Words That Burn

The Day Time Began, by Eugene McCarthy (1916-2005)

Our days were yellow and green

we marked the seasons with respect,

but spring was ours.  We were shoots

and sprouts, and greenings,

We heard the first word

that fish were running in the creek.

Secretive we went with men into sheds

for torches and tridents

for nets and traps.

We shared the wildness of that week,

in men and fish.  First fruits

after the winter.  Dried meat gone,

the pork barrel holding only brine.

Bank clerks came out in skins,

teachers in loin clouts [clothes]

while game wardens drove in darkened cars,

watching the vagrant flares

beside the fish mad streams, or crouched

at home to see who came and went,

holding their peace

surprised by violence.

 

We were spendthrift of time

A day was not too much to spend

to find a willow right for a whistle

to blow the greenest sound the world

had ever heard.

Another day to search the oak and hickory thickets,

geometry and experience run togetehr

to choose the fork, fit

for a sling.

Whole days long we pursued the spotted frogs

and dared the curse of newts and toads.

 

New Adams, unhurried, pure, we checked the names

given by the old.

Some things we found well titled

blood-root for sight

skunks for smell

crab apples for taste

yarrow for sound

mallow for touch.

Some we found named ill, too little or too much

or in a foreign tongue.

These we challenged with new names.

 

Space was our preoccupation,

infinity, not eternity our concern.

We were strong bent on counting,

the railroad ties, so many to a mile,

the telephone poles, the cars that passed,

marking our growth against door frames.

 

The sky was a kite,

I flew it on a string,

winding it in to see its blue, again

to count the whirling swallows,

and read the patterned scroll of blackbirds turning

to check the marking of the hawk,

and then letting it out to the end

of the last pinched inch of

string, in the vise of thumb and finger.

 

One day the string broke,

the kite flew over the shoulder of the world,

but reluctantly, reaching back in great lunges

as lost kites do, or as a girl running

in a reversed movie, as at each arched step, the earth

set free, leaps forward, catching her farther back

the treadmill doubly betraying,

Remote and more remote.

 

Now I lie on a west facing hill in October

the dragging string having circled the world, the universe,

crosses my hand in the grass.  I do not grasp it,

it brushes my closed eyes, I do not open.

That world is no longer mine, but for remembrance

Space ended then, and time began.

NOTE:

In addition to being a poet, Eugene McCarthy was a Minnesota Senator from 1959 to 1971, but should not be confused with Joseph McCarthy, who was from Wisconsin and responsible for the House Un-American Activities Committee and its communist witch-hunt in the ’50s.

Only until this cigarette is ended, by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

The Watcher, by A. D. (Alec Derwent) Hope (1907-2000)

Can the tree that grows in grief

Rooted in its own despair

Crown its head with bud and leaf,

Blossom and enrich the air?

 

Can the bird that on the bough

Tries the ripeness of the fruit,

Taste the agony below,

Know the worm that cuts the root?

 

In a dream I saw my tree

Clothed in paradisal white,

Every branch in ecstasy

Spread its odors on the night;

 

Lovers walking two and two

Felt their own delight expressed,

And the bird that thither flew

Chose its branches for her nest;

 

Children in a laughing tide

Thronged it round to taste and see;

“See the shining fruit” they cried,

“See the happy, blossoming tree!”

 

You alone among them there

Came with your divining heart,

Breathed that still, enchanted air,

Felt your tears in anguish start,

 

And the passion of your woe

At the sweetness of the fruit

Watered all the ground below,

Touched and healed the wounded root.

 

Then the bird among the leaves

Checked its song in sad surmise;

Then the lover saw what grieves

In the depths of human eyes;

 

But the children at your side

Took your hands and laughed to see

“O the shining fruit!” they cried,

“O the happy, happy tree!”

 

The Visit, by Jason Shinder (1955-)

 

My only mother, who lost sixty pounds, tried to stand up in the bathroom 

and fell backwards on the white linoleum floor in the first hour of the morning 
and was carried to the bed in the nurse's arms and then abruptly 

opened her eyes, later, the room dark, and twisted the needles in her arms 

and talked to her dead friend, Rosie, and heard the doorbell ring 
as though in the kitchen in the old place deciding if she should answer, 

rubbing the circle on her finger where the wedding ring once was 

while slipping downward on the sheets like a body without limbs and I slid 
my good arms beneath her arm-pits and pulled her bony body up 

against the two thin pillows. And then, when she was asleep again, 

I walked down the hallway's arc of yellow light, ghosts hovering 
on either side of the doors of rooms where the strange sickness 

of being alive was the last thing between dreaming and eternity 

which closes like the ocean closes over the blue-starry body 
and does not stop, and I understood again that we never come back, 

and upright, with everything that takes its life seriously, I returned to my mother.

