Post a poem a day to celebrate poetry month

The American Sublime by Wallace Stevens

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?

But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

Dance Lessons of the Thirties by Donald Justice

Wafts of old incense mixed with Cuban coffee
Hung on the air; a fan turned; it was summer.
And (of the buried life) some last aroma
Still clung to the tumbled cushions of the sofa.

At lesson time, pushed back, it used to be
The thing we managed somehow just to miss
With our last-second dips and whirls—all this
While the Victrola wound down gradually.

And this was their exile, those brave ladies who taught us
So much of art, and stepped off to their doom
Demonstrating the fox-trot with their daughters
Endlessly around some sad and makeshift ballroom.

O little lost Bohemias of the suburbs!

To See My Mother by Sharon Olds

It was like witnessing the earth being formed,
to see my mother die, like seeing
the dry lands be separated
from the oceans, and all the mists bear up
on one side, and all the solids
be borne down, on the other, until
the body was all there, all bronze and
petrified redwood opal, and the soul all
gone. If she hadn’t looked so exalted, so
beast-exalted and refreshed and suddenly
hopeful, more than hopeful—beyond
hope, relieved—if she had not been suffering so
much, since I had met her, I do not
know how I would have stood it, without
fighting someone, though no one was there
to fight, death was not there except
as her, my task was to hold her tiny
crown in one cupped hand, and her near
birdbone shoulder. Lakes, clouds,
nests. Winds, stems, tongues.
Embryo, zygote, blastocele, atom,
my mother’s dying was like an end
of life on earth, some end of water
and moisture salt and sweet, and vapor,
till only that still, ocher moon
shone, in the room, mouth open, no song.

The Midnight Club by Mark Strand

The gifted have told us for years that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they, in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all night
In rooms that are cold and webbed with the moon’s light;
Sometimes, during the day, they lean on their cars,
And stare into the blistering valley, glassy and golden,
But mainly they sit, hunched in the dark, feet on the floor,
Hands on the table, shirts with a bloodstain over the heart.

I Had Been a Polar Explorer by Mark Strand

I had been a polar explorer in my youth
and spent countless days and nights freezing
in one blank place and then another. Eventually,
I quit my travels and stayed at home,
and there grew within me a sudden excess of desire,
as if a brilliant stream of light of the sort one sees
within a diamond were passing through me.
I filled page after page with visions of what I had witnessed—
groaning seas of pack ice, giant glaciers, and the windswept white
of icebergs. Then, with nothing more to say, I stopped
and turned my sights on what was near. Almost at once,
a man wearing a dark coat and broad-brimmed hat
appeared under the trees in front of my house.
The way he stared straight ahead and stood,
not shifting his weight, letting his arms hang down
at his side, made me think that I knew him.
But when I raised my hand to say hello,
he took a step back, turned away, and started to fade
as longing fades until nothing is left of it.

You’re Beautiful by Simon Armitage

because you’re classically trained.
I’m ugly because I associate piano wire with strangulation.

You’re beautiful because you stop to read the cards in
newsagents’ windows about lost cats and missing dogs.
I’m ugly because of what I did to that jellyfish with a lolly
stick and a big stone.

You’re beautiful because for you, politeness is instinctive, not
a marketing campaign.
I’m ugly because desperation is impossible to hide.

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars.

You’re beautiful because you believe in coincidence and the
power of thought.
I’m ugly because I proved God to be a mathematical
impossibility.

You’re beautiful because you prefer home-made soup to the
packet stuff.
I’m ugly because once, at a dinner party, I defended the
aristocracy and wasn’t even drunk.

You’re beautiful because you can’t work the remote control.
I’m ugly because of satellite television and twenty-four-hour
rolling news.

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars.

You’re beautiful because you cry at weddings as well as
funerals.
I’m ugly because I think of children as another species from
a different world.

You’re beautiful because you look great in any colour
including red.
I’m ugly because I think shopping is strictly for the
acquisition of material goods.

You’re beautiful because when you were born, undiscovered
planets lined up to peep over the rim of your cradle and lay
gifts of gravity and light at your miniature feet.
I’m ugly for saying “love at first sight” is another form of
mistaken identity, and that the most human of all responses
is to gloat.

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars.

You’re beautiful because you’ve never seen the inside of a
car-wash.
I’m ugly because I always ask for a receipt.

You’re beautiful for sending a box of shoes to the third
world.
I’m ugly because I remember the telephone numbers of
ex-girlfriends and the year Schubert was born.

