own need for relief–of whatever kind–in mind.