Charles Wright, from Littlefoot (#8)

Good luck is a locked door,
                          but the key's around here somewhere.
Meanwhile, half-hidden under the thick staircase of memory,
One hears the footsteps go up and the footsteps go down.

As water mirrors the moon, the earth mirrors heaven,
Where things without shadows have shadows.
A lifetime isn't too much to pay
                                for such a reflection.

Littlefoot is a book-length poem in which Wright, coming up on his seventieth birthday, confronts the big questions of life and death. The New Yorker published section 14, section 32, and section 34 earlier this year, while the Academy of American Poets put section 19 on its website.

Eliza Griswold, "Wideawake Field"

I've never been where we are,
although the glass studded
with soldier's rusted buttons
says we aren't the first.
The airstrip's islands of cracked macadam
suggest an ancient volcano.
We are the volcano.
We, the notes sung
by a creator, who, if not singular,
is creation—
not an idea, a force.
Let us tumble.
Let us laugh at our grip.
If these are last days,
let them not catch us sleeping
but awake in this field, and ready.

The title poem from Griswold's debut collection, Wideawake Field. She is also a Nieman Fellow journalist who's written feature stories on, among other subjects, the frontlines of Iraq, the radical Islamist insurgency in Bangladesh, cannibalism among Congolese rebels, and what U.S. military are doing in Afghan prisons, and her first book-length work of nonfiction, The Tenth Parallel, will be published later this year. (I first mentioned these articles after attending Griswold's book party for GalleyCat.)

Cathy Park Hong, "The Lineage of Yes-Men"

Nut'ing but brine jars y jaundice widows en mine old village.
I's come from 'eritage o peddlas y traitors,
whom kneel y quaff a lyre spoon-me-spondas. Mine fadder
sole Makkoli wine to whitey GIs din guidim to widows fo bounce.
Me grandfadder sole Makkoli wine to Hapenese colonists
din he guidim to insurrectas... sticka hop? Some pelehuu?

Afta war, villa men pelt mine grandfadder wit ground stones.
He stand in de cold tillim fingas frost jawed, until blewblack.
Villagers callim yellow, callim chihuahua ssaeki, a dies irae
fo yesman—he yessed his way to gravestone.

Din mine fadder sole Makkoli—he a 'Merriken GI chihuahua.
Some populii tink GIs heroes with dim strafing "Pinko chink"
but eh! Those Jees like regula pirates, search fo booty y pillage...

He took Jees to war widows tho widows too dry woeing tears
for Eros. He like mine grandfadder yessed y yessed, nodded
til no lift him fes up. In his deathbed... sayim to me,
Ttallim, you say no, no, no, you say only no. Him fes
waterlog de liquor y when him die, he retched white.

From Dance Dance Revolution, the winner of the 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize. Hong will be reading with Christian Hawkey and Rachel Zucker tomorrow night at a Bryant Park event sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. After that, check her blog for future events... or listen to her read the poem "Zoo" at Salon.

Matt Donovan, "Charlie Chaplin Dug Up & Ransomed: A Prayer"

That my body, Lord, might rise too, resurrected reluctantly from earth,
given the rainwater, the dawn begun, grave walls pitched into ooze,

given that the scheme to bury me deeper in my own grave's dirt will fail
because of schanpps & mud & Lord, let the breath of those who deliver me

that night be sweetened by cherry-tipped cigars. Allow what will lift me
fumbling the first March of my death to be not only a shovel, the grace of rope,

a mechanic's coat trussed to brass handles, but also the plan for a paid-for garage,
pave cement floors, a procession of wrenches in a drawer. Grant me

morning light in a pickup bed, lying within earshot of Bulgarian songs that rhyme
thigh with smoke & permit me, Lord, once hangovers wane, to be stashed

at the far edge of a field, close to the rocks of a fishing spot where a thief will always—
or for more than a week—watch me, conceal me, keep me in spring heat, devour

a plum & suck its pit clean, dream of cash he half knows won't come. Let my reward,
Lord, be crow wings, furrows, bits of last year's stalks, three threadbare burlap sacks.

From Vellum, the winner of this year's Bread Loaf Writer's Conference Bakeless Prize. See also "Saint Catherine in an O: A Song About Knives," published in Agni.

Nathaniel Bellows, "Horticultural"

I did not saw the fallen tree—not all
of it had fallen—because somehow each spring,
the rotted half still mysteriously bloomed.

In the orchard we hung iron fruit, syrup-coated
decoys to fool devouring convoys of insects.
The harvest suffered but survived the early frost,
and we grew sick of the sweetness of peaches.

We ate from the garden till it was spent, then
threw its left-behinds at each other—failures
still in their beds, scabbed over with saltmarsh hay.

