“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow…Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
KURT VONNEGUT, Man Without a Country
THAT THING
by Alberto Rios
No word rhymes with silence, or tries to.
No word wants to visit that furtive backyard garden.
Silence is the word that will not be spoken–
After all, who can pronounce it? Once spoken,
We will not hear it. It is the story not told,
The memory carefully unspoken in this house,
Your house. Silence is the place underneath language
An unto-itself, an army
Stronger than words, more patient,
Bigger than the dictionary.
Its weapons are familiar,
Painful, without antidote and giving of no respite.
Quiet tells us it is coming, and so, too,
Quiet is tolerated, left to be, undisturbed at its work,
Silence’s grim reaper, allowed only to make deliveries,
To fill the bins, to cut the grass, eat if it needs to,
Then expected to leave, quickly, cleanly,
No trace afterward, no errant grass cuttings,
No black from the bottom of its shoes on the floor.
Good bye, we say, and in saying
Mispronounce its name, but happy not to know,
Ready not to ask. Good-bye, we say, and mean it.
MY CRIMINAL NOTEBOOK
by Alberto Rios
I am stealing things All the time.
I steal what I can from everywhere,
The light, the air, The music that matters most to me.
I carry them away neatly, invisible in word
Valises, inside unfathomable
Thoughts, attached to the magnet
Harvest of a song I’m singing-nobody,
Nobody is the wiser- I carry everything away with me
Using rhyme dollies and spelling knots.
The police have not caught on.
But I am at large,
Unwieldy, and unstoppable.
I walk freely
Every day, anywhere, all the time
In spite of having stolen
Horses and kisses-the stars themselves,
More than one, more than once.
I steal, I steal,
I have always stolen.
Be careful of me. When you see me,
Speak quietly and do little.
Do not let me notice you.
Get away
If you want to be safe.
Illustration: Pages from The Diary of Frida Kahlo
REFUGIO’S HAIR
by Alberto Rios
In the old days of our family,
My grandmother was a young woman
Whose hair was as long as the river.
She lived with her sisters on the ranch
La Calera–The Land of the Lime–
And her days were happy.
But her uncle Carlos lived there too,
Carlos whose soul had the edge of a knife.
One day, to teach her to ride a horse,
He made her climb on the fastest one,
Bareback, and sit there
As he held its long face in his arms.
And then he did the unspeakable deed
For which he would always be remembered:
He called for the handsome baby Pirrín
And he placed the child in her arms.
With that picture of a Madonna on horseback
He slapped the shank of the horse’s rear leg.
The horse did what a horse must,
Racing full toward the bright horizon.
But first he ran under the álamo trees
To rid his back of this unfair weight:
This woman full of tears
And this baby full of love.
When they reached the trees and went under,
Her hair, which had trailed her,
Equal in its magnificence to the tail of the horse,
That hair rose up and flew into the branches
As if it were a thousand arms,
All of them trying to save her.
The horse ran off and left her,
The baby still in her arms,
The two of them hanging from her hair.
The baby looked only at her
And did not cry, so steady was her cradle.
Her sisters came running to save them.
But the hair would not let go.
From its fear it held on and had to be cut,
All of it, from her head.
From that day on, my grandmother
Wore her hair short like a scream,
But it was long like a river in her sleep.
PAINTING: “Woman Combing Her Hair” by Edgar Degas (1894)
THE CITIES INSIDE US
by Alberto Rios
We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads.
We speak words between us that we recognize
But which cannot be looked up.
They are our words.
They come from very far inside our mouths.
You and I, we are the secret citizens of the city
Inside us, and inside us
There go all the cars we have driven
And seen, there are all the people
We know and have known, there
Are all the places that are
But which used to be as well. This is where
They went. They did not disappear.
We each take a piece
Through the eye and through the ear.
It’s loud inside us, in there, and when we speak
In the outside world
We have to hope that some of that sound
Does not come out, that an arm
Not reach out
In place of the tongue.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alberto Alvaro Ríos was born in Nogales, Arizona, in 1952. He received a BA from the University of Arizona in 1974 and an MFA in Creative Writing from the same institution in 1979. His poetry collections include Dangerous Shirt (Copper Canyon Press, 2009); The Theater of Night (2007); The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (2002), nominated for the National Book Award; Teodora Luna’s Two Kisses(1990); The Lime Orchard Woman (1988); Five Indiscretions (1985); and Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982), winner of the 1981 Walt Whitman Award. He has been honored with numerous awards, including six Pushcart Prizes, the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1994, he has served as Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he has taught since 1982. In 2013, Ríos was named the inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona.
