Monthly Archives: March 2018

17 posts

Digging Seamus Heaney

poetry poetry books reading poetry

What’s the opposite of a perfect storm? How about an imperfect sunny day? Certainly not the weather in Massachusetts yesterday, which was cloudy start to finish. But it was an accent-on-good Friday nonetheless. I wrote a poem tangentially about Henry David Thoreau to start the it off. Then I visited the library and picked up a first-edition paperback of Seamus Heaney’s debut collection of poems, Death of a Naturalist, which included in its title (Kismet!) Henry David’s favorite word.

Then, when I walked the dog last evening, I heard peepers the minute I exited the house—like a light switch had been thrown, as if nearing 60 degrees near the end of March had done the trick and flipped the sound-of-summer soundtrack.

So you see, it was an auspicious day. One in which I not only started, but finished this British paperback (Faber and Faber, sold for 1.25 pounds in 1966) of 57 pages in one sitting. That’s 34 Seamus Heaney poems with an old-school library card in the back showing it was signed out for the first time on June 15, 1977, and only three more times after that, the last being Dec. 22, 1995.

Gentle aside to poets: If you’re wondering why your poetry books aren’t selling better, you need look no further than this Irish giant’s first foray, which apparently got little play in the Petersham Library. Small comfort, that, I realize, but still….

Now some people are intimidated by the likes of men named Seamus Heaney. He did, after all, develop a style to be reckoned with over time. Have no fear here, however. Seamus’s first outing is mostly one-page poems (a particular favorite length of mine) filled with memories of farm life and boyhood back in the days of yore in Ireland. Sod. Cows. Cuds. Potatoes. Barns. Drowning kittens. Irish wakes. Young love. The usual and the un-, in other words.

Leading off, a familiar poem. The only one I knew from this collection, turns out. See if you know it, too:

 

Digging
by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

 

And dig he did, rooting out many a poem in his day. And it all started here. First. For him when it was published. For me, when I checked it out of the library 52 years later. On one of the better days I’ve had in a while.

The only thing that could have topped off a day like yesterday would be seeing a new review of my own book of poems. Out of the blue. Like the peepers on cue. Like a reader was really digging my work, Heaney-style….

Random Thoughts on the Eve of Easter

opinion poetry

  • The front page of newspapers is bad for writing poetry, especially these days.
  • So is watching 60 Minutes, where the forecast is mostly Stormy. It all clouds the brain. Anger “trumps” creativity every time. Turn off your TV, writers!
  • If you’re bringing your muse in for a check-up by telling friends you just don’t get ideas anymore, you’ve got more than mechanical problems.
  • Photography before, during, and after serving as president will age a person’s face. Photos of Abraham Lincoln, poor man, attest to that. The only other known ager of men is the poetry market, where you can grow a 5-year-wrinkle just waiting for replies.
  • For most occasions, “replies” being loosely defined as form e-mails.
  • March is down to but a few days of lambdom. Then it’s April, the month T.S. Eliot ruined forever by turning it into a cruller. No, wait. A misspelled crueller (sic) month.
  • (Yes, Virginia, it sometimes snows in April.)
  • It think it was Basho who once said (in 17 syllables) that selling poetry books is like selling winter coats in July. Renga that.
  • I once worked in the marketing department of a corporation. The line there was “pennies a day, Mr. Customer. Pennies a day.” So the next time someone looks at the price of poetry books in alarm ($15 for just 85 pages?), remind them that it is but 4/10ths of a cent a day.
  • Plus, unlike today’s newspaper, it rereads nicely. For years!
  • And you thought all the deals were at Target!
  • Almost Easter, which forever reminds me of W. B. Yeats “Easter, 1916,” which (while we’re talking risings) in turn leads me to his poem “The Second Coming” with its iconic lines: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;”
  • Ordinarily that would be good enough to secure “The Second Coming’s” place among most-quoted poems or poems who gave other writers book-title material, but the poem contains yet one more gem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
  • I once went slouching towards Bridgeport. Does that count?
  • Just finished reading Marie Howe’s debut poetry collection, The Good Thief, which is not as strong as her later collection What the Living Do. The good news? I can learn as much from one as the other.
  • Why are so many holidays marked by sugar? With Easter upon us, I think of chocolate eggs, chocolate bunnies, and (God save us all) peeps. Halloween? Nothing but door-to-door candy robberies. Valentine’s Day? Love plays second fiddle to sweets, Sweetie. Christmas? Cookies and candies and cakes, oh my! The sugar industry has done something right.
  • Opening Day in baseball is today. It’s as much a marker of spring as the redwing blackbirds I hear out back.
  • The problem with gift certificates to bookstores, online or brick and mortar, is spending them. Like Christmas Eve, anticipation is what makes it. Once you buy books, you inevitably bring them home, sometimes to never read them, sometimes to read them and get disappointed. Expectation is a tough character to match.
  • Spring also means my favorite made-up word: “mudluscious.” Any word e.e. cummings likes but autocorrect does not is OK by me.
  • If you celebrate Easter, “ham” it up. Me, I’m passing on the ham this year. You reach a point where you crave variety and throw yourself at a restaurant menu’s mercy.

