Poem for 6/30/22 - Museum Piece by Richard Wilbur

 

Museum Piece

The good grey guardians of art
Patrol the halls on spongy shoes,
Impartially protective, though
Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse.

Here dozes one against the wall,
Disposed upon a funeral chair.
A Degas dancer pirouettes
Upon the parting of his hair.

See how she spins! The grace is there,
But strain as well is plain to see.
Degas loved the two together:
Beauty joined to energy.

Edgar Degas purchased once
A fine El Greco, which he kept
Against the wall beside his bed
To hang his pants on while he slept.

— Richard Wilbur

Poem for 6/29/22 - "Easters" by Donald Hall

 Easters

by Donald Hall

from The Painted Bed (2002)

• The epigraph to this book comes from the Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and reads: “The true subject of poetry / is the death of the beloved.”

• Note that Hall is the widower of the American poet, Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995.

On the first of the four Easters

she could still swallow, and six

days before death took her last

Communion. The tall young minister

prayed as if taking dictation

from a dying bloodstream.

On the second Easter I orbited

the world in a lust of quickness

that bloodied itself into rage

imagining murder, and collapsed

to despair. Nowhere among blasted

lilies could grace find an earth.

On the third Easter I sang hymns

and remembered earlier Aprils

when we gathered cold on the hill

at sunrise by Ansel and Edna's house,

ate homemade bacon and hot cross buns.

The grave remained the grave.

On the fourth Easter the passionate

minister with the face of a boy

spoke as he blessed Communion,

and my spirit lightened for the first

time since her death at the image

of a tomb opened, a hooded figure.

Now it is May: green hay, black flies,

and the returning peonies, each

year smaller without her attentions.

Ivisit her grave walking with Gus

but without ghosts; with daffodils,

carved names, and one year blank.

Poem for 6/28/22 - Depiction of Childhood (after Picasso) by Franz Wright

 

MINOTAUROMACHIE (1935)

Blind Minotaur Guided by a Girl in the Night, 1934

Pablo Picasso, Spanish, 1881–1973

Aquatint, engraving, drypoint, and scraper

Poem for 6/27/22 - PLATE 134. BY EAKINS. "A COWBOY IN THE WEST. AN UNIDENTIFIED MAN AT THE BADGER COMPANY RANCH." by David Ferry

 

Cowboy sitting in front of BT Ranch building
Thomas Eakins

(This is not Plate 134, but it was the best I could find on Google!)

Poem for 6/23/22 - Monet's Waterlilies by Robert Hayden

 

Monet's Waterlilies

by Robert Hayden

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

Poem for 6/22/22 - Genius by Billy Collins

 

Genius

by Billy Collins

was what they called you in high school
if you tripped on a shoelace in the hall
and all your books went flying.

Or if you walked into an open locker door,
you would be known as Einstein,
who imagined riding a streetcar into infinity.

Later, genius became someone
who could take a sliver of chalk and squire pi
a hundred places out beyond the decimal point,

or a man painting on his back on a scaffold,
or drawing a waterwheel in a margin,
or spinning out a little night music.

But earlier this week on a wooded path,
I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir
were the true geniuses,

the ones who had figured out how to fly,
how to be both beautiful and brutal,
and how to mate for life.

Twenty-four geniuses in all,
for I numbered them as Yeats had done,
deployed upon the calm, crystalline surface—

forty-eight if we count their white reflections,
or an even fifty if you want to throw in me
and the dog running up ahead,

who were at least smart enough to be out
that morning—she sniffing the ground,
me with my head up in the bright morning air.

Poem for 6/21/22 - WHITMAN / VITMAN by Richard Fein

 WHITMAN / VITMAN

by Richard Fein

If you had been Velvl Vitman, I'd have

turned your Yiddish into English, I

poking around in the circuits of your beard,

my fingers finding and tracing your face,

my palms grazing your ruddy flesh,

your body and movements affecting me

and my characters, my strokes, and my lines;

the tones of the syllables, and pauses,

and the corresponding flecks of our words

make a marriage between us, my English

coming off of your Yiddish, tongue to tongue,

you then closer to me than ever before.

Of if I was Ruvn-Yankev Fayn and you still

Walt Whitman, I'd have turned your English

into Yiddish, showing how the body

of a poem could turn into another body,

the two of us closer than ever,

the way V inheres in W.

from Losing It (2021)

Poem for 6/20/22 - Morning Poem by Mary Oliver

 

“Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches–
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead–
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging–

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted–

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

 

“Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver, Dream Work (1986).

 

Of a Certain Friendship

Elsa Gidlow

Odd how you entered my house quietly, Quietly left again. While you stayed you ate at my table, Slept in my bed. There was much sweetness, Yet little was done, little said. After you left there was pain, Now there is no more pain. But the door of a certain room in my house Will be always shut. Your fork, your plate, the glass you drank from, The music you played, Are in that room With the pillow where last your head was laid. And there is one place in my garden Where it’s best that I set no foot.

Poem for 6/7/22 - The Book of Ruth and Naomi by Marge Piercy

This poem is anthologized in the Yizkor service in the Conservative Movement's most recent prayer book. 

The Book of Ruth and Naomi
By Marge Piercy

When you pick up the Tanakh and read
the Book of Ruth, it is a shock
how little it resembles memory.
It's concerned with inheritance,
lands, men's names, how women
must wiggle and wobble to live.

Yet women have kept it dear
for the beloved elder who
cherished Ruth, more friend than
daughter. Daughters leave. Ruth
brought even the baby she made
with Boaz home as a gift.

Where you go, I will go too,
your people shall be my people,
I will be a Jew for you,
for what is yours I will love
as I love you, oh Naomi
my mother, my sister, my heart.

Show me a woman who does not dream
a double, heart's twin, a sister
of the mind in whose ear she can whisper,
whose hair she can braid as her life
twists its pleasure and pain and shame.
Show me a woman who does not hide 

in the locket of bone that deep
eye beam of fiercely gentle love
she had once from mother, daughter,
sister; once like a warm moon
that radiance aligned the tides
of her blood into potent order.

At the season of first fruits, we recall
two travelers, co-conspirators, scavengers
making do with leftovers and mill ends,
whose friendship was stronger than fear,
stronger than hunger, who walked together,
the road of shards, hands joined.

Marge Piercy's poem "The Book of Ruth and Naomi" first appeared in Mars and Her Children (Knopf, 1992).