Dailies 1/27/18

Rachael Hegarty – The Purple Shamrock, Boston

The manager, a Galway curlew,
tells me to swot up
on the menu
and make sure to let

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Miller Oberman – Silentium

The sun didn’t set, but like a fallen rider
the light un-horsed itself, dove shaggy

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Gertrude Stein – Tender Buttons [A Little Called Pauline]

A little called anything shows shudders.
Come and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope.

–

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~TRIBRACH~

Poetry Diary: because her essay is getting so much attention:

Rebecca Watts – The Molecatcher’s Warning

Nobody asked or answered questions out there.
Ten miles from the nearest anywhere
the landscape was a disbanded library.

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Dailies 11/2/17: diamonds, sunshower, Election Night, dinner fight, brooding, skeleton

~~~TRIBRACH~~~

Poetry Diary: Today was the Day of the Dead….

Jane Hirshfield – My Skeleton

My skeleton,
you who once ached
with your own growing larger

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Natalie Shapero – Sunshower

Some people say the devil is beating

his wife. Some people say the devil

is pawing his wife. Some people say

the devil is doubling down on an overall

–

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Aaron Poochigian – My Political Poem 

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Election Night. A Walman parking lot.
A green fog off the half-drained reservoir
had jumped the fence to breed with puffs of pot
issuing from a mag-wheeled muscle car.

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C.K. Williams – Peace

–

We fight for hours, through dinner, through the endless evening, who
 *****even knows now what about,
what could be so dire to have to suffer so for, stuck in one another’s craws
*****like fishbones,

–

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Monica Ferrell – Of the Irresolubleness of Diamonds

If my love for you were a teacup,

I would praise it for its blue. I’d consider

Its delicate handle, the pictures painted there

Of ladies, of their parasols.

But my love is not a teacup,

–

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Donika Kelly – Brood

My chest is earth

I meant to write my chest is warm
but earth will do

–

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Dailies 10/20/17: “The best poems take long journeys.” Poems referencing San Francisco, Kansas, Seattle, New Orleans, & New Haven

Sarah Sarai  – Andy Warhol Left Those Parties by Midnight

You will not wake at 7
tomorrow morning and
start working as I’ve read
he did, will not wonder until
9 or 11 a.m. if you can fly
Berthe to San Francisco
to confirm sorrow everywhere.

–

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Philip Schaefer – Touching Down

So much for
the lone cannon

up to its ears
in winter wheat

in the Kansas
of someone’s dying

–

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Prageeta Sharma – Seattle Sun

There is a quick sharp pull that one might feel, with it a weighted turn to finding brightness where there is none. I have Seattle to thank for this, but the home of ours must be built anew. And yet I am not in my method and have no sense of worship for the work

–

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Robert Bly – The Day We Visited New Orleans

–

So much time has gone by! Napoleon’s house—
He never came—still stands in the Quarter.
Time ends all the good living that
Louis the Sixteenth, after the trouble, never

–

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~~~TRIBRACH~~~

Poetry Diary: since all of the other poems today mention cities etc. I figured I’d put one up re: the town I work in. 

Carolyn M. Rodgers – East of New Haven

–

you see so many

********graveyards around

******these little towns—

********out in the open

**********spaces & places.

–

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Dailies 10/12/17: luggage, teeth, a runaway military surveillance blimp, staring into the sun, double double toil & trouble

Ted Kooser – Luggage

I’ve given away the black Samsonite suitcase
that for thirty-five years enfolded my suits
like a wallet, though months before, I’d already
set it forever aside. For the very last time

–

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Thomas Lux – A Little Tooth

–

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s all

–

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Jehanne Dubrow – Runaway Military Surveillance Blimp Drifts from Maryland to Pennsylvania 

*****The aerostat looks less like a balloon
than like a woman, her body’s milky curves—

–

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Jennifer Grotz – Staring into the Sun

What had been treacherous the first time

had become second nature, releasing

the emergency brake, then rolling backwards

in little bursts, braking the whole way down

–

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~~~TRIBRACH~~~

Poetry Diary: getting ready for Halloween….

William Shakespeare – Song of the Witches: “Double, double toil and trouble” (from Macbeth)

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the caldron boil and bake;

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

–

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Dailies 10/9/17: a car accident, buttercups, the death of a horse, our spirits, Christopher Columbus

Jeff Coomer – Six Inches

–

One minute I’m meandering down
a country road on a magnificent fall day,
lost in thought, radio playing,
and the next minute I feel my wheels

–

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Mary Ann Samyn  – A Wind Comes Through

—and buttercups respond. A beautiful set-up,
for as long as it lasts.

By habit, the mind imagines what it would prefer.

–

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Linda Gregerson – Narrow Flame

–

Sun at the zenith. Greening

*******earth.

  Slight buckling of the left

–

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Mark Waldron – How scrubbed-up clean

are our spirits, these loquacious silver gods who glide at
some safe distance above their rank and proletarian bodies.

Foul though fascinating landscapes they are that they
traverse, besmirched with armpits and fruity genitalia

–

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~~~TRIBRACH~~~

Poetry Diary: It’s Columbus Day. 

Trumbull Stickney – You Say, Columbus with his Argosies

You say, Columbus with his argosies

Who rash and greedy took the screaming main

And vanished out before the hurricane

Into the sunset after merchandise,

–

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Dailies 9/4/17: sweatshop fire, drifting from loved ones, a clown family, the sun getting over everything, the new higher

TRIBRACH

Poetry Diary: Happy Labor Day….

Robert Pinsky – Shirt 

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,

The nearly invisible stitches along the collar

Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

–

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Paul Hunter – The Clown Family Moved

“THE CLOWN FAMILY MOVED into a big old house late one fall,
just before his mother came home from the hospital with a brand-new
baby boy. They didn’t have much furniture, and at the moment no
mom, so the place felt huge and hollow. And the furnace didn’t work

–

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–

Charles Rafferty – Drift

–

Long ago, the old friends stopped calling. I used to think they had
lost my number. Now I forgive them their children and their jobs,
their wives and their divorces, their cancer and their lawns, the fifteen
minutes they allow themselves at the piano every night. I am able to go

–

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–

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John Ashbery – The New Higher

You meant more than life to me. I lived through
you not knowing, not knowing I was living.
I learned that you called for me. I came to where
you were living, up a stair. There was no one there.

–

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–

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Gabrielle Calvocoressi  – The Sun Got All Over Everything

Over the boys and girls by the pool,
over the bougainvillea, which got so hot
my palms stayed warm for minutes after.
It made a mess of a day
that was supposed to be the worst
and lured me outside so I forgot her death entirely.

–

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SUN

(poetry diary 245-4/22/17) Sun!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I sat in the sun

Jane Hirshfield

–

I moved my chair into sun

–

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Dailies 1/25/17: 4 on mortality

Each Day The Sun Makes Us – Greg Watson

Each day the sun makes us believe
it will last forever, and then
disappears again into the earth,

–

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Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard – Kay Ryan

–

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;

–

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City Championship, 1926 – Floyd Skloot

–

My father was a sprinter in his youth
nicknamed Horse for the hitch in his gait.
Here he is airborne in a mid-stride haze.

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Children of Aleppo – Chard deNiord

The children were asking
a thousand questions about why
the sky was blue and grass was green
when suddenly their tongues
were stilled by an answer they
never saw. Now silence rings

–

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