 

 

 

 

 

The Beauty of Holding a New Book in Your Hands

poetry poetry books

Can you beat the feeling of buying a new book you’re looking forward to reading? I don’t care what the date is, it’s like Christmas morning.

Better than Christmas morning, even, because you don’t have to put up with all the people and the noise and the obligations (and can you think of three more lethal things for reading?).

And not only is the new book good for you, it’s good for the author, who—unless he’s Dan Brown—is not making much on this writing and appreciates every little royalty he can get. (On this count, I speak from first-hand knowledge.)

Me, I like to look the new book over, feel it front and back, sniff a riff of pages. Oh, yeah. Only then do I turn into it slowly, looking at the colophon, dedication page, epigraph, acknowledgments, table of contents, etc.

And when it comes to a new book of poetry, when I’m done teasing myself with a little anticipation, I read the first poem—the warm-up, the promise of things to come–slowly. Then again. And then, because it’s a magical number, a third time.

You knew where I was going with this, I’m sure. This was me, yesterday, with George Bilgere’s new book of poems, Blood Pages, which can be had on sale if you scroll down here.

Anyway, the first poem. Take a look:

 

’56 Corvette
by George Bilgere

I’m grateful to the camera for reaching out
sixty years ago and putting a stop
to time, if only for the 1/125th of a second,
so that my father and I can sit a little longer
in the nifty white convertible he’s just bought
and driven home to take me for a spin.

I’m five years old, and taking in
what the camera can’t: perfume of seat leather,
my dad’s Chesterfield, and the lilt
of Vitalis in the air as he slips
the little beauty into first, eases out
the clutch, and heads off to be dead
by the end of the year, his liver
finally throwing in the towel.

We smiled as the shutter clicked,
giving the film its sweet slice of light,
and my mother waved and went back into the dark
part of life that doesn’t get its picture taken.

 

There. See what I mean? New book. Smooth page. Sweet poem with more to follow. All you need do is find your favorite place to read. You know. Away from people, noise, and Christmas morning.

 

 

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When Poets Make Cameos in Your Poems

Lost Sherpa of Happiness my poems poetry poetry books

horses

It stands to reason, if you read poetry as much as poets do, that sooner or later famous poets will enter your poems. The cameos are not restricted to poets, however. Prose writers rise to the occasion as well. It’s a reimagining of their imagined worlds in your own imagination, if you will.

In my first book, appearances were made by Tolstoy, Turgenev, Pliny, and James Joyce. In the latest, it’s Hemingway and James Wright. The poem below, “Reading James Wright,” appeared in the fall 2017 issue of The MacGuffin, a fine journal of poetry and prose put out by Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan. Subsequently the poem appeared in my latest collection, Lost Sherpa of Happiness.

 

Reading James Wright
by Ken Craft

I have been wandering with Wright
These two hours, under trees
Shadowy with women and dance. Soon it is dusk.
Somewhere horses
Move. The flint of hooves. The stone masking soft
Kindnesses.
He doesn’t know I am here, mistakes
Me for loneliness on a sturdy branch.
I leave him to his
Beautiful dark,
The dampness of give beneath my feet.