Although the holly never went out of leaf,
we only clipped the branches, the berries
for the cold season when Joy took root in the house
and crept from room to room like a scarlet vine.

From Why Speak? Bellows will read tonight at Morningside Bookshop; he was also the first poet to read on the NY Times website back in 2002.

(And, yes, I had so much fun running poems for National Poetry Month I'm going to keep at it for a while. Enjoy!)

Albert Goldbarth,
"The Initial Published Discovery"

In another poem, I chronicled my descent
to a level of shadow and intermittent fiery light.
It was a world of empty faces—almost sucked out,
as if eggs the weasels got at had been turned to faces.
Wanderers and their hunched-up stalkers,
mutterers to angry private gods... that's who I found
down there. I was talking about
our dream life—our subconscious—but a friend said
that she thought I'd meant the New York subway system,
ha ha. Nonetheless, I give to the neurobiologists
this first identification of a mechanism, somewhere in the brain,
I call "the turnstile." It allows our passage
into the depths. And what's the morning
—what's the clear new start—if not our exiting
back into this life through the same round gate?

From The Kitchen Sink, a new collection spanning the last thirty-five years of Goldbarth's career. Shortly after he won his second National Book Critics Circle award in 2002, Eric McHenry celebrated Goldbarth's "wacky, talky, and fat" poems in Slate. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, "[his] erudition and wit found expression in compulsively wordy but dazzling compositions."

Edward Dorn, "Are They Dancing"

There is a sad carnival up the valley
The willows flow it seems on trellises of music
Everyone is there today, everyone I love.

There is a mad mad fiesta along the river
Thrilling ladies sing in my ear, where
Are your friends, lost? They were to come

And banjoes were to accompany us all
And our feet were to go continually
The sound of laughter was to flow over the water

What was to have been, is something else
I am afraid. Only a letter from New Mexico
And another from a mountain by Pocatello.

I wonder, what instruments are playing
And whose eyes are straying over the mountain
Over the desert
And are they dancing: or gazing at the earth.

From Way More West, a posthumous collection reviewed today in the New York Times by August Kleinzahler, who observes: "Throughout his career, he was the least endearing, domesticated or predictable of poets, always determined to go his own way, no matter what anyone thought. And if he hadn't been that way, American poetry would be a lot less vital and interesting." (Really, though, that's the sort of thing one would say about any poet if they're any good, isn't it? It hardly seems like much of a critical insight, which is surprising because Kleinzahler's usually much sharper.)

You might listen to Dorn reading from his work.

Natasha Trethewey,
"Theories of Time and Space"

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion—dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp—buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry—tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph—who you were—
will be waiting when you return

From Native Guard, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Hear Tretheway read this poem in a recording of a March 2007 event at the AWP writers' conference.

Joseph Lease, from "Free Again"

When I can't sleep I am full of red buds and torn curtains and shiny cars parked in a lot. My lower-middle-class manners tear through my upper-middle-class manners: I stared at braided colors in water while my peers figured out the art of the deal. I was (I wanted to be) a Miwestern boy with a disco in my eyes—Chicago Jew, greengold suburb Jew, son of a Coney Island Jew. When I drank I got punched up by luminous waves of anger. I thought I had to chhoose between winning in New York and being a good person. I'm not a good person: a good person doesn't talk about himself—or so good people tell me. What is our country. Did it start as blank, as blank blank, as blank blank blank. I would love to fly to Vegas for the Punk Festival—we aren't the first culture to "monetize relationships"—force steel splintering, force breathing, moisture in the air: the city dissolves, one long story of corruption: USA means the outer miracle kills the inner miracle: history has to live with what was here: no images, no lightning, no letters of flame: leaves move, clouds move, money moves, night pushes through the money—

From Broken World. Lease reads tonight with Paul Vazquez at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, and also at Labyrinth Book this Saturday afternoon.

Carl Dennis, "At the Border"

At the border between the past and the future
No sign on a post warns you that your passport
Won't let you return to your native land
As a citizen, just as a tourist
Who Won't be allowed to fraternize with the locals.

No guard steps out of a booth to explain
You can't bring gifts back, however modest,
Can't even pass a note to a few friends
That suggests what worries of theirs are misguided,
What expectations too ambitious.

Are you sure you're ready to leave,
To Cross the bridge that begins
Under a clear sky and ends in fog?
But look, you've started across already
And it's one-lane wide, with no room for U-turns.

No time even to pause as drivers behind you
Lean on their horns, those who've convinced themselves
Their home awaits them on the other side.

From Unknown Friends, who will be reading with Henri Cole tonight at Housing Works Café in an event sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. As he explained to a reader during an online Q&A, "Poetry is useful in that it allows readers to feel that they are not alone, that others have thought and felt as they have. It can do this more powerfully than any other kind of writing, or at least more directly, because in a good poem we are made to feel that we are in the presence of a whole human being speaking to us directly, or providing a script for us to enter as we see fit."

