Here in St. Louis it's a chilly National Poetry Month morning, and the LED lights up and down the UCity Loop are a steady cool: a mid-spring morning to evoke “profound pity,” as in this poem by Sarah Trudgeon.

Drugstore Baby

After dinner, Baby and me take just the right amount of Neurontin
and walk to CVS. The stars come out. We test
nail polishes on Baby’s little nails, softer than skin;
we nod at Jeggings and Snuggies in As Seen on TV,
the varieties of Band-Aids, the hair gels. But it’s Office Supply,
we know, that will do us in. We buy. We buy
pads of scrapbooking paper (Capturing Special Memories™).
Stickers. Felt pens. Walking out, we watch a man
try to return here something he got at Walmart,
yelling into the beige store phone, “I know that, in my philosophy,
the customer’s right. I’d give me a gift card… Somethin’!”

But at home, we find nothing to save or record.
So we cut pictures of roses and angels from books and make
a new book, less professional, but one that, says Baby,
inspires a profound pity. As usual, he is right: it’s so sad.
And we haven’t even included the things that are sad.
Our fingers and bones sore from cutting and sitting on the floor,
we talk about how, earlier, cars nosed home for dinner
in the winter dark—all of those people, living and living
and living. Baby and I had been plodding along the sidewalk,
wishing we had a snack. We were so tired.

from Blackbird (Fall 2014)

On this early Monday morning of National Poetry Month, 30,000 runners are gathering on Boston streets for the Boston Marathon. To celebrate, here's a poem about running by Irving Feldman.

The Runners

Here or there hundreds of them, phantom-like,
bobbing in place at street corners, then
lifting their knees suddenly and leaping
into the densest, loudest traffic
(of briefest trajectories, of shortest views),
in transit yet at ease, breathing, loping,
like bearers of distance and pure direction,
darting half naked out of nowhere and
where, where in the world are they running to?
swift and solitary, silent beings
who, should you now step into the path,
have dodged away, or, if you raise a hand
to stay them to speak, immediately
are gone: who are these runners who create
in their gliding such fine, singular spaces
among the street’s vociferous jargons?
—as if each one were a still, wordless message
or question one would answer if one could grasp it,
this one, that one, sliding past, going away,
while you stand there, your hand raised to no purpose,
your hidden heart rejoicing that the quick heel
won’t soon, won’t ever, be overtaken,
although you, as you have longed to, suddenly
disburden yourself and follow follow.

from Collected Poems: 1954-2004 (Schocken Books, 2004)

Today, on this penultimate Sunday of National Poetry Month, here's a poem about sitting in church–could be about sitting anywhere, perhaps, but wanting to be elsewhere and struggling to articulate a thought–by David Bottoms.

Baptists

At Canton First Baptist no one ever spoke of mythologies
or metaphor. No one in the pulpit, huffing

red-faced to catch a breath,
ever asked why the prophets had long ago drifted into dust and silence.

Desert was simply a wilderness of sand. Blood was blood,
water was wine,

and wine (grape juice) was sometimes blood.

Most Sundays my mind was someplace else entirely, racing
the engine of my father's Impala, or breaking

a curveball over home plate, or casting

a lure over choir loft and organ, over stained-glass disciples
and net-draped fishing boats, struggling
to hook a thought, to reel it to the surface, clean, untangled,
without snagging the pulpit or the back of a pew.

from Birmingham Poetry Review (Spring 2015)

Here today for National Poetry Month is a poem about planting and hoping for the best by James Matthew Wilson.

Agricola: A Song for Planting

My arms have labored such small cares
And failed them. So little as one seed,
To sow, or toss among the tares
To shrivel for thirst, or try to feed

What’s buried in the drying ground.
I scythe the grain when Autumn comes.
But now, the earth is cold; the browned
And fallen husks of last year crumble

Beneath each step I take. This year
Promises drought, the thirsting stalks
To be as these cut white stalks are,
The living follow the dead’s walk.

