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Donald R. Anderson
The Flamingo Sticks Out Its Tongue
Flight is a painful drag,
a lot of feathers are strewn
across lonely highways
where there wasn't enough takeoff room.
In my pocket is a key,
I turn on the world and it lights up
like Nagasaki
and I hover, accelerate,
drift into space.
I think Donald R. Anderson should be the poet laureate of Stockton. Nice guy, very active in the lit-arts scene there, excellent poet.
I picked up Jack Gilbert's REFUSING HEAVEN at the library today. I love Gilbert anyway, but especially this book. Here's an example:
Jack Gilbert
The Lost Hotels Of Paris
The Lord gives everything and charges
by taking it back. What a bargain.
Like being young for a while. We are
allowed to visit hearts of women,
to go into their bodies so we feel
no longer alone. We are permitted
romantic love with its bounty and half-life
of two years. It is right to mourn
for the small hotels of Paris that used to be
when we used to be. My mansard looking
down on Notre Dame every morning is gone,
and me listening to the bell at night.
Venice is no more. The best Greek islands
have drowned in acceleration. But it's the having
not the keeping that is the treasure.
Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon
and said he was giving up poetry
because it told lies, that language distorts.
I agreed, but asked what we have
that gets it right even that much/
We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see the memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough.
--
I'm a huge Jimmy Santiago Baca fan as well. Something about the Gilbert and Anderson poems made want to to re-read this one:
Jimmy Santiago Baca
Crying Poem
For the longest time,
I haven't been able to cry.
Tears start to come while I'm watching a movie tears
starts to come,
swelling my whole body a tulip starting to open under moon,
then the petals of my eyelids
stiffen
and something in me braces
and I don't cry.
When we crashed into a telephone pole
my dad yelled me not to cry,
I was terrified, almost killed –
but don't cry,
he said.
I couldn't cry because men don't cry.
When the dog bit me on the leg I couldn't cry,
when Joey died I couldn't cry –
how cool it would feel
to have a tear slide down the corner of my eye
on my cheek,
to the curve of my lip,
where I could taste it –
but I don't cry.
Something blocks the paths, channels
under my skin.
Tear ducts are red cracked clay,
for thirty years,
drought famine'd,
since I was eight when I got a beating for crying.
My heart an open furnace oven door,
rage seething for tears to cool it down,
but coal hoveling men keep feeding it
don't cry don't cry don't cry.
I want to untie my hands like a tired boxer's gloves
and lay them down on the table, gripped in their tight
clench of defense,
and I want to grow new hands
open flowers,
moistened by my tears.
I love the color blue
color brown.
I'd love
to touch my chapped cheeks
and whisper in tears
my compassion.
But I've always had to stop it up in me, hold my breath back,
so as not to cry.
Man, I cry,
and it's a lie I don't.
I embrace my brother and pray shoulder to shoulder.
I kneel and kiss earth,
and I cry -- if only I could cry.
Don't translate my tears into thought,
I want to sob autumn tears on my window,
streaking the pane blurring the world.
I want to fill every hole in my heart with glimmering tear pools,
fill my kitchen sink with tears,
just thinking of me not crying all these years,
makes me want to cry,
but I been taught not to cry –
big people don't cry, people say,
ain't those alligator tears boy,
can't fool me with those tears –
bullshit!
Fooling no one but myself not crying
step aside –
I'm going to cry,
until my shirt is drenched,
and my hands shimmery wet
with tears,
running down my face on my arms,
my legs and breast,
and you have to look at me,
because I'm drowning your manly ways in my tears,
to get back my tears.
I'm crying until there isn't a single tear left
crying,
for what we been through not crying,
how we fooled ourselves thinking men don't cry.
I'm crying on the bus, in bed, at the dinner table, on the couch,
enough to float Noah's boat,
let out the robin of my heart,
bringing me back my own single shoot of greening
life again –
and you go fuck yourself
dry eyed days,
here I come,
giving you a Chicano monsoon season,
here comes this Chicano cry baby,
flooding prison walls,
my childrens' bedrooms,
splashing and tear slinging
tears up to my ankles,
planting rice and corn and beans
in fields glimmering with my tears,
and all you dry skinned nut-cracking ball whackers,
don't want to get your killer bone-breaking boots wet,
step aside,
because I'm bringing you rain.
Goodbyes were crying events –
Goodbye to grandma, to my brother,
friends, my neighborhood,
teachers and other boys,
and I never shed a tear,
though I felt them coming up in me.
I bit my teeth down hard to hold the tears back,
lowered my face and thought about something else.
I kept hearing voices in me,
telling me not to cry, don't cry, don't cry!
Boys don't cry,
leave yourself open,
become liable to get an ax in your heart by some non-crying fool,
be a sissy,
puto, you be hurting
yourself if you cry.
I hurt when I didn't cry,
all those times when I didn't cry ashamed
to in front of people,
fearful others would think I'm not a man,
fearful I'd be made fun of,
whole groups of us heard tragic news
and no one cries,
because it ain't right –
we need to weep –
get up in the middle of the night,
and cry, like a endurance's hips and stomach convulse during
child birth, we need to give birth
to that terrible convulsion of tears,
weep for those we never wept for,
let the legs shake and your arms embrace you
in a junkie habit for tears,
weep for the poor in prison
taken from their families,
the fieldworker's daughter
eaten by cancer from pesticides,
and weep,
for all those homeless
who couldn't meet mortgage payments,
those sleeping under bridges,
and the hopeless,
cry our differences into a lake,
where we can all cleanse our goodbyes and apathy,
papas cry for their children,
let children cry in my arms,
men cry in my arms,
endurance cry in my arms,
let us all cry,
after lovemaking and fighting,
make cry a prayer,
a language made of whimpers and sniffles and sobs,
cry out loud, louder, cry baby, cry! Cry! Cry!
--
You can send poems, too. jamesleejobe@gmail.com
all. good. things. jobe.
--
Current Mood: chipper
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