Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Philippe Petit













Saw Man on Wire at Tribeca Film Festival.

He spent one hour on the wire before the police nabbed him.
The criminal complaint read "man on wire,"
his punishment to perform community service
by juggling for children
He will do so again this Saturday and Sunday at St. Mark's Church .

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Grace Paley







Grace Paley’s last book of poetry, Fidelity, describes some trees that are torn in half by hurricanes yet new growth occurs.

Education

To have lived long enough
and not too far from the dying
of a couple of ancient trees
the high leaf and flowering
above broken arms to have known
one great tree full and sturdy
then in my own years
the arbitrary swords of sunscald
lightning scar scab rot

in the woods behind our house
uprooted storm-thrown hemlock
(hurricane of 'thirty-eight) a humped
and heaving graveyard do you see that

it's good in one ordinary life
to have witnessed the hard labor
of a long death the way one
high branch can still advance alone pale green
and greener into the sun's
nutritious light

Thursday, April 17, 2008

The Trees by Philip Larkin

(for poem in your pocket day)


The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say.
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Life Cycle (revised 4/17/08)

I heard his manic laugh today
when I saw his book
rain soaked in the gutter.
He had worked so hard on it,
the story of his life.

I knew him in college. He was a street musician.
He could play bluegrass and the mandolin
but he wanted to be a writer.
We all wanted to be writers.

He worked on his writing til it was more than a work in progress.
An agent sold it, a reviewer liked it,
Hollywood optioned it. When the paperback came out
it had the movie stars on the cover.
Young people in the know
made the movie a cult hit.

At dinner at his brownstone apartment
we ate his shrimp entrée and a spinach salad
which his sister criticized as being too wet.
Don’t you hate it she said when people serve
soggy lettuce.

The second book took longer to write.
He had trouble
finding a publisher,
and it was not well received.
Soon it was swallowed up by the remainder houses.
In the meantime, the mass market paperback of the
first book was finding its way
onto street vendors tables for a quarter.
People who tried it put it on their basement racks
for people to share. I heard from others that he was ill,
depressed, then divorced. He died alone.
The book sat there in the rain
like a warning.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

I fell on my face

In South Carolina
in the parking lot
pitched over the concrete slab
thinking it flat
landed on my face
and my chest
bawled like a baby
got a shiner
broken rib
take advil now by the handful
I am unfit

Winter, thirty degrees

The branches of trees
are wrapped in spirals of lights.
They look trapped. A man
has lost his glove. It lies on
the sidewalk, fingers pointing up.