 

I felt a little sad writing it. For me “his beautiful dark” was the death Wright addressed so often in his poetry. And the “dampness of give beneath my feet” was meant as a metaphor for my own mortality–all of our mortalities–which will someday reunite us beneath the earth.

I can’t stress the importance of writers reading widely enough. When you read a collection by a poet you admire, you come under the writer’s spell. Sometimes the spell leads you to write yourself–about the conjurer. It’s one of the nine muses, I’m more than sure. The name is Greek to me, but you understand.

 

 

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Unimpeachable? Why Writers Cannot Count on the Constitution

opinion poetry

constituion

Reading the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review, I dwelled longer than recommended on Andrew Sullivan’s review of two Trump-centric books: Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide by Cass R. Sunstein, and Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America, a collection of essays edited by the same man.

First things first: authoritarianism is bad news for everyone, save the powers-that-be and their toadies, but it is particularly dangerous for writers who dare consort with such dangerous accomplices as Truth and Criticism. And I mean writers of every stripe, from journalists to poets. And I mean artists of every stripe, from actors to painters to musicians, because authoritarians love to lump us all together and label us: “liberals,” “socialists,” “elitists.”

That last one is particularly amusing. I am about as elitist as an old truck. But if the powers-that-be label you and repeat their lies enough, their toadies in the swamp begin to sing the same song. The refrain? Any enemy of Trump’s is an enemy of the state’s.

Back to Andrew Sullivan’s article: If you’re looking for a cautionary tale on authoritarianism, Sullivan writes, you need go no further than Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is systematically turning that country’s democracy into permanent one-man rule.

Could it happen in the United States? As Trump begins to beat the drums (read: tweet the tweets) more and more about Robert Mueller the closer Mueller’s investigation leads back to Trump’s lair, the answer is increasingly becoming a foregone conclusion that no doubt will include Mueller’s firing. Here’s Sullivan in a key paragraph:

“The dismemberment of a public discourse centered on objective truth is a key first step, fomented by unceasing dissemination of outright lies from the very top, metabolized by tribal social media, ever more extreme talk radio and what is essentially a state propaganda channel, Fox News. The neutering of the courts is the second step — and Trump is well on his way to (constitutionally) establishing a federal judiciary whose most important feature will be reliable assent to executive power. Congress itself has far less approval than Trump; its inability to do anything but further bankrupt the country, enrich oligarchy and sabotage many Americans’ health care leaves an aching void filled by… a president who repeatedly insists that ‘I am the only one who matters’.”

Sullivan goes on to bemoan the fact that “the possibility of reasoned deliberation at the heart of democratic life has been obliterated by the white-hot racial and cultural hatreds that Trump was able to exploit to get elected and that he constantly fuels.”

Scarier still? Trump has not cornered the market on capitalizing on racial and cultural hatred. It is unfolding in other countries as well, all in an ominously 1930s kind of way.

Sullivan wraps up his book review with these profoundly disturbing words: “The Democrats find themselves in opposition a little like Marco Rubio in the primaries. Take the high road and you are irrelevant; take the low road and you cannot compete with the biggest bully and liar on the block. The result is that an unimpeachable president is slowly constructing the kind of authoritarian state that America was actually founded to overthrow.

“There is nothing in the Constitutions’s formal operation that can prevent this. Impeachment certainly cannot. As long as one major political party endorses it, and a solid plurality of Americans support such an authoritarian slide, it is unstoppable. The founders knew that without a virtuous citizenry, the Constitution was a mere piece of paper and, in Madison’s words, ‘no theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure.’ Franklin was blunter in forecasting the moment we are now in: He believed that the American experiment in self-government ‘can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.’ You can impeach a president, but you can’t, alas, impeach the people. They voted for the kind of monarch the American republic was designed, above all else, to resist; and they have gotten one.”

As Sullivan sums up his words on Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America, he hints that the collected essayists have already come to a frightening conclusion regarding the titular question of the hour: Can it happen here? “If you read between the lines,” he writes, “‘it’ already has.”

