we came whirling
out of nothingness
scattering stars
like dust

Rumi

***********************************

When I Heard the Learned Astronomer

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with
much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman

If you want what visible reality
can give, you're an employee.
If you want the unseen world,
you're not living your truth.
Both wishes are foolish,
but you'll be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is
love's confusing joy.

Rumi

Allison Wolff

Like a river at night, her hair,
the sky starless, streetlights
glossing the full dark of it:
Was she Jewish? I was seventeen,

an “Afro-American” senior
transferred to a suburban school
that held just a few of us.
And she had light-brown eyes

and tight tube tops and skin
white enough to read by
in a dim room. It was impossible
not to be curious.

Me and my boy, Terry, talked about
“pink honeys” sometimes: we watched
I Dream of Jeannie and could see Barbara
Eden – in her skimpy finery – lounging

on our very own lonely sofas.
We wondered what white girls were
really like, as if they’d been raised
by the freckled light of the moon.

I can’t remember Allison’s voice
but the loud tap of her strapless heels
clacking down the the halls is still clear.
Autumn, 1972: Race was the elephant
sitting on everyone. Even
as a teenager, I took the weight
as part of the weather, a sort of heavy
humidity felt inside and in the streets.

One day, once upon a time, she laughed
with me in the cafeteria – something
about the tater tots, I guess,
or the electric-blue Jell-O. Usually,

it was just some of the displaced brothers
talkin’ noise, clowning around, so she
caught all of us way off-guard. Then,
after school, I waved and she smiled

and the sun was out – that three o’clock,
after-school sun rubbing the sidewalk
with the shadows of trees—

and while the wind pitched the last
of September, we started talking
and the dry leaves shook and sizzled.

In so many ways, I was still a child,
though I wore my seventeen years
like a matador’s cape.

The monsters that murdered
Emmett Till—were they everywhere?
I didn’t know. I didn’t know enough

to worry enough about the story
white people kept trying to tell.
And, given the thing that America is,
maybe sometimes such stupidity works
for the good. Occasionally,

History offers a reprieve, everything
leading up to a particular moment
suddenly declared a mistrial:
so I’m a black boy suddenly

walking the Jenkintown streets
with a white girl—so ridiculously
conspicuous we must’ve been
invisible. I remember her mother

not being home and cold Coca-Cola
in plastic cups and the delicious
length of Allison’s tongue and
we knew, without saying anything.
we were kissing the color line

goodbye and on and on and on for an hour
we kissed, hardly breathing, the light almost
blinding whenever we unclosed our eyes—
as if we had discovered the dreaming door
to a different county and were walking

out as if we could actually
walk the glare we’d been
born into: as if my hand
on her knee, her hand
on my hand, my hand
in her hair, her mouth
on my mouth opened
and opened and opened

Tim Seibles

Mattina

M'illumino
d'immenso

I illuminate myself
with immensity

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970)
translated by Gian Lombardo

*****************************

“And suddenly it’s evening”

Ed è subito sera

Ognuno sta solo cuor della terra
traffito da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera

Everyone’s always alone on the earth’s breast
pierced by a ray of sunlight:
and suddenly it’s evening

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968)
translated by Gian Lombardo

"Any true poem should offer its reader paths through thought and intuition toward an altered awareness of his or her own life. I want my poems to speak directly to the reader. At the same time, I hope they complicate the thinking of anyone who reads them. My poems are out of a desire to ask questions, not to supply answers."

Steve Orlen
1942-2010

******************

THE TOOTHBRUSH

I’m trying to remember you without nostalgia
thieving your words and hoarding them
because all that I’m getting is the toothbrush
you carried in a mug every day
down the corridor heading for the men’s room
to commit a small act of resistance
against breakdown.

I always laughed:
you have the best hygiene of anyone
in the department, which was a joke
because the stink of cigarettes
surrounded you like the fry oil
of a prep cook. Still something like
tenderness inhered in the mug
and its rigid little daisy.

Here’s how we met: me on job interview
fresh from New England trying
not to sweat in desert heat,
you after friendly dinner with Gail
and studio tour and poetry talk
driving me downtown in some big junk car
with no AC saying Barrio Hollywood
and Hotel Congress and the Shanty.

Then came the test: the story about a whore
in Nogales who had a spider web
tattooed around her pussy. I’m sure that
was the word—offense was the point
and I understood implicit was the question
does your poetry trump your politics?

This was in those years when women
were correcting men as if sex
were a policy that could be rewritten
in a pencil stroke. I passed, laughing it off:
Oh my god you’re kidding that’s incredible.
A poet can find wonder anywhere
and I did wonder how strong a woman
had to be to take that kind of pain.

Here’s how we said goodbye: I came
to visit you, the nurse recalibrating
your drip as you asked, have I got any time?
And you, thumbs down, facing it.
I saw you catch your breath
hand to throat beneath the black t-shirt,
some event the hand would contain,
some moment of self-consolation,
like air was alien.

Aurelie called it
the weird majesty of death
that had come over all of us,
people gathering
in a circle, each face
reorganizing itself through
the eyes of another’s grief
as if to be animated
were to violate the pure encroachment
of the inanimate.

There was a kiss,
me walking you to the bathroom
and then to bed where you lay
in shuttered afternoon light,
others in the room, whatever privacy
once meant it meant no longer
and you seemed nothing but
this invitation to tenderness.

And what kiss was this—not familial peck,
not lovers’ open-mouthed encroachment,
not parental seal of approval but
the mouth opened by the final
so quiet need to say
there is nothing between us
that needs to be cleaned away.

Alison Hawthorne Deming
January 2011

Poet, teacher, friend.


Steve, You will be sorely missed.
We will carry your words with us ~

A Cave of Angelfish Huddle Against the Moon

Put an ear to the light at fall
of dark and you will hear
nothing. This pale luminescence
that drifts in upon them
makes a blue bole of their caves,
a scare of their scything
tails. They tell
in the bubbling dark of images
that come in upon them
when light spreads like an oil slick
and sea fans
that once were their refuge
turn away.
Now there is no dark
dark enough for their silver tails,
scatter of color
(like coins massively
piling in the lap of a miser)
that was, in the day, their pride.
How hugely here we belong.
This is their song
in the silting
drift of the reef.
They have never seen the moon
nor the black scut of night, stars
spread like plankton
in their beastly infinities.

Ron De Maris

*****************************
(Micah wrote about going to hear President Obama speak in Tucson on January 12, 2011)

I went to hear the president speak with my dad. He talked about the the six people who died from the shooting. One of the most important things he told us what that Gabby opened her eyes! That made me feel happy. He talked about Christina and how she died. I felt sad. Barack Obama got to speak the longest, that made me feel good.

I knew one of the people that got shot. His name is Ron Barber. My mom worked with Gabby at the university.

Afterwards, lots of people were outside looking for Obama’s limousine.

To The New Year

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

W. S. Merwin