What lie did I tell myself when
I cast my efforts to sustain
Each growth? Each year forgives my sin,
But remnants of each loss remain.

from The Violent and the Fallen (Finishing Line Press)

National Poetry Month is not all pretty stuff. For instance, if you float rivers–in a tube, by kayak or canoe–you’ve likely drifted by beautifully horrific scenes such as this poem by David Bottoms.

Under the Vulture-Tree

We have all seen them circling pastures,
have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing,
the fences of our own backyards, and have stood
amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift.
But I had never seen so many so close, hundreds,
every limb of the dead oak feathered black,

and I cut the engine, let the river grab the jon boat
and pull it toward the tree.
The black leaves shined, the pink fruit blossomed
red, ugly as a human heart.
Then, as I passed under their dream, I saw for the first time
its soft countenance, the raw fleshy jowls
wrinkled and generous, like the faces of the very old
who have grown to empathize with everything.

And I drifted away from them, slow, on the pull of the river,
reluctant, looking back at their roost,
calling them what I’d never called them, what they are,
those dwarfed transfiguring angels,
who flock to the side of the poisoned fox, the mud turtle
crushed on the shoulder of the road,
who pray over the leaf-graves of the anonymous lost,
with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings.

from Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1995)

For the first day of the second half of National Poetry Month (and now that ideal spring mornings are becoming the norm) here’s a Robert Bly translation of a poem by Tomas Tranströmer.

Morning Bird Songs

I wake up my car;
pollen covers the windshield.
I put my dark glasses on.
The bird songs all turn dark.
Meanwhile, someone is buying a paper
at the railroad station
not far from a big freight car
reddened all over with rust.
It shimmers in the sun.
The whole universe is full.
A cool corridor cuts through the spring warmth;
a man comes hurrying past
describing how someone right up in the main office
has been telling lies about him.
Through a backdoor in the landscape
the magpie arrives,
black and white, bird of the death-goddess.
A blackbird flies back and forth
until the whole scene becomes a charcoal drawing,
except for the white clothes on the line:
A Palestrina choir.
The whole universe is full!
Fantastic to feel how my poem is growing
While I myself am shrinking.
It’s getting bigger, it’s taking my place,
it’s pressing against me.
It has shoved me out of the nest.
The poem is finished.

At the halfway point of National Poetry Month, here’s a poem–a story, a meditation on memory and time, a vision of mortality–by Donald Hall.

The Names of Horses

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every
morning,led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground–old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

 

Much there is that's not right with the world. Thus today for National Poetry Month this old frightening visionary poem by William Butler Yeats.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!

Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Thoughts of summer and leisure are in the air. And lazy rivers and lakes. Thus this poem by Jeffrey Harrison for the 13th day of National Poetry Month.

Green Canoe

I don't often get the chance any longer
to go out alone in the green canoe
and, lying in the bottom of the boat,
just drift where the breeze takes me,
down to the other end of the lake
or into some cove without my knowing
because I can't see anything over
the gunwales but sky as I lie there,
feeling the ribs of the boat as my own,
this floating pod with a body inside it …

also a mind, that drifts among clouds
and the sounds that carry over water–
a flutter of birdsong, a screen door
slamming shut—as well as the usual stuff
that clutters it, but slowed down, opened up,
like the fluff of milkweed tugged
from its husk and floating over the lake,
to be mistaken for mayflies at dusk
by feeding trout, or be carried away
to a place where the seeds might sprout.

from Feeding the Fire (Sarabande Books, 2001)

Today is the St. Louis Go! Marathon, so for this second Sunday of National Poetry Month here’s a poem about movement and grace by Ted Kooser.

A Rainy Morning

A young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.
You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.
Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.
So expertly she plays the chords
of this difficult music she has mastered,
her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
while the wind turns the pages of rain.

from Delights & Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004)