Warming Up to Tarjei Vesaas’s Ice Palace

poetry prose poems

ice palace

On the back of Tarjei Vesaas’s book, The Ice Palace, is a blurb by Nova that reads, “Believable and haunting…this beautiful neo-prose poem is as sombre and Scandinavian as a Bergman film.”

I can’t vouch for the Bergman film bit (I think I’ve seen all of one), but I’m all in on the “haunting” and the “beautiful” and the “sombre” parts. As for “neo-prose poem,” I guess that is because it is a novel, not a prose poem, so the prefix gives Nova poetic license to call it such.

Shall we put it to the prose poem test? Here’s a paragraph describing the ice palace itself–a structure which is a collaboration between winter and a waterfall in Norway–to consider. Put your neo- goggles on and see what you think:

“The sun had suddenly disappeared. There was a ravine with steep sides; the sun would perhaps reach into it later, but now it was in ice-cold shadow. Unn looked down into an enchanted world of small pinnacles, gables, frosted domes, soft curves, and confused tracery. All of it was ice, and the water spurted between, building it up continually. Branches of the waterfall had been diverted and rushed into new channels, creating new forms. Everything shone. The sun had not yet come, but it shone ice-blue and green of itself, and deathly cold. The waterfall plunged into the middle of it as if diving into a black cellar. Up on the edge of the rock the water spread out in stripes, the color changing from black to green, from green to yellow and white, as the fall became wilder. A booming came from the cellar-hole where the water dashed itself into white foam against the stones on the bottom. Huge puffs of mist rose into the air.”

Such description could easily become a found poem of the neo-lyric variety, no? Heck with the 500-piece puzzle. Try your hand at a found poem using the above paragraph as an exercise.

Me? I’m off to work, but look forward to some of your efforts. And no, it won’t be graded. Make your found grade an “A” why don’t you? You’ll see that poetic license melts icy grading systems every time….

Snow: The Poetry & Politics of Praising It

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Be careful what you wish for, the saying goes. Was it only a week ago, March 7th, that I posted a poetic paean to snow called “March Snow”?

Yes, I waxed poetic about how innocent March snow was, how wet and transient, how beautiful in that it inevitably signaled Old Man Winter’s death throes.

Are snow storms any reason to stop by woods (to write a poem) on a snowy evening? Or is that strictly the province of a man appropriately named “Frost”?

Last week’s storm turned out to be a nor’easter that knocked our power out for 13 hours. And we were one of the lucky ones. Many surrounding Massachusetts towns were without power for days. In the cold. (Or shall we say, with the cold mousing its way in?)

Schools were closed for two days — Day One because of the snow, and Day Two because of the widespread power outages and downed tree limbs littering impassable side roads.

Yes, pretty March snow is dense with moisture. The kind that weighs on the minds of birch and white pine limbs, especially.

Yesterday, another nor’easter blew through, bringing us 20 inches more of the lovely March Snow. School was cancelled anew. Electrical power blinked off, on, off for good in many homes. And this morning I’ve learned schools will be closed a second day for the second time in two weeks. Four days lost, just like that, to the drifting beauty that is March Snow.

Be careful what you wish for, the saying goes.

And how naive can a poet get, writing rhapsodic about the beauty of snow at the end of its season? Everyone says it’s a pain, a plague, a plight to be endured. Why then, am I thinking “muse”?

It’s an outrage, I guess. I had a small collection of villagers with pitchforks and torches outside my home last night shouting and calling me out. My post brought on these two nor’easters, you see. Jinxed us but good. Must be!

But really, I’m here to stand by my post. These storms are no less beautiful because they take away our games and diversions. No lights, no internet, no TV. Granted, no heat is a more serious matter, but our forefathers (and not just four of them) would seriously wonder what we’ve come to if we no longer prepare for the unexpected. Why, they’d ask, would we live in New England without the back-up peace of mind that’s called a wood-burning stove or a pellet stove?

“Weather happens,” as they used to say in colonial times. “Now let’s write a poem. By candlelight.”