Linda Gregerson, from "De Magnete"

It was during the siege of Lucera
     that Petrus Peregrinus (Peter
the Pilgrim), builder of catapults, layer
of mines, chief engineer and servant
     to Charles the servant of God,
conducted in his leisure hours behind
     the fortifications whose
erection he himself had lately overseen
     experiments on the lodestone.
From his letter "On the Magnet" (August
     8, 1269), a world
of usefulness and chiefly as to method, only
     later named and codified. "My dearest
friend," he wrote. The scorching wind.
     The city not yet fallen. Soon.

From Magnetic North, which also includes the long poem "Bicameral." Gregerson will be taking part in the "Reading Between A & B" series next month with C. Dale Young and John Gallaher. Here's a preview of what she might sound like: "Narrow Flame," which she read last month to an Atlanta audience.

Dorianne Laux, "Moon in the Window"

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

From Facts About the Moon. Laux is also the co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. On the subject of inspiration, Laux told an interviewer: "There is no one way to get into a poem. And that’s part of the excitement, that you never know what the trigger will be. And for me, much of the enjoyment of writing is the search for the exact word. I like moving through my day thinking about a line of poetry, searching for a word. Precision is as important to poets as it is to watchmakers or the builders of bridges. Each brick or board or steel rod needs to be perfect to hold the thing up."

Robert Wrigley, "Review"

Impossible not to admire the stinbug's blundering:
sitting on the porch, I could see among the swarm flying my way
this particular one at least twenty yards or more away
before—and despite my hapless ducks and feints—
he smacked me right in the forehead and fell
exactly into the center of the book my evasive manuevering
had caused me to forget about, so that it closed on him
and wounded him, yes, it's true, but not before
he left in the thin of it that amazing harsh camphor
and swampy crotchland smell he is most famously known for,
which even today, some years later, still purls
from its pages, though I have not opened the book again.

From Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems. "My sense of the poem has come to be that it is a thing that emerges in the writing. It is rarely something premeditated, plotted, graphed, or outlined in advance," Wrigley once told an interviewer. "Good poems are smart. They devise ways of allowing the reader in. They don't answer all the questions; they pose questions. But the ones that matter most to me are the ones that allow me to come inside and see how the light shines through the windows."

Elaine Equi,
"The Objects in Japanese Novels"

Empty cages outline
the periphery of a named thing.
Their emptiness shines
like lanterns on virgin snow.
A few flakes swirl up,
caught—as scenic views
are caught in parts of speech,
where wishes and schemes
glow gloomy as a shrine,
and hair is a kind of incense.
Here, even abundance is delicate
with a slender waist.
And sorrow, embarrassment, disgust
can be aestheticized too
if surrounded by the right things—
a refreshing breeze, a small drum.

From Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems. Equi will be reading tonight at Marymount Manhattan College with fellow poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, in a National Poetry Month event sponsored by the Academy of American Poets.

Jillian Weise, "Incision"

The nape of my neck is a tell.
Otherwise you wouldn't notice
with the layers of clothes: shirt,
vest, scarf, coat.

Undressed, it's a solitary hole
in the middle of a white wall, you
can't help but stare, what picture
hung there, what of, what color?

It gets worse than this, you'll
want to see how far down it goes.
The circular incision top and bottom,
a line contained by points.

The seal of an envelope, opened.

From The Amputee's Guide to Sex, the debut collection from Wiese, an actress and former editorial assistant at The Paris Review. Though Wiese is an amputee, her publisher cautions, "the poems have a life of their own" and are not necessarily autobiographical. See also "The Body in Pain" and "Us, Like a Bad Mix Tape," along with several other poems on her Soft Skull Press page.

Josephine Dickinson, "Do I Sleep With You?"

Do I sleep with you or you with me?
It's splitting hairs to say I came to you
and use your brush and comb, and therefore we
don't "sleep together." But it may be true.
In any case, I say you sleep with me.
The action's mostly yours. You made me stay.
Made staying perfect, future and to be.
Apart from that, it's what most people say.
Tributaries join rivers, but they mix,
go to somewhere, neither cares to where.
Both stand and swell their bank beside a tree.
They're not concerned with any verbal tricks.
So, say I oined your river, if you dare.
In any case, I say you sleep with me.

From Slience Fell, the American debut collection from Josephine Dickson, which, drawing upon several volumes published in the UK, tells the story of her marriage to a Cumbrian sheep farmer who was more than twice her age when they met.

"Roshi," Leonard Cohen

I never really understood
what he said
but every now and then
I find myself
barking with the dog
or helping out
in other little ways