COUNTDOWN!

The Headache of Ranking

2009-12-27T02:58:00.000-08:00

I've lost count of my annual countdowns--the silly little reward I give myself at the end of the year (or, before, the end of the school year) for basically reading the books I've spent a lot of moolah to have.

Three things are different this year: one, they're all single-author poetry collections/compilations; two, I've taken the liberty of typing out some excerpts (if you're the author and reading this, no harm intended--my only intention is to encourage more people to read your work and buy your book/s as well); and three, I've given in for the first time to the temptation of extending the list beyond the traditional top ten (five more books all came in at number 11).

I've been shuffling and reshuffling the top three for hours now, even while the posts were already published. And as usual, it breaks my heart that only one book can be number one (This is true. I'm not saying this as some kind of apology to the other authors--who I'm sure do not know me anyway--as defensive as it sounds). They were all number ones the moment they broke down my walls.

Enjoy, and see you next year!

11: Flour, water, salt and yeast

2009-12-27T02:45:00.000-08:00

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
Interior with Sudden Joy
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999

Rise

I can’t believe you’ve come back,
like the train I missed so badly, barely,
which stopped & returned for me. It scared me,
humming backwards along the track.

I rise to make a supper succulent
for the cut of your mouth, your bite of wine
so sharp, you remember you were mine.
You may resist, you will relent.

At home in fire, desire is bread
whose flour, water, salt and yeast,
not yet confused, are still, at least,
in the soil, the sea, the mine, the dead.

I have all I longed for, you
in pleasure. You missed me, your body swelling.
Once more, you lie with me, smelling
of almonds, as the poisoned do.

11: Geep driving you grazy

2009-12-27T02:44:00.000-08:00

KRISTIN NACA
Bird Eating Bird
Harper Perennial, 2009

Language Poetry / Grandma’s English

Dos / doze / those / toes shuffles through my head
when grandma speaks, consonants blurred
from her mouth a flat tire. Unable to make out
each word I try reading lips, What / that / cat woman,
but end up lost. Her lips relaxed, bursts of sound
fretting through them. You muddy her, Grandma barks
at my father. You muddy her, she drives you grazy.

A child, I love their arguments, never fully
understanding what Grandma means when
she tells Dad, She got you rosin / rousing / rosing.
You watch. She geep driving you grazy. Though
I do get when my Grandma says, / gahng /, for can,
and when she says, /gahng /, for can’t.
When she curses, wants sympathy—like,
/ Ghang / it raw meat. It give you gancer.
Look it’s / rrrud /, she blusters. Her r
like she’s starting a lawn mower. / Rrraw / meat,
Charlie, she argues, shows it to my father.

Marinade, he answers. And Grandma gives up.
A martyr, she says, Go on, it it. Her tongue,
forcing sparks from our household English.
Beauty when she grabs her chest and sighs,
I gahng go up dos stairs, Charlie, my art, my art!

11: In a walled world

2009-12-27T02:43:00.000-08:00

MOOKIE KATIGBAK
The Proxy Eros
Anvil, 2008

As Far as Cho-Fu-Sa

If you are coming down the river Kiang, let me know beforehand and I will come out to meet you as far as Cho-Fu-Sa.
- Li Po, "The River Merchant's Wife" (trans. Ezra Pound)

What I am, ever, is this: composure of stone.
Spare weather visiting the garden, small as the hours
I keep watch by. Beyond this wall

Must be better weathers. This claw of stars
Must constellate somewhere into a bear,
Else names would lie.

Since winter’s thaws, no script from you
Save this: “I travel the river and follow
The white gulls—”

Husband. See me walking the dusty pass
Where loom our prior lives?
Here the years pass that I enshrine

Within these walls, sparing nothing
From the ardors of my stare. Blue plums,
Paired butterflies repeat you

In a walled world. I tell myself
To clear the moss, mend the gate
So long unswayed and caked with dirt,

But nothing moves. Somewhere
You are actual. Happen to me there.

11: Reckless weeds

2009-12-27T02:35:00.000-08:00

L. LACAMBRA YPIL
The Highest Hiding Place
Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009

Garden

When we talked about the world
we were talking about order:
a trail of grass, a fist of blooms.
My mother points to a slow
and deliberate fall of the full fruit.

“When we are dying,” she says
“when we are long gone and dead,”

And it is so easy to pretend we had a world
of choice. A green, easy tending.
The orchids tenaciously
cling to their dark barks.

We talked straight into evening,
straight into each tangled tendril
angled against dark, into dark.
If we could only hold the edgeless
in place. Night and its reckless weeds.
The light was not ours to give.

