Yet another attempt at poetry rejected by the gods of words...

What's Left is Miraculously Ordinary

A not-that-old man grudgingly wakes
to a wine hangover, high-mileage joints
wail Rice Crispy sounds as he warily climbs
out of the warm bed to return what's left

of the fermented liquid to the ecosystem.
He eats eggs and toast with spread, combs
over what's left of his hair, straps down
an ear flap hat and the gear in his truck bed

bereft of the tools for tending grape vines
on hills now spotted with McMansion views
of the corn monument field of rusting harrows,
subsoilers, cultivators, and trailed foragers--

like giraffes still tall near the decomposing barn.
He taps the brakes--slow on the frozen driveway--
drives as if in tow behind the snow plow,
veers to slide down the side road through

white walled woods to the lake like a salt flat
where he walks on the water--still fueled by
the warm eggs and bread with spread--where a shed
over a hole evolves into a fish factory, while snow
falls like cotton on what's left of the vines.

Scott Supak

Auschwitz "Arbeit Macht Frei" Sign Stolen

I can only imagine the kind of sick bastards that would steal that. But I agree with Jonathan Turley that it is unforgivable that it could be stolen. Denial much, Deutschland?

Yes, I know the camp is in Poland, but I'm insinuating that a Nazi took the sign, and I would think that Germany should have to pay to help keep the camp preserved, although I'm not sure that they do.

The job was apparently very professionally done, which would boost the theory that this was someone trying to make big money selling to the underground Nazi market.

British historian Andrew Roberts said the sign would generate huge interest on the burgeoning market for Nazi memorabilia.

I can never hear about that sign, sprawled above the entrance to Auschwitz, that means "work will set you free," without thinking of the Donald Baker poem that uses it in one of the most impressive ways it ever could be. Talk about putting something in context.

Formal Application

“The poets apparently want to rejoin the human race.”--Time

I shall begin by learning to throw
the knife, first at trees, until it sticks
in the trunk and quivers every time;

next from a chair, using only wrist
and fingers, at a thing on the ground,
a fresh ant hill or a fallen leaf;

then at a moving object, perhaps
a pieplate swinging on twine, until
I pot it at least twice in three tries.

Meanwhile, I shall be teaching the birds
that the skinny fellow in sneakers
is a source of suet and breadcrumbs,

first putting them on a shingle nailed
to a pine tree, next scattering them
on the needles, closer and closer

to my seat, until the proper bird,
a towhee, I think, in black and rust
and gray, takes tossed crumbs six feet away.

Finally, I shall coordinate
conditioned reflex and functional
form and qualify as Modern Man.

You see the splash of blood and feathers
and the blade pinning it to the tree?
It’s called an “Audubon Crucifix.”

The phrase has pleasing (even pious)
connotations, like Arbeit Macht Frei,
“Molotov Cocktail,” and Enola Gay.

(Donald W Baker)

This Day, For Thers

My favorite blog is Whiskey Fire, and my favorite blogger is Thers, who's mother just died. In his post about her passing, he links to Donne, Death Be Not Proud, an understandable sentiment from a man who just lost his mother. Since it's my son's birthday ("Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow..."), I'm going to be celebrating today, but I really want to take this little time for Thers who certainly deserves a taste of the beautiful for a moment, if only as a reward for his tireless raking of muck.

I like the Donne, especially after some Bushmills, but I'm more of a modern poetry lover, and I always think of what might just be My Favorite Poem (although that is certainly an even more elusive classification than Favorite Blog or Blogger) on such occasions, which is by Lawrence Raab. Since I couldn't find it on the internets anywhere, I'll put it here, for Thers.

This Day

Watching the beautiful
sticks of trees as they click and sway,
the first green unraveling,

it's easy to imagine I might
remember this day forever.
I say it to myself,

never to others, while the poem
made hoping to preserve it
is changed, then changed again

to fit another order
it happens to discover.
At the end I find myself

in a room by a window, or at the edge
of a field, with the same clear
sky above me wherein later

I will imagine clouds, as if
some movement were required. That,
or a different kind of stillness.

So there must also be
a family circled round
the bedside of someone

who is dying. I place
myself among them.
All of us are waiting

for the little we believe we need
to hold on to and repeat.
But this is not my family

although it is you
who are dying, your words
I am again unable to imagine

as everything continues
sliding together in the light,
that day so easily

changed to this one,
the sky that is so blue, and the clouds
that cross my gaze with such terrible speed.

--Lawrence Raab

Poetry After Years of None

Thousands of Tiny Taps Almost at Once

Almost frozen rain drops bounce
off slanted glass: molten BBs
the second impact of which
humans can barely detect.

The defroster-warmed windshield
lubricates the basal slide,
a glacial race across car parts
toward salted road like wrist blood

down fingers. Red and blue sirens
intermittently flash blinding,
weary authority from cops, ambulances,
and plow apparatus-strapped pickups.

The shorting-neon bar-sign effect prisms
through each half-flattened drop in the mire--
Tetris-piled-ice sky-scrapers, an opaque
cityscape on a bedrock of wiper blades.

Flip the switch! See a civilization
destroyed! The rubber barbarian
horde squeegees the watery wen
into compressed detritus, then resets.

Oil-fueled blades slice ice aside
into dross monoliths, offal sacrifices
destined to feed roadside sluices.
Obliviously eager new sleet

floods the excavated tabula rasa--
the abhorred-vacuum, now a province
filled by termites, protected witnesses,
contraceptive sponges, and colonists.

Gravity hauls the slush across
the transparent Diolkos, unaware
of its shivering nakedness, bare
liquid held together by sheer

temperature like exposed, decrepit
houses in leafless woods,
revealed only in winter,
about to be obliterated.

Scott Supak
February, 2009