When I first started up this blog, I had no idea what I was going to use it for. I just needed a place to spew my thoughts. Well, I guess that's still exactly what it is, but I like to think I am finally a little more organized. Not all there yet. But one of my first posts was some random poetry from me. I found a file on my computer tonight with a string of poems that meant enough to me to save. So in honor of one of my first blog posts, I figured I'd share!

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death

is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,

which took a whole life to develop and market—

the quips, the witticisms, the slant

adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest

the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched

in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,

their tears confused with their diamond earrings,

their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,

their response and your performance twinned.

The jokes over the phone. The memories packed

in the rapid-access file. The whole act.

Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;

imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

-John Updike

The Vanishings

One day it will vanish,

how you felt when you were overwhelmed

by her, soaping each other in the shower,

or when you heard the news

of his death, there in the T-bone diner

on Queens Boulevard amid the shouts

of short-order cooks, Armenian, oblivious.

One day one thing and then a dear other

will blur and though they won’t be lost

they won’t mean as much,

that motorcycle ride on the dirt road

to the deserted beach near Cadiz,

the Guardia mistaking you for a drug-runner,

his machine gun in your belly—

already history now, merely your history,

which means everything to you.

You strain to bring back

your mother’s full face and full body

before her illness, the arc and tenor

of family dinners, the mysteries

of radio, and Charlie Collins,

eight years old, inviting you

to his house to see the largest turd

that had ever come from him, unflushed.

One day there’ll be almost nothing

except what you’ve written down,

then only what you’ve written down well,

then little of that.

The march on Washington in ‘68

where you hoped to change the world

and meet beautiful, sensitive women

is choreography now, cops on horses,

everyone backing off, stepping forward.

The exam you stole and put back unseen

has become one of your stories,

overtold, tainted with charm.

All of it, anyway, will go the way of icebergs

come summer, the small chunks floating

in the Adriatic until they’re only water,

pure, and someone taking sad pride

that he can swim in it, numbly.

For you, though, loss, almost painless,

that Senior Prom at the Latin Quarter—

Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan, and you

just interested in your date’s cleavage

and staying out all night at Jones Beach,

the small dune fires fueled by driftwood.

You can’t remember a riff or a song,

and your date’s a woman now, married,

has had sex as you have

some few thousand times, good sex

and forgettable sex, even boring sex,

oh you never could have imagined

back then with the waves crashing

what the body could erase.

It’s vanishing as you speak, the soul-grit,

the story-fodder,

everything you retrieve is your past,

everything you let go

goes to memory’s out-box, open on all sides

in cahoots with thin air.

The jobs you didn’t get vanish like scabs.

Her good-bye, causing the phone to slip

from your hand, doesn’t hurt anymore,

too much doesn’t hurt anymore,

not even that hint of your father, ghost-thumping

on your roof in Spain, hurts anymore.

You understand and therefore hate

because you hate the passivity of understanding

that your worst rage and finest

private gesture will flatten and collapse

into history, become invisible

like defeats inside houses. Then something happens

(it is happening) which won’t vanish fast enough,

your voice fails, chokes to silence;

hurt (how could you have forgotten?) hurts.

Every other truth in the world, out of respect,

slides over, makes room for its superior.

-Stephen Dunn

The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina

Somewhere in everyone’s head something points toward home,

a dashboard’s floating compass, turning all the time

to keep from turning. It doesn’t matter how we come

to be where we are, someplace where nothing goes

the way it went once, where nothing holds fast

to where it belongs, or what you’ve risen or fallen to.

What the bubble always points to,

whether we notice it or not, is home.

It may be true that if you move fast

everything fades away, that given time

and noise enough, every memory goes

into the blackness, and if new ones come—

small, mole-like memories that come

to live in the furry dark—they, too,

curl up and die. But Carol goes

to high school now. John works at home

what days he can to spend some time

with Sue and the kids. He drives too fast.

Ellen won’t eat her breakfast.

Your sister was going to come

but didn’t have the time.

Some mornings at one or two

or three I want you home

a lot, but then it goes.

It all goes.

Hold on fast

to thoughts of home

when they come.

They’re going to

less with time.

Time

goes

too

fast.

Come

home.

Forgive me that. One time it wasn’t fast.

A myth goes that when the quick years come

then you will, too. Me, I’ll still be home.

- Miller Williams

First Lesson

Lie back, daughter, let your head

be tipped back in the cup of my hand.

Gently, and I will hold you. Spread

your arms wide, lie out on the stream

and look high at the gulls. A dead-

man’s-float is face down. You will dive

and swim soon enough where this tidewater

ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe

me, when you tire on the long thrash

to your island, lie up, and survive.

As you float now, where I held you

and let go, remember when fear

cramps your heart what I told you:

lie gently and wide to the light-year

stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

- Philip Booth

If—

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

- Rudyard Kipling

wrist-wrestling father

On the maple wood we placed our elbows

and gripped hands, the object to bend

the other’s arm to the kitchen table.

We flexed our arms and waited for the sign.

I once shot a wild goose.

I once stood not twenty feet from a buck deer unnoticed.

I’ve seen a woods full of pink lady slippers.

I once caught a 19-inch trout on a tiny fly.

I’ve seen the Pacific, I’ve seen the Atlantic,

I’ve watched whales in each.

I once heard Lenny Bruce tell jokes.

I’ve seen Sandy Koufax pitch a baseball.

I’ve heard Paul Desmond play the saxophone.

I’ve been to London to see the Queen.

I’ve had dinner with a Nobel Prize poet.

I wrote a poem once with every word but one just right.

I’ve fathered two fine sons

and loved the same woman for twenty-five years.

But I’ve never been more amazed

than when I snapped my father’s arm down to the table.

- Orval Lund

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head, I

see my mother with a few light books at her hip

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the

wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

sword-tips black in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,

her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I

take them up like the male and female

paper dolls and bang them together

at the hips like chips of flint as if to

strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

-Sharon Olds