Talk To God

Talk To God


Thank him for your little house
on the periphery, its splendid view
of the wildflowers in summer,
and the nervous, forked prints of deer
in that same field after a snowstorm.
Thank him even for the monotony
that drives us to make and destroy
and dissect what otherwise would be
merely the lush, unnamed world.
Ease into your misgivings.
Ask him if in his weakness
he was ever responsible
for a pettiness—some weather, say,
brought in to show who’s boss
when no one seemed sufficiently moved
by a sunset, or the shape of an egg.
Ask him if when he gave us desire
he had underestimated its power.
And when, if ever, did he realize
love is not inspired by obedience?
Be respectful when you confess to him
you began to redefine heaven
as you discovered certain pleasures.
And sympathize with how sad it is
that awe has been replaced
by small enthusiasms, that you’re aware
things just aren’t the same these days,
that you wish for him a few evenings
surrounded by the old, stunned silence.
Maybe it will be possible then
to ask, Why this sorry state of affairs?
Why—after so much hatefulness
done in his name—no list of corrections
nailed to some rectory door?
Remember to thank him for the silkworm,
apples in season, photosynthesis,
the northern lights. And be sincere.
But let it be known you’re willing to suffer
only in proportion to your errors,
not one unfair moment more.
Insist on this as if it could be granted:
not one moment more.


Stephen Dunn

Posted over on Poems Out Loud

Stephen Crane in Longport

Stephen Crane in Longport


Occasionally the weak survive
because the god that doesn't exist
wants to give us something
to misinterpret.
That ís what Crane was thinking
as he washed up on Longport beach.
He seemed to remember the afterlife
had been a boat forever lost
in the doldrums of the sea. Then a storm,
the boat's captain thrown overboard,
suddenly captain of nothing,
waves buffeting him and his crew
until they surrendered and went under.
He saw a man, suntanned, hairy-chested,
squatting near a dune, eating something
he'd pulled fom a bag. It was
(by the expression on the man's face)
bitter though the man kept on eating
as if he couldnít get enough. Crane felt
he was dreaming a writer's dream;
he'd arrived in a world
he himself had made.
By this time many people from town
were making their way toward him.
No, they walked right by
as if they were pursuing the horizon.
It ís pointless, Crane wanted to say,
wherever you're all going.
But he knew they'd think he was lying,
or maybe not even hear him.


Stephen Dunn

Posted over on Quarterly West

Hawthorne in Tuckerton

Hawthorne in Tuckerton


Like the other great ones he wouldn't
vanish into his own destiny,
kept showing up
in different parts of America,
small pious towns like this one,
wooded, where he trusted
that what thumped in the human heart
would manifest, make its old nightly rounds.
Scratch an American,he was overheard saying
at the diner,and you'll find a Puritan.
And one man nodded while another
in a John Deere cap swallowed hard,
changed the subject to the Phillies.
Hawthorne still loved the repressed,
the avoided. Nothing made him more
alert than a large passion twisted,
coiled in the recesses of an innocent.
But something had changed.
People camped without fear
in the piney forest,
were simply amused by tales
of the Jersey Devil.
And Tuckerton now had its Seaport.
Its Dimmesdales
and Rappacinis had a stake in the market.
Their daughters wore lipstick
and openly danced to loud music.
Hawthorne began to feel like the ghost
he was. Grace, he lamented,
was once so poignant
before this democratization of the sacred.
Adultery so much more interesting
when everyone didn't commit it.