11: Like fear in reverse

2009-12-27T02:13:00.000-08:00

TRACY K. SMITH
Duende
Graywolf Press, 2007

“I Killed You Because You Didn’t Go to School and Had No Future”

—Note left beside the body of
nine-year-old Patricio Hilario,
found in a Rio street n 1989

You voice crashed through the alley
Like a dog with tin cans tied to its tail.

Idiot pranks. At the sight of your swagger
Old women prayed faster, whispered.

Their daughters yelled after you. Little shit.
Delinquent. You couldn’t even read

What we wrote about kids like you. Today,
Heat wends up from the neighbors’ houses

Like fear in reverse. You uncle
Wears trousers and perspires

Into the seams of his shirt. His only belt
Is full of new holes and nearly circles you twice.

10: For the vein glowing green on the thigh

2009-12-27T02:07:00.000-08:00

RICK BAROT
Want
Sarabande Books, 2008

Elegy

In this rain we are moved to anecdotes.
That people float candles out to the river.
That in a field there is the crickets’ grief.
It could be colder just now but it isn’t.
Though there are the posters’ missing faces.
Though a car is upside down, wheel turning.
The day will only want to keep arriving.
We will startle for the clothes by the bed.
For the vein glowing green on the thigh.
The coffee will come black in its cup.
The bread will be made of something clean.
This will not seem enough and it isn’t:
The white nouns of the moon, the paper.
The handkerchief pulled from an empty fist.

#9: Kundiman

2009-12-27T02:01:00.000-08:00

EUGENE GLORIA
Drivers at the Short-Time Motel
Penguin Books, 2000

White Flower

In a cul-de-sac valley,
a woman’s hand smooths petals,
then clips thorned stems
she’ll arrange in a choir of roses.

Out back is her husband lost
in the long ago as he scoops
a fistful of earth to plant seedlings
of peach, or plum, he no longer remembers.

But the husband recalls
what he refuses to forget of the hot months
before the vagrant rains of July,

before the small flat
where nights his children slept
side by side on straw mats spread on the floor,

and in a separate room,
desire’s cries muffled to a hush.

What the husband remembers
is his boyhood town
and the history of his heart

where once a woman in a light
summer dress and borrowed high heels

came to visit and never returned
to the city where she’s from.

This is the story he unearths
from the wilderness within.
A story about winning
this woman’s hand
after showing her the old church
and the choir loft where he sang.

Legend has it that elopement
is another word for abduction,
this woman’s version, perhaps not as sweet.

I recall my father’s story
and retell it to my lover
as we walk through paved streets
I can no longer name.

Tonight my sleeping lover’s body
shapes the sheet covering her.
She is tossing and churning in a storm
of uneasy sleep. I pause from writing,

Wake her with my boathand
sailing over waves of shadowy sinews,
the ripples of her spine,
muscle and skin against skin.

My fingertips oiled with White Flower:
pungent cure-all for the body’s pain,
except for the boneache of sweet desire.

Once there was a man who palmed seeds
on a smooth earth as if they were memories,
and a woman’s tenderest hands gave in to love.

#8: In this way you are erased

2009-12-27T01:56:00.000-08:00

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
Human Dark with Sugar
Copper Canyon Press, 2008

Straight’s the New Gay

Because if you are a woman you should fall for another
at least once in your life

unless you are in the deviant minority of women
claiming to be 110 percent heterosexual.

In that case it is an imperative: defy your nature.
Get rid of that too-protesty 10 percent.

You, more so than normal women, will fall harder
than you ever imagined.

Your bruises will be museum-quality Ming Dynasty
frog-blossoms uprooting your veins.

Words like penis-substitute or lifestyle,
as applied to yours,

will wound and incite you into daily little wars.
This is a regime change.

Nevertheless, still a regime. You will be gayer
than the most-aborted genes,

more lesbian than anything else you will ever be.
In this way you are erased

(you’ve known it and feared it all along) from science,
discourse, your careers.

This is how we do it to you: we keep you extremes
to either side

and parade down the middle while you cheer us on.

#7: Here are the ashes

2009-12-27T01:50:00.000-08:00

Ann Lauterbach
Hum
Penguin Books, 2005

Hum

The days are beautiful.
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of the weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.
The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.
The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.
The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?
The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.
The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.
What are these ashes?

Here is the hate
That does not travel.

Here is the robe
That smells of the night

Here are the words
Retired to their books

Here are the stones
Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge
Over the water

Here is the place
Where the sun came up

Here is a season
Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.
The days are beautiful.