ART: “Surreal City” by Phunke Pixie
MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY (Excerpt)
by Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
… I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.
Read the rest of the poem at poetryfoundation.org.
“Meditations in an Emergency” is found in Frank O’Hara’s 1957 poetry collection of the same name. The 52-page book, reissued by Grove Press in 1996, is available at Amazon.com.
AUTHOR BIO FROM THE POETRY FOUNDATION: Frank O’Hara (born in 1926) was a dynamic leader of the “New York School” of poets, a group that included John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. From the beginning, O’Hara’s poetry was engaged with the worlds of music, dance, and painting. In that complex of associations, he devised an idea of poetic form that allowed the inclusion of many kinds of events, including everyday conversations and notes about New York advertising signs. Since his death in 1966 at age forty, the depth and richness of his achievements as a poet and art critic have been recognized by an international audience.
PAINTING: Portrait of Frank O’Hara by Larry Rivers (1955)
FORTUNE HAS ITS COOKIES TO GIVE OUT
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Fortune
has its cookies to give out
which is a good thing
since its been a long time since
that summer in Brooklyn
when they closed off the street
one hot day
and the
FIREMEN
turned on their hoses
and all the kids ran out in it
in the middle of the street
and there were
maybe a couple dozen of us
out there
with the water squirting up
to the
sky
and all over
us
there was maybe only six of us
kids altogether
running around in our
barefeet and birthday
suits
and I remember Molly but then
the firemen stopped squirting their hoses
all of a sudden and went
back in
their firehouse
and
started playing pinochle again
just as if nothing
had ever
happened
while I remember Molly
looked at me and
ran in
because I guess really we were the only ones there
Photo: “Summer, Lower East Side, Manhattan, 1937″ (detail) by Arthur Fellig, AKA Weegee.
LET ME PLEASE LOOK INTO MY WINDOW
by Gerald Stern
Let me please look into my window on 103rd Street one more time—
without crying, without tearing the satin, without touching
the white face, without straightening the tie or crumpling the flower.
Let me walk up Broadway past Zak’s, past the Melody Fruit Store,
past Stein’s Eyes, past the New Moon Inn, past the Olympia.
Let me leave quietly by Gate 29
and fall asleep as we pull away from the ramp
into the tunnel.
Let me wake up happy, let me know where I am, let me lie still,
as we turn left, as we cross the water, as we leave the light
***
“Let Me Please Look Into My Window” appears in Gerald Stern‘s collection This Time: New and Selected Poems © W.W. Norton & Co., 1998, winner of the National Book Award for poetry. Find the book at Amazon.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1925, Gerald Stern studied at the University of Pittsburgh (BA, 1947) and Columbia University (MA., in 1949). His work became widely recognized after the 1977 publication of Lucky Life, that year’s Lamont Poetry Selection, and of a series of essays on writing poetry in American Poetry Review. He has received many prestigious awards for his writing, including the 1996 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 1998 National Book Award for This Time: New and Selected Poems, and the 2012 Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Award for Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992. He was Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2000-2002 and received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2005. Since 2006, Stern has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Photo: 103rd St. windows
A while back, I said, “I’m gonna pop some tags” (to quote “Thrift Shop,” a humorous/profane song by blond rapper Macklemore — a tune with over 400 million views on youtube), so I went to my local Goodwill store and for $2.99 snagged a pristine copy of POEMS OF NEW YORK (Everyman’s Library, 2002), a collection of 125 poems about Gotham’s many facets.
Here’s a poem from the anthology — part of the Everyman Library’s Pocket Poet Series — a beautiful hardcover book, with gorgeous photos on the dust jacket, and a threaded gold bookmark.
SUBWAY RUSH HOUR
by Langston Hughes
Mingled
breath and smell
so close
mingled
black and white
so near
no room for fear.
###
So pay a visit to your local thrift shop this week — most of these operations benefit worthy causes — and pop some tags. You never know what you’ll find.
BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
(Excerpt from Novella)
by Truman Capote
I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.
Silver Birch Press 