ENVOY:

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
by Robert Frost (a man without a pitchfork or torch)

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Books That Lead You to Books

opinion poetry

jd

Word of mouth is powerful exchange in the market of book selling. No publicist can match it. Person A reads a book and recommends it to Person B, who immediately tells Person C, “You have to read this!” right on down the alphabet.

Me, I’ve had more recommendations via “word of author.” If I admire an author, I often read the writers he or she admires. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Especially if you believe as I do that writing is informed by the writers you admire, consciously or subconsciously.

My first reading extravaganza came thanks to the young and tortured anti-hero, Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye. In an early scene in his private school dorm, Holden is found reading.

What’s the title? As the reader bends for a closer look, he finds it is none other than Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen. It might have been a strange choice for a teenager, but as a teenager myself, I hunted it down and read it as well, feeling cool in a Caulfield kind of way.

The other book Holden recommends in this scene is The Return of the Native. Thomas Hardy, the author, was the kind of guy you’d like to call up and talk to, Holden says. Though I was still in high school, I met Eustacia Vye because of Holden. Talk about a blind date! I made it to the end, too–classic or no–and even read a few more Hardy’s (most memorably, Tess of the D’Urbervilles).

Another great word-of-author guy is Ernest Hemingway. He loved to write about eating, drinking, and reading. In A Moveable Feast (misspelling and all), he shares the books he’s checked out of Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookstore, Shakespeare & Co. One was Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, a book I took with me on a deer hunt in Maine.

We often associate books with location read, and that collection of stories will forever go down as the one in my hands when the early snowstorm socked us into a farmhouse on a Maine mountain. I’d rather read than hunt, anyway.

Hemingway also was reading Constance Garnett’s translation of War and Peace while playing the starving artist in 1920s Paris. That and Dostoevsky’s The Gambler and Other Stories. I credit Ernie with making me the Russophile that I am–at least when it comes to Russian literature from the golden age (19th century).

In The Green Hills of Africa, EH talks books some more. He’s still reading Tolstoy, in fact. “The Cossacks” and Leo’s other stories of Sevastopol. I bought these stories, too, and read them quickly and selfishly, like a hungry dog that doesn’t want to share his meal.

Hemingway doesn’t stop there. He has Stendhal while big-game hunting in Africa, reading Le Rouge et Le Noir. Suddenly and dutifully, I was reading Stendhal as well. I think I liked The Charterhouse of Parma even better, but I never would have read either if not for Ernie.

It’s like dominoes after awhile. When reading Tolstoy, I got to read books he mentioned. Chekhov’s short stories. Pushkin’s wonderful Belkin’s Tales. Lermontov’s atmospheric  A Hero of Our Time, another short masterpiece featuring an anti-hero.

Perhaps it speaks to my shy nature as a teenager. Word of mouth was for the social sorts. Me, I hung out with writers in a vicarious way, and followed up on their every recommendation. That habit has brought nothing but literary gold, making me a “wealthy” man of sorts, at least if “well-read” counts for something on the stock exchange.

And if you find Tolstoy and Turgenev and Hemingway in my poems (and you will), it’s for a reason. Books that led me to books.

The Hubris of Daylight Savings Time

humor poetry

time

You wake up. Squint at the clock. Seven o’clock. Is that possible?

No, wait. Spring ahead. Was this clock sprung before bed?

Yes, because it’s in the bedroom. Or that was your thought last night, anyway. So six o’clock, really. And you went to bed at 11. No, make that 10. Which means you slept a total of… oh, forget about it.

Downstairs to make the Sunday morning coffee. Seems brighter than usual. Or maybe that’s just bright reflecting off the forward-March snow.

Where the hell’s the atomic clock? Or the cable box. The internet will do, too. Big Brothers, all. They have our times, all right. More than we know.

Let the spring rituals begin: Fix the clock on the microwave (quick time). Fix the clock on the stove (hot times). Where else? There’s got to be a rogue clock somewhere, holding its Eastern Standard Time hostage on the principle of it all. Maybe you’ll leave it — the revolutionary in you giving tacit sympathy to its cause.

