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For Friday July 11, 2008
Bloated Haiku
Minnow, abandon your nibbling illusions. Stop preying on tiny
imaginations. Swell and grow into the pond's overlord, a fat fish
silently devouring all. Release us from the tyranny of the small!



Elizabeth Spires


For Thursday July 10, 2008
Wash Day
July, 1947, Gibbon, Minn.

Soiled thoughts heap up
like rags in a basket.
Time to do a wash.
The weather's right,
bright and windy.
A quick-dry day.

First, soap. Not store-bought.
But stone-hard pig fat
and lye mixed with
oatmeal in a pail.
Then hacked with a knife
into Lux-like flakes.

Then the washer, gas-powered.
Hard to start in the
kitchen, but too heavy
to lug outside.
"Fumes!" (There's
a word for you!)

The blue-enameled kitchen
stove burns corncobs
gnawed clean by pigs.
After the pigs have done
their damnedest,
the cobs burn hot.

Water. Well-water
is real cold.
No stove, pigs or not,
is hot enough to bring
well-water to blood heat.
For that you need a heart.

In the root cellar
beneath the kitchen
potatoes sprout
dead white—
because there's
no light.

Outside, on wash day, are
two galvanized steel tubs
for rinsing in the lovely air.
Rinse Tub One: rainwater, sheer joy.
Rinse Tub Two: the blueing,
too cold to be true.

Then, everything dries on the line
in the winds of July.
What dries first?
Handkerchiefs and lady's underwear.
What dries last?
The farmer's overalls

heavy with desire.
On the bib,
where the heart beats,
his everlasting snuff tin
has inscribed an unwashable
perfect circle forever.

At noon, the naked truth descends
offering her stunning breasts.
Also here comes the prophet
Amos, with something in hand.
In fact, a basket of summer fruit.
Ch. 8, vss. 1,2. (Check it out.)



Allen Grossman


For Wednesday July 9,2008
For the Fifty (Who Made PEACE with Their Bodies)
1.
In the green beginning,
in the morning mist,
they emerge from their chrysalis
of clothes: peel off purses & cells,
slacks & Gap sweats, turtle-
necks & tanks, Tommy's & Salvation

Army, platforms & clogs,
abandoning bras & lingerie, labels
& names, courtesies & shames,

the emperor's rhetoric of defense,
laying it down, their child-
stretched or still-taut flesh

giddy in sudden proximity,
onto the cold earth: bodies fetal or supine,
as if come-hithering

or dead, wriggle on the grass to form
the shape of a word yet to come, almost
embarrassing to name: a word

thicker, heavier than the rolled rags
of their bodies seen from a cockpit:
they touch to make

the word they want to become:
it's difficult to get the news
from our bodies, yet people die each day

for lack of what is found there:
here: the fifty hold, & still
to become a testament, a will,

embody something outside
themselves & themselves: the body,
the dreaming disarmed body.

2.
And if the exposed
flesh of women spells,
as they stretch prone, a word
they wish the world
might wear, the tenderness
of unbruised skin, juice

of itself unsipped? And then?
Here, where flesh is marked
& measured in market

scales of the ogler's eyes,
will they fall, cast down
to their own odd armor,

or gloat on the novel glut
of flesh, the body commodity
no Godiva can set free?

But what if unbuffed generals,
grandfathers unashamed, stood
before camera's judgment,

vulnerables genuflecting
to the cold, their sag noses
shying from all eyes—

unjockstrapped, uncupped,
an offering of useless nipples
& old maps of animal fur

tracing their chests? It's no use.
Shoot out the lights, suture
the lids, & trace with fingertips

the blind-dark rooms
of what we are, houses
of breath, sheltered & unshelled.



Philip Metres


For Tuesday July 8, 2008
Stopping along the Way
Heading south toward campus, my car
stops suddenly, abruptly, almost
on its own. My right foot
has found the brake pedal
before my eyes can admire
a very young possum strolling
across our right of way
at his personal intersection
of human cross-purposes,
some of whose brakes are squeaking
behind us now. The possum
pauses, lowers his gray-pink-
and-sooty snout to drink in
the odor of something
among the fallen and flattened
sycamore leaves. I've seen
too many of him lying down
even flatter than seemed
possible beside roads
and in gutters. I realize
my car's mere presence looming
over him won't quicken
those four deliberate paws,
won't urge him out of danger,
but before I can think or make
some warning sign, two cars
are honking. He lifts his head
dreamily, comparing
that sound to some distant sound
somewhere deep, far back
in his old, new mind, then begins
strolling forward again
and up onto the grass
among the unloaded, locked,
and abandoned bicycles
and empties and leaflets left
by fraternal and sisterly
orders on their own ways
to and from understanding
or back to forbidden gardens
and holes in the ground. Again
a car behind me honks.
And another. It's what geese do
heading south at the beginning
of winter. They want to know
the one in front still believes
they're there and are trusting him
to be sure where they're all going.



David Wagoner



For Monday July 7, 2008
Under the Elm
Under the elm for a long time
I've been waiting for you, O my soul.
Weeks follow each other like books
Perused, my thoughts elsewhere,
Full of music that's distracted too
Full of a deep buzzing where words images
Perceptions dwell in the jumble of memory
Of which our mind is composed.
And nothing comes to assert your coming
No other sign than smoke.
Is it you that we should have welcomed
When tenderness filled our hearts?
You that we should have discovered
On the shores of pity or of love?
I have not been taught to notice your presence
Even when reveille raises the limbs
Of a future happiness; even when
Tired of a long day I seek
Silence in the immense dark where I jettison
What differentiates the sun from death.
Hours accumulated, absurd riches,
I am ready to give up the trees and the cities
But I still hope to receive you, my soul,
Laden with my own eternity.
You who are me, who resembles nobody,
You that I must give back some day to who knows who.
By Pierre Martory