Stephen Dunn

Posted over on Quarterly West

Every Single Night

Every Single Night

Every single night
I wait for them to come again,
to appear out of the deepest shadows
at the oak foot of my bed;
the two blue dwarfs and the taller Gray,
easily entering my room
without using the door,
standing still in the silence, azure
in the moonlight, waiting
until I notice them, and then moving
beside me on both sides, just as
ruby molecules, tiny insane red dust mites
shimmering, push the moonlight aside
allowing a beastly beam to explode
through my ceiling
bathing me in blood light,
leaving me shaking,
conscious, angry, and frightened—yes,
every time fear carves up my guts cold
like an icicle scalpel opening up my chest—
leaving me breathless and stiff
as matter separates and I pass through
my bed covers, rising slowly
like a party balloon,
rising, rising toward the ceiling
and then traveling past it
as if it were made of smoke—
suddenly outside suspended
in the chill night air,
the sky bristling with brilliance, rising
more quickly up to embrace the black belly
of the silver craft hovering unseen
fifty yards above my house,
and then total darkness
along with that terrible and familiar hum;
only to awaken moments later
sitting up in my sweat-drenched blankets
cursing the reoccurring dream,
or perhaps the actual violation
of my carnate husk
by beings from beyond;
with reality bending
like a mirage snake tying itself
into a savage valentine,
my posterior hurting like I had been
the unwilling participant
in a prison gang bang,
and my sad soul reattaching
its wings.

Glenn Buttkus March 2010

Getting It Wrong Again

Getting It Wrong Again

Some days are like that.
I just say the wrong thing, and,
you tell me, at the wrong time.
Or, I tell you, there’s no need
to be so impatient, why can’t you
hold back on the sarcasm. Some days
we are all sharp corners, dead-ends,
as if we have lost sight of the landscape
we have lived for twenty five years
which, of course, has not always been
meadows of cornflowers, and definitely
not a clear, straight road with low hedges.
I have always loved the air around mountains
and sea. Last year you realised why
you liked staying on Hillsboro Beach
so much: the expanse of Atlantic ocean,
the sky arcing over you from east to west,
how you felt you could lose yourself
in the stretch of both. Some days
it’s best to look ahead to the next,
resist swearing at the bumpy terrain
which appears in the rear-view mirror
sooner than we ever think it will.


Lynne Rees

Posted over on Applehouse Poetry

Blood Donor

Blood Donor

Give it up
in pints and puddles,
spurting around the nails
piercing your open palms,
or the thick spikes in your feet,
or the femoral artery
in the groin of the many-faced soldier
who stepped on a roadside bomb
in a muddy ditch in Kandahar,
or the severed thumb that lost
its conflict with the Skil-Saw blade,
or the Collie’s severed ear
after he jumped without hesitation
into a pack of California coyotes
devouring his master’s tabby,
or the Hispanic gang member
lying in an ER in Chino
with three Glock caps in his butt,
or the 18 year old blonde cheerleader
who stuck her face through the windshield
of her boyfriend’s ’70 Camero,
or the firefighter giving liquid-life for
his fallen and burned comrade,
or Joe Citizen who annually makes his trek
to the Red Cross to give up hot hemoglobin,
or the nose bleed that will not clot;
our wounded economy,
our fractured freedom,
our lacerated liberty,
our precious privacy;
all impaled on the sharp stilettos
of hooded fascist politicos—
even our rights of expression, even
our poetry.

No, goddamn it, no.
You don’t have to take out poetry—
we give it freely.

Glenn Buttkus March 2010

Innane Nattering

Innane Nattering


Things are happening
or are about to happen
Weather getting mild.
Bike rides in the offing.
The onning really, I don't get off
till the ride is over.
But that's a small point.

Tomorrow, f'rinstance,
I donate another pint
of one of my precious bodily fluids
The red one made out of iron.
To make sure that adventure goes off
as planned, I had a Red Robin mushroom burger
for dinner tonight and,
after a pretty good program about Dolley Madison
on the public telly station,
a peanut butter and jam sannich.
Protein and sugar and various esters
on a couple slices of A La Francaise bread.
A brand I must travel far to obtain any more.
Even my fancy store on Queen Anne
doesn't stock much.
So I have to hit the QFC on Capitol hill.
Actually don't hit it,
it's made of durable materials
that would undoubtedly defeat me
in any contest of fisticuffs
I might be foolish enough to start.

I just go there and buy the stuff.
But, you knew that already.

Many other marvelous things have happened
since last we spoke,
but I remember hardly any of it.

Hmmmm.....

OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT?!!!
YAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Suddenly I am run over by a truck.


Doug Palmer March 2010