#6: Microphone

2009-12-27T01:45:00.000-08:00

JERICHO BROWN
Please
New Issues / Western Michigan University, 2008

Track 1: Lush Life

The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you,
To see you shake your head. The mic may as well
Be a leather belt. You drive to the center of town
To be whipped by a woman’s voice. You can’t tell
The difference between a leather belt and a lover’s
Tongue. A lover’s tongue might call you bitch,
A term of endearment where you come from, a kind
Of compliment preceded by the word sing
In certain nightclubs. A lush little tongue
You have: you can yell, Sing bitch, and, I love you,
With a shot of Patrón at the end of each phrase
From the same barstool every Saturday night, but you can’t
Remember your father’s leather belt without shaking
Your head. That’s what satisfies her, the woman
With the microphone. She does not mean to entertain
You, and neither do I. Speak to me in a lover’s tongue—
Call me your bitch, and I’ll sing the whole night long.

#5: This is my demented song

2009-12-27T01:42:00.000-08:00

FRANZ WRIGHT
Earlier Poems
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007

View from an Institution

Thirty miles or so south of LA
stand two hangars, like two tombs
on the plain between
the freeway and the mountains,
remote dark swarms of army helicopters every hour
departing and arriving: I still
feel too sick even to think
we lived in their presence,
their shadows,
for nearly a year. Oh yes, I remember
it. And when I can't sleep
I think of huge observatories parting soundlessly
or those two domelike structures
we passed once on the coast highway,
the nuclear reactor eerily lit and crane-manipulated all night long.
And when I'm by myself,
this is my demented song:
welcome to the University—
it seems you're the only one registered this fall.
You'll notice our nocturnal sprinkling-system.
You'll notice the library's books are all blank on the inside.

#4: I devastate the mirror

2009-12-27T01:40:00.000-08:00

JAMES ALLEN HALL
Now You’re the Enemy
University of Arkansas Press, 2007

Portrait of My Mother as

Lillian Virginia Mountweazel

Most of all, my mother wanted to mean something.

The desire consumed her—like it did Lillian Mountweazel,
who devoted her life first to photography, then weaponry;
she too wanted to go on transforming the flesh
from the real into the torched. My mother

was filled with wanderlust, a legion of mercenaries
setting their campfires on the beachhead, scoring fear
into the adversary, watching from the walls.

Most of all, she wanted to tongue-lash, to conquer
the barbaric fathers, then govern their bodies.
Incurable among the battle lusts, she lay down
her camera to fight. In this photograph, self-portrait,

tinged sepia, she’s rallying her troops, lecturing them on
how to bruise the man, drown him, make him
wear the lacy underwear, then demand he demean her.

First rule of offense: teach a man to degrade you,
you spoil his heart.

In another, she’s wearing bespoke boots, stepping over the rubble
saying, I will remember you just like this, picking off the armor
saying, My name is not what I said it was.

First rule of offense: if you’re never lackluster,
the enemy’s never lacklusting.

Most of all, my mother wanted to live forever. No laws
or dams or mountain ranges or children are named
for her. No effigy burns, no ash is left to corrupt.
When I want to be tragic, I put on her mothworn bustier,

I cross up the brassiere, powder my face oyster-white,
roll up the tattered red stockings. I am alive then,
lifting her discarded camera. I devastate the mirror.

Note: Mountweazel is a fictitious character inserted into the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia. in order to thwart copycats. Born in Bangs, Ohio, her entry also indicates she was a U.S. fountain designer and photographer. Mountweazel died in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.

#3: The heart's melt

2009-12-27T01:35:00.000-08:00

JACK GILBERT
The Great Fires
Poems 1982-1992
Knopf, 2008 (1995)

Measuring the Tyger

Barrels of chains. Sides of beef stacked in vans.
Water buffalo dragging logs of teak in the river mud
outside Mandalay. Pantocrater in the Byzantium dome.
The mammoth overhead crane bringing slabs of steel
through the dingy light and roar to the giant shear
that cuts the adamantine three-quarter-inch plates
and they flop down. The weight of the mind fractures
the girders and piers of the spirit, spilling out
the heart’s melt. Incandescent ingots big as cars
trundling out of titanic mills, red slag scaling off
the brighter metal in the dark. The Monongahela River
below, night’s sheen on its belly. Silence except
for the machinery clanging deeper in us. You will
love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time
running out. Day after day of the everyday.
What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge.
Newness strutting around as if it were significant.
Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry.
I want to go back to that time after Michiko’s death
when I cried every day among the trees. To the real.
To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive.

Alone

I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on the lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.

Moment of Grace

Mogins disliked everything about Anna's pregnancy.
Said it was organs and fluids and stuff no man wanted
to know about. He was so disturbed by her milkiness
after the birth that he took his class to another part
of Denmark for the summer. When we finally made love,
the baby began to cry, and I went to get him. Anna held
the boy as we continued, until the strength went out
of her and I cradled his nakedness asleep against me
as we passed through the final stages. In the happiness
afterward, both of us nursed at her, our heads
nudging each other blindly in the brilliant dark.

