Self-Improvement

Tony Hoagland

Just before she flew off like a swan

to her wealthy parents’ summer home,

Bruce’s college girlfriend asked him

to improve his expertise at oral sex,

and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip

to flick the light switch in his room

on and off a hundred times a day

until he grew fluent at the nuances

of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,

more inspired than he ever was at algebra,

beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,

thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,

seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind’s eye,

the quadratic equation of her climax

yield to the logic

of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed

the bulb from his apartment ceiling

so that passersby would not believe

a giant firefly was pulsing

its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood

two inches from the wall,

in darkness, fogging the old plaster

with his breath, he visualized the future

as a mansion standing on the shore

that he was rowing to

with his tongue’s exhausted oar.

Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:

met someone, apres-ski, who,

using nothing but his nose

could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.

Sometimes we are asked

to get good at something we have

no talent for,

or we excel at something we will never

have the opportunity to prove.

Often we ask ourselves

to make absolute sense

out of what just happens,

and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,

which everybody practices,

but strangely few of us

grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex,

costly, beautiful, but secret.

Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down,

full of bodies wearing faces,

are full of hidden talent:

enough to make pianos moan,

sidewalks split,

streetlights deliriously flicker.

This World

Czeslaw Milosz

It appears that it was all a misunderstanding.

What was only a trial run was taken seriously.

The rivers will return to their beginnings.

The wind will cease in its turning about.

Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots.

Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror–

They are children again.

The dead will wake up, not comprehending.

Till everything that happened has unhappened.

What a relief! Breathe freely, you who have suffered much. 

Faith

Czeslaw Milosz

The word Faith means when someone sees

A dew-drop or a floating leaf, and knows

That they are, because they have to be.

And even if you dreamed, or closed your eyes

And wished, the world would still be what it was,

And the leaf would still be carried down the river.

It means that when someone’s foot is hurt

By a sharp rock, he also knows that rocks

Are here so they can hurt our feet.

Look, see the long shadow cast by the trees;

And flowers and people throw shadows on the earth:

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

In Black Despair

Czeslaw Milosz

In grayish doubt and black despair,

I drafted hymns to the earth and the air,

pretending to joy, although I lacked it.

The age had made lament redundant.

So here’s the question — who can answer it —

Was he a brave man or a hypocrite?

[The will to see 

oneself as fragile]

The will to see oneself as 

fragile, fallible, 

liable to fail. 



To consider a stranger and 

hear, in the mind’s ear, 

one’s true voice



insisting: I must change.

Ordinary people do this

Patient urgent work



alone and together

day upon day upon day.

Like my mother, once,



leading her ailing mother 

back through the maze 

of our suburban scrawl,



past ache, past haze, 

past confusion and rage

toward a neat room



where waited prayer,

fear, forgiveness, 

grief, grace. This



is a poem about kin 

and neighbors and nations 

adrift, in error, under siege.



This is a ceasefire poem. 

Tracy K. Smith

Dog Star

Take today. I want there
            to be less
of everything—wind

& worry, of leaves
            littering the ground
& love letters, addressee

unknown. Return
            to sender—
this, my quarrel

with what
            must be
told. No,

I insist, No.

Yet the wind won’t
            go away 
so easily, the stars remain

& do not grey—
            the boy looking
up into them thinks

he’s seeing them first
            tonight—it’s true,
here the sky & moon

do meet
            in an overgrown field—
nothing here 

tall enough to pretend
            to reach—even him
amazed at the blue,

even you.

Kevin Young

I.AM. NOT.A.MODEL.MINORITY

I come from family of  over-achievers…

The Laughing Heart

your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you. 

Charles Bukowski

For My Unwritten Poems

I write a poem for my unwritten poems,
for those that lie still in the rigid rest of nothingness,
as in the rest of reason—unemerged ideas.

How good the word is that has not yet been pronounced,
growing to its maturity in beds of silence
like the corn kernel in the field. 
Tomorrow perhaps the sun will crawl out
from the wind-swept, snowed-in heights,
and the seed
and the word
will rise into the blossoming beauty
of visible being.
Tomorrow perhaps there will be pain in the renewed white heat
of spring’s ascent towards bloom.

How good the kernel is,
that hibernates through years’ becoming
in the peace of its own essence,
beneath the earth,
like the bear after months of sleep— 
waiting, expecting
to awaken. 

Itshe Slutsky