You’re beautiful because you sponsored a parrot in a zoo.
I’m ugly because when I sigh it’s like the slow collapse of a
circus tent.

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars.

You’re beautiful because you can point at a man in a uniform
and laugh.
I’m ugly because I was a police informer in a previous life.

You’re beautiful because you drink a litre of water and eat
three pieces of fruit a day.
I’m ugly for taking the line that a meal without meat is a
beautiful woman with one eye.

You’re beautiful because you don’t see love as a competition
and you know how to lose.
I’m ugly because I kissed the FA Cup then held it up to the
crowd.

You’re beautiful because of a single buttercup in the top
buttonhole of your cardigan.
I’m ugly because I said the World’s Strongest Woman was a
muscleman in a dress.

You’re beautiful because you couldn’t live in a lighthouse.
I’m ugly for making hand-shadows in front of the giant bulb,
so when they look up, the captains of vessels in distress see
the ears of a rabbit, or the eye of a fox, or the legs of a
galloping black horse.

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars.

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars.

Greeter of Souls by Deborah Digges

Ponds are spring-fed, lakes run off rivers.
Here souls pass, not one deified,
and sometimes this is terrible to know
three floors below the street, where light drinks the world,
siphoned like music through portals.
How fed, that dark, the octaves framed faceless.
A memory of water.
The trees more beautiful not themselves.
Souls who have passed here, tired brightening.
Dumpsters of linen, empty
gurneys along corridors to parking garages.
Who wonders, is it morning?
Who washes these blankets?
Can I not be the greeter of souls?
What’s to be done with the envelopes of hair?
If the inlets are frozen, can I walk across?
When I look down into myself to see a scattering of birds,
do I put on the new garments?
On which side of the river should I wait?

Ode to Pepper Vinegar by Kevin Young

You sat in the tomb

of our family fridge
for years, without

fail. You were all

I wanted covering
my greens, satisfaction

I’ve since sought

for years in restaurants
which claimed soul, but neither

knew you nor

your vinegar prayer.
Baby brother

of bitterness, soothsayer,

you taught
me the difference between loss

& holding on. Next to the neon

of the maraschino cherries,
you floated & stayed

constant as a flame

on an unknown soldier’s grave;
I never did know

how you got here

you just were. Adrift
in your mason jar

you were a briny bit of where

we came from, rusty lid
awaiting our touch

& tongue, you were faith

in the everyday, not rare
as the sugarcane

my grandparents sent north

come Christmas, drained
sweet & dry, delicious, gone

by New Year’s;

no, you were nearer,
familiar, the thump

thump of an upright bass

or the brass
of a funeral band

bringing us home.

Spring Song II by Jean Garrigue

And now my spring beauties,
Things of the earth,
Beetles, shards and wings of moth
And snail houses left
From last summer’s wreck,
Now spring smoke
Of the burned dead leaves
And veils of the scent
Of some secret plant,

Come, my beauties, teach me,
Let me have your wild surprise,
Yes, and tell me on my knees
Of your new life.

Page from the Koran by James Merrill

A small vellum environment
Overrun by black
Scorpions of Kufic script—their ranks
All trigger tail and gold vowel-sac—
At auction this mild winter morning went
For six hundred Swiss francs.

By noon, fire from the same blue heavens
Had half erased Beirut.
Allah be praised, it said on crude handbills,
For guns and Nazarenes to shoot.
“How gladly with proper words,” said Wallace Stevens,
“The soldier dies.” Or kills.

God’s very word, then, stung the heart
To greed and rancor. Yet
Not where the last glow touches one spare man
Inked-in against his minaret
—Letters so handled they are life, and hurt,
Leaving the scribe immune?

Fragment on Dissembling by Lucie Brock-Broido

Curious in your dark
Frock-coat, do everything
That you have to,
If it is time;
Leave nothing
Still unsaid.
Once, to make of nothing
Something, was divine.
To have made
Of something
Nothing, was sublime.

On the Jetty by C.P. Cavafy

Intoxicating night, in the dark, on the jetty.
And afterward in the little room of the tawdry
hotel—where we gave ourselves completely to our unwholesome
passion; hour
after hour, again and again to our own love—
until the new day glistened on the windowpanes.

This evening the shape of the night resembles,
revived in me, a night of the distant past.

Without any moon, extremely dark
(an advantage). Night of our encounter
on the jetty; at a great
distance from the cafés and the bars.