Who invented Daylights Savings, anyhow? Why are we subjected to these insignificantly significant jolts to our inner circadian rhythms twice a year? Fall bleeping back. Spring bleeping ahead. Late to this appointment. Early to that one.

You don’t want to think about it too much, because the answer is Congressmen. Lord. Politicians! Playing politics with clocks based on their “studies” which, you’ve learned, have to be studied themselves because they’re seldom if ever true.

And this evening, the outside will look strangely different, too. All because of political hubris. All because of men playing god. The Greeks knew a thing or two about the folly of mortals getting uppity. After all, didn’t they invent the word hubris?

Case closed. Eyes closed. You need a nap. Too much thinking for today, especially considering you were robbed of an hour while you slept.

So go ahead. Dream a little. Of clock-less rooms. Of time-less worlds. Of lands where no man can wear his wealth on his wrist and call it an expensive watch. Time will take care of itself. And it will never fall or spring. It will just bide with a little smirk on its lips….

 

 

Aubades: Love Poems That Dawn On You

poetry poetry books

“Poetry doesn’t get enough mainstream attention these days. It’s a mode of engaging with the world, it feels like magic, it requires nothing of you other than a willing ear. It’s also a mode of engagement that is not argumentative, it’s full of surprise, and it’s full of grace.”

Thus spake Jia Tolentino in her video intro to a reading of Tracy K. Smith’s “Solstice,” taken from Life on Mars, the book I’ve been reading (or perhaps that’s been reading me).

The book itself is a rich nougat, much sweeter and more filling than expected. All manner of poetry is going on here, from free verse to bound forms to boundless imagination in the form of postcard missives between people.

As another example of the variety, I give you an aubade entitled, quite simply, “Aubade.” An old French form, an aubade, gets its own 2-minute podcast on Merriam-Webster. Although it looks like you’d pronounce it with a long “a,” it is, in fact, pronounced “oh-BOD.” Without further ado, here is Tracy’s love song to the morning:

 

“Aubade”
by Tracy K. Smith

You wake with a start from some dream
Asking if I want to walk with you around the block.

You go through the things that need doing
Before Monday. Six emails. A presentation on Manet.

No, I don’t want to put on clothes and shoes
And dark glasses and follow the dog and you

Down Smith Street. It’s eight o’clock. The sun
Is toying with those thick clouds and the trees

Shake their heads in the wind. You exhale,

Wheel your feet to the floor, walk around to my side
And let your back end drop down onto the bed.

You resort to the weather. A high today of 78.
But that’s hours aways. And look at the dog

Still passed out cold, twitching in a dream.

When we stop talking, we hear the soft sounds
He makes in his sleep. Not quite barking. More like

Learning to speak. As if he’s in the middle of a scene
Where he must stand before the great dog god

Trying to account for his life.

 

Mornings can get rather prosaic, as this aubade attests, making it a much easier form for poets to explore than the ghazals we found leaping around in yesterday’s post. And it feels as if the aubade isn’t done speaking, either, when we see, two poems later, Smith’s continuation of the dog theme. For what goes with mornings more than dogs?

 

“Eggs Norwegian”

by Tracy K. Smith

Give a man a stick, and he’ll hurl it at the sun
For his dog to race toward as it falls. He’ll relish
The snap in those jagged teeth, the rough breath
Sawing in and out through the craggy mouth, the clink
Of tags approaching as the dog canters back. He’ll stoop
To do it again and again, so your walk through grass
Lasts all morning, the dog tired now in the heat,
The stick now just a wet and gnarled nub that doesn’t sail
So much as drop. And when the dog plops to the grass
Like a misbegotten turd, and even you want nothing
More than a plate of eggs at some sidewalk café, the man–
Who, too, by now has dropped even the idea of fetch—
Will push you against a tree and ease his leg between
Your legs as his industrious tongue whispers
Convincingly into your mouth.

 

A stronger poem, I think, but every bit as lovely as morning, the best time of day, the most creative time of day, the time of day I need no alarm clock to greet. Speaking of days, maybe we need to discover the Norwegian word for “egg poems.”

Love, dogs, or eggs, may yours be a good one, no matter how much remains of it.