Compulsively Allergic to the Truth, by Jeffrey McDaniel (1967-)

I'm sorry I was late.
I was pulled over by a cop
for driving blindfolded
with a raspberry-scented candle
flickering in my mouth.
I'm sorry I was late.
I was on my way
when I felt a plot
thickening in my arm.
I have a fear of heights.
Luckily the Earth
is on the second floor
of the universe.
I am not the egg man.
I am the owl
who just witnessed
another tree fall over
in the forest of your life.
I am your father
shaking his head
at the thought of you.
I am his words dissolving
in your mind like footprints
in a rainstorm.
I am a long-legged martini.
I am feeding olives
to the bull inside you.
I am decorating
your labyrinth,
tacking up snapshots
of all the people
who've gotten lost
in your corridors.

Turn Off the TV!, by Bruce Lansky (1941-)

 

 

 

 

 

The Widow, by Thomas P. Lynch (1948-)

Her life was spent in deference to his comfort.

The rocking chair was his, the window seat,

the firm side of the mattress.

 

Hers were the midnights with sickly children,

pickups after guests left, the single

misery of childbirth.  She had duties:

 

to feed him and to follow and to forgive him his few

excesses.  Sometimes he drank, he puffed cigars,

he belched, he brought the money in

 

and brought Belleek and Waterford for birthdays,

rings and rare scents for Christmas, twice he sent

a card with flowers: “All my love, always.”

 

At night she spread herself like linen out

for him to take his feastly pleasures in

and liked it well enough, or said she did, day in

 

day out.  For thirty years they agreed on this

till one night after dinner dancing,

he died a gassy death at fifty — turned

 

a quiet purple in his chair, quit breathing.

She grieved him with a real grief for she missed him

sorely.  After six months of that she felt relieved.

Quiceañera, by Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952-)

My dolls have been put away like dead

children in a chest I will carry

with me when I marry.

I reach under my skirt to feel

a satin slip bought for this day.  It is soft

as the inside of my thighs.  My hair

has been nailed back with  my mother’s

black hairpins to my skull. Her hands

stretched my eyes open as she twisted

braids into a tight circle at the nape

of my neck.  I am to wash my own clothes

and sheets from this day on, as if

the fluids of my body were poison, as if

the little trickle of blood I believe

travels from my heart to the world were

shameful.  Is not the blood of saints and

men in battle beautiful? Do Christ’s hands

not bleed into your eyes from His cross?

At night I hear myself growing and wake

to find my hands drifting of their own will

to sooth skin stretched tight

over my bones.

I am wound like the guts of a clock,

waiting for each hour to release me.

Ode to a Dental Hygienist, by Earnest A. Hooton (1887-1954)

Hygienist, in your dental chair
I sit without a single care
Except when tickled by your hair.
I know that when you grab the drills
I need not fear the pain that kills.
You merely make my molars clean
With pumice doped with wintergreen.
So I lean back in calm reflection,
With close-up views of your complexion,
And taste the flavor of your thumbs
While you massage my flabby gums.
To me no woman can be smarter
Than she who scales away my tarter,
And none more fitted for my bride
Than one who knows me from inside.
At least as far as she has gotten
She sees how much of me is rotten.

NOTE:
Originally delivered as part of a speech to the 1942 graduating class of Dental Hygienists from the Forsyth Dental Infirmary in Boston.

Lethe, by Lorentzos Mavilis (1860-1912)

Lucky are the dead who forget
life’s bitterness. When the sun
goes down and twilight follows,
do not weep however you grieve.

At that hour, souls thirst and go
to oblivion’s icy fountain;
but the water will blacken like slime,
if a tear falls from those they love.

And if they drink cloudy water they recall
crossing asphodel prairies and old pains
that lie dormant within them.

If you must weep at twilight,
let your eyes lament the living;
they long to but know not how to forget.

(Trans.  Rae Dalven)