Poem whose philosophy I agree with (William Meredith).

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The cheer

reader my friend, is in the words here, somewhere.
Frankly, I’d like to make you smile.
Words addresssing evil won’t turn evil back
but they can give heart.
The cheer is hidden in right words.

A great deal isn’t right, as they say,
as they are lately at some pains to tell us.
Words have to speak about that.
They would be the less words
for saying smile when they should say do.
If you ask them do what?
they turn serious quick enough, but never unlovely.
And they will tell you what to do,
if you listen, if you want that.

Certainly good cheer has never been what’s wrong,
though solemn people mistrust it.
Against evil, between evils, lovely words are right.
How absurd it would be to spin these noises out,
so serious that we call them poems,
if they couldn’t make a person smile.
Cheer or courage is what they were all born in.
It’s what they’re trying to tell us, miming like that.
It’s native to the words,
and what they want us to always know,
even when it seems quite impossible to do.

Word (it’s all about the Z).

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Here are some rarely used z-words that I invite you to integrate into conversation.

zoanthropy: delusion that one is an animal (so common these days)
zoetic: living; vital (how poetic)
zazzy: flashy; stylish (I thought I’d made up this word circa 8th grade)
zoilism: carping and unjust criticism
zomotherapy: medical treatment using raw meat (I am NOT interested)
zabaglione: frothy custard (what an intriguing format for custard, this froth)
zaftig: having a full; rounded figure (this feels Yiddish)
zanyism: buffoonery
zapata: flowing, drooping moustache (It flows…but also droops! Fail.)
zappy: lively; entertaining
zarf: ornamental holder for hot coffee cup (sounds more like a coffee snafu)
zatch: female genitalia (!!!!!!!!!)
zemni: blind mole-rat (I’m hoping, for the sake of the species, that this is uncommon)
zho: cross between a yak and a cow (zho no)
zonelet: a little zone (okay I DEFINITELY made up this word)
zoodikers: an exclamation (Zoodikers!)
zoon: organism regarded as a complete animal (…so close to noon[ie]…)
zorino: euphemism for skunk fur (golly I didn’t know we needed a euphemism for this)

z-baby: a nickname coined in the summer of 2006 for a first-rate lady whose name will be on the cover of my first cheekily-titled collection of pop essays about my life (“Pop Rocks with Zara Zuckerman”)

Poem to read slowly (Alberto Ríos).

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In My Hurry

The curious lavender attentions to itself of the jacaranda
Stopped me, as through the leaves and small avenues

In late summer I made my way in love toward you.
The tree’s flowering was an intimacy I had not earned,

A color of undergarment or something from the better
Pages in the book already underlined by classmates.

It was lavender or lilac, something from the hundred blues,
This color without rank and without help, standing there,

Giving me the gift over and over again but high up, outside
My reach, which made my desire to touch it all the more.

The color and the tree, the moment and the lateness of the season,
They joined in a gang of what I could see was a tangle of sinew,

So much muscle in search of the cover-skin of an arm,
The tree itself seeming all at once an arm unleashed,

Strength itself gone wild in its parts to the sky.
This was an arm that had stopped me—

How could I not have seen it? This tree was an arm
And more than an arm, its muscle strung in everything

So that the tree—everything about it—the tree
Made itself of arm and leg, leg and neck, at angles,

At stops and starts and in bends, everything broken,
Everything but the lavender, which was flower,

So much lavender coming from what was left, what must be
A mouth, a thousand mouths, at once speaking

The lavender or the lilac, the blue, understood language.
These were match-tipped words asking the impossible of me,

Whatever I imagined the impossible to be: a bowl of cherries
In winter, or that I might come again by this place and stop.

Absent of reason, I could agree to anything addressing a tree.
The cherries were not much, I know, but what they meant,

Born of this exotic, all lavender and muscle, held me.
It was an equal and other necessity, calling to me in my hurry.

It was a tree in wild color calling to a tree in wild color,
And the lavender, I think you know what the lavender is.

Poem (Mine).

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Love Poem, 7 of __

My sweet,

I was speaking to Natasha yesterday over tea
and she asked me, What keeps you breathing?
Funny to inquire about what we’ve never
presided over. I considered this question as one
about stillness and answered your name.
From the heavens, nothing on earth
is in motion. Be well until I’m there
to ensure it.

All my love,
Sylvain

Poem (Tony Hoagland).

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The Question

“We are what is missing from the world.” –Fernando Pessoa

Some questions have no answer.
Raised, they hang there in the mind
like open mouths, full of something missing,
The great Portuguese poet, Pessoa,
said that the idea of happiness
is what makes men permanently sad.
The body, imagining the soul,
looks ugly to itself.
A man hears a word, and the world
becomes a place that he misunderstands.
So he climbs high into his life,
ashamed of all he doesn’t know,
and refuses to come down.

If you could coax him out again,
you could tell him, say,
that anything can be explained.
The shape of apples, for example,
by their love of travel.
Or that the sky is blue because
it’s an easy color on the eyes.

Even the dog, chasing its tail,
has, temporarily, a center.
Even the bird, disappearing into its hole
knows that the world goes on without it.
And Pessoa, that eminently healthy many,
that artist, wore a blue wool hat
even on the hottest summer days.
Simply to toss at strangers on the street.
He liked to see them catch it,
and grow immediately less strange.

Poem (mine-all-mine).

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Boy, teach me
how to guru

how to blow
on through

the rest of these
young XY’s

with lines attached.
I see you (boy)

firstborn of a wild
acorn morn

where the willows
caw their hip

misnomers. Miss
Homer’s what

they call me
at the bar you

saw me swillin’ in
my ankles brushed

up along some
damn nice flooring

the microphone in
my lady hand

I demand
of you I demand

you call me other
-wise call me wise

call me by my given name
at the very least boy call

your momma

Poem (Jean-Pierre Rosnay).

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The Song of the Fireplace

It’s God’s shirt that is burning or, if you like it any better, his beard.

Fires in a fireplace are more and more infrequent, at least where we are, and for that reason too they are all the more precious to us.

At one time or another, there is always a friend or relative who can take advantage of a fire to visit us or sound off.

Wood fires always have something to tell us. The one giving me my excuse now for a flight of poetic fancy speaks to me of the past, of war, of the Resistance.

It insists on my not forgetting the Haute-Savoie, Vercors, Mont Mouchet, where fires of logs and dead leaves strengthened and warmed our will to keep fighting on to victory.

Fires in a fireplace always lead us back to the essential, their warmth has nothing in common with the warmth produced by electric power. God sometimes speaks above a small candle-flame, but rarely in light from an electric bulb.

Let’s leave it at that.