#2: These, our bodies, possessed by light

2009-12-27T01:33:00.001-08:00

RICHARD SIKEN
Crush
Yale University Press, 2005

Scheherazade

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it's more like a song on a policeman's radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means
we're inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.

(Note: The original copy has indented lines, which are inapplicable in Blogger.)

#1: Close my eyes and I'm a vessel

2009-12-27T01:31:00.000-08:00

LYNDA HULL
Collected Poems
Graywolf Re/View Series, 2006

River into Seas

Palaces of drift and crystal, the clouds
loosen their burden, unworldly flakes so thick
the border zones and sea and shore, the boundless zones
of air fuse to float their worlds until the spirits
congregate, fleet histories yearning into shape.

Close my eyes and I’m a vessel. Make it
some lucent amphora, Venetian blue, lip circled
in faded gold. Can you see the whorls of breath,
imperfections, the navel where it was blown
from the glass maker’s pipe, can you see it drawn

up from the bay where flakes hiss the instant
they become the bay? Part the curtain. The foghorn’s
steady, soothing moan--warning, safety, the reeling
home. Shipwreck and rescue. Stories within stories--
there’s this one of the cottage nestled into dune

snowed into pure wave, the bay beyond and its lavish
rustle, skirts lifting and falling fringed in foam.
But I’m in another season--my friends’ house adrift,
Wally’s last spring-into-summer, his bed a raft,
cats and dogs clustered and we’re watching television

floods, the Mississippi drowning whole cities
unfamiliar. How could any form be a vessel
adequate to such becoming, the stories unspoiled
through the skein of months as the virus erased
more and more until Wally’s nimbused as these

storm clouds, the sudden glowing ladders they let fall?
But that’s not the moment I’m conjuring--it’s when
my voyager afloat so many moths brought back
every flood story I carried. Drifting worlds,
and Wai Min take a shape I tell Wally as

steady watermark across the cold bare floor--
Chinatown , South Pacific flashing its crimson,
neoned waves traced across Wai Min’s midnight eyes
behind black shades, and the voice unraveling past
each knocking window pane. It’s another world

I’m telling. Cognac and squalor. The foghorn’s haunting drone
blends with that halting monotone, scarlet watermarks,
the Sinkiang’s floodtides murky brown, the village
become water, swept away. Three days floating on a door,
his sister, the grandmother weaving stories endless

beneath the waxed umbrella canopy she’s fashioned,
stories to soothe the children wrapped in the curtain
of her hair, to calm the ghost souls’ burned lanterns.
How rats swam to their raft, soaked cats, spirits
she said, ghosts held tranced by the storied murmorous

river. I have no spell, simply the foghorn’s song
when voices unbodied, drift over water past
the low dune this cottage nestles in becoming
shape in motion stilled. No boundaries on this point,
foghorn singing its come-home incantation over

the ruthless currents. And it isn’t so
we’re merely vessels given in grace, in mystery,
just a little while, our fleet streaked moments?
And this day is given, singular, chilly
bolts of snow chenilled across the sky, the sea.

How to cipher where one life begins and becomes
another? Part the curtain and here’s my voyager
afloat, gentle sleeper, sweet fish, dancer over
water and he’s talking, laughing in
that great four poster bed he could not leave

for months, a raft to buoy his furious radiant soul,
if I may so hazard to say that? Yes,
there was laughter, the stories, the shining dogs--
gold and black--his company. Voyager afloat
so many months, bank of sunflowers he loved spitting

their seeds. Tick. Black numerals on the sill.
A world can be built anywhere & he spun, letting go…
The last time I held him, the last time we spoke, just
a whisper--hoarse--that married now this many-voiced mansion
of storm and from him I’ve learned to slip my body,

to be the storm governed by the law of bounty given
then taken away. Shush and glide. The tide’s running
high, its silken muscular tearing rules by cycles,
relentless, the drawn lavish damasks--teal, aquamarine,
silvered steel, desires tidal forces, such urgent

fullness, the elaborate collapse, and withdrawal
beyond the drawn curtain that shows the secret
desert of bare ruched sand. I’ve learned this,
I’ve learned to be the horn calling home
the journeyer, saying farewell. And here’s

the foghorn’s simple two-note wail,
mechanical stark aria that ripples
out to shelter all of us--
our mortal burden of dreams--
adrift in the sea’s restless shouldering.

FOR WALLY ROBERTS, 1951-1994