Tapwater Jackson Living Small

A young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.
You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.
Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.
So expertly she plays the chords
of this difficult music she has mastered,
her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
while the wind turns the pages of rain.

by Ted Kooser
from Delights and Shadows
Copper Canyon Press, 2004

Source: 3quarksdaily

Her skin, saffron toasted in the sun,
eyes darting like a gazelle.

—That god who made her, how could he
have left her alone? Was he blind?

—This wonder is not the result of blindness:
she is a woman, and a sinuous vine.

The Buddha’s doctrine is thus proven:
nothing in this world is created.
(Dharmakirti, 7th Century)

Via 3quarksdaily

A Note

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it’s not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.

by Wislawa Szymborska
from Monologue of a Dog
translated by S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh

3 Quarks Daily Link here

BY DANIELA OLSZEWSKA, McSweeney’s
Train cases, blue lung, marines uniform underwear, correct pronunciation of caesura, suicide tree house cult, koi ponds, psikhushkas, doll with a head at both ends, how to defer student loan, yogurt mountain birthday club, Gwendolyn Brooks, can a penis literally break in half(?), circumstances under which you can sue your landlord …
More Here
[Timothy McSweeney is not responsible for the placement of the carrot on his snowman]

by Theodor Geisel

Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave
Had twenty-three sons and she named them all Dave?
Well, she did. And that wasn’t a smart thing to do.
You see, when she wants one and calls out, “Yoo-Hoo!
Come into the house, Dave!” she doesn’t get one.
All twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run!
This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves’
As you can imagine, with so many Daves.
And often she wishes that, when they were born,
She had named one of them Bodkin Van Horn
And one of them Hoos-Foos. And one of them Snimm.
And one of them Hot-Shot. And one Sunny Jim.
And one of them Shadrack. And one of them Blinkey.
And one of them Stuffy. And one of them Stinkey.
Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face.
Another one Marvin O’Gravel Balloon Face.
And one of them Ziggy. And one Soggy Muff.
One Buffalo Bill. And one Biffalo Buff.
And one of them Sneepy. And one Weepy Weed.
And one Paris Garters. And one Harris Tweed.
And one of them Sir Michael Carmichael Zutt
And one of them Oliver Boliver Butt
And one of them Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate …
But she didn’t do it. And now it’s too late.

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)

They ran the numbers twice for you
giving you the benefit of the doubt
but you knew the computer at the other
end of the officer’s PDA would not find
your brown number in its little black index.
You drove exactly one mile per hour below the speed
limit. You buckled your baby into his car seat according
to instructions. You signaled for exactly three seconds
before you turned left. You wanted to hide the Subway wrappers,
the empty box of Orbitz gum. Evidence of Big Macs.
You wanted to drink the Mountain Dew before it turned toxic
in the hot Phoenix sun as you asked, doesn’t this green
sludge make me American enough? But you didn’t
move because you knew the officer would have taken
that for gun-finding or drug-hiding or some other supposed
Mexican sport. You with your hands at ten and two
wondered how long the bus ride the officer would take you
on would last and whether they would provide any water.
You wondered, as the officer put hand to holster,
how dangerous it would be to down that Mountain
Dew then and there, in the wide-open American air.

by Nicole Walker, via 3 Quarks Daily
Boston Review; July/August 2010

O Sting, where is thy death?

David Musgrave, The New Yorker

By Alan Dugan

Nothing is plumb, level or square:
the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
for myself, the floors
for myself, and got
hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
Oh, I spat rage’s nails
into the frame-up of my work:
it held. It settled plumb,
level, solid, square and true
for that great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through,
skewing as wrong the other way.
God damned it. This is hell,
but I planned it, I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can’t do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.

My sunbaked acre
laced with trails of hummingbird vapors.

Lavender buds on graceful stems bowing in the heat.

The hawk powers from right to left, only feet above the ground, waiting to take advantage
with the movement of a wing tip.

Why the fuck doesn’t he eat the squirrels who mob my bird feeders?
I mean, help me out here.

By Tapwater Jackson, reposted by popular demand — OK, one person asked for it.

I like you, a twenty-year-old poet writes to me.
A beginning carpenter of words.

His letter smells of lumber.
His muse still sleeps in rosewood.

Ambitious noise in a literary sawmill.
Apprentices veneering a gullible tongue.

They cut to size the shy plywood of sentences.
A haiku whittled with a plane.

Problems begin
with a splinter lodged in memory.

It is hard to remove
much harder to describe.

Wood shavings fly. The apple cores of angels.
Dust up to the heavens.

by Ewa Lipska
translation by Robin Davidson & Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska
from The New Century
Northwestern University Press, 2009
Via 3 Quarks Daily

Orbit via 3Quarks

I think about joining the Seven Sisters
when I make
peanut butter and jelly
again.

Tying shoes I wonder
how this
planet doesn’t stop spinning.

Dust bunnies are molecular chambers and
laundry is a colorful list of historical moments.

Standing around with other Moms
At preschool
they seem content,
to stare at each other as they
discuss what was on television or
survival of children’s phases
or avoiding cellulite and crow’s feet.

I never saw any of them look up
so I hardly ever
spoke up.

The children rotate around these stars,
manicured and yoga calm.
I once said something about
having only one child, suddenly
this black hole developed
and the conversation formed
a vacuum.

As if I was to be avoided or
studied from afar.
Maybe that’s all I can give—
one supernova explosion
noted and charted in a
hospital on the outer nexus,
giving birth to a son.
Soon after I was noted
to collapse in on myself,
and the study of me
stoped with a note
of “high risk.”

The question is, was I capable
all along to give new bodies
to the cosmos,
but I waited too long?
I will test my theories and
write grant letters until
I die.

by Jen D. Clark
from Astropoetica, 2010

Proof

Her skin, saffron toasted in the sun,
eyes darting like a gazelle.

—That god who made her, how could he
have left her alone? Was he blind?

—This wonder is not the result of blindness:
she is a woman, and a sinuos vine.

The Buddha’s doctrine thus is proven:
nothing in this world was created.

(Dharmakirti, 7th Century)

3 Quarks Daily

Have you considered the possibility
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?

If you’ve done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.

If you’ve not done this, you probably don’t understand this poem,
or think it’s not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day’s time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.

But if you’ve arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you’re open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.

How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love slips through your fingers like sand.

by Federico Moramarco via 3 Quarks Daily