poems for November 18 and 21

In November by Lisel Mueller
Furniture Stephen Dobyns
My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell by Gwendolyn Brooks
Cellophane: An Assay by Jane Hirschfield
The Envoy by Jane Hirschfield
Hirschfield’s translation of a poem by Izumi Shikibu


The poems for this week of November have somewhat of a thread addressing the role of time, and rewards of metaphors and looking at things from different perspectives.

For Mueller, she gives us the Hansel and” Gretl feel of fairy tale, or others commented,
a Rip Van Winkle-esque experience of waking up in the present, where a past life
100 years ago, is over, dreamt. "If I die before I wake" in the children’s lullaby
is replaced by waking to a present filled with coffee and sunlight. The longest line of the 19 line poem, “But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.” follows the line that “bad news is in distant places.” The Old Story and the personal “my” story point the reader to empathize with someone else living what could have been your life. It makes sense that Mueller escaped from Nazi Germany, and indeed, what might have been her story, was directed to others not as lucky.

I am reminded of Mueller’s poem “Things” in Dobyns’ poem “Furniture”, which provides metaphors on a meditation both perception of speed. The poem’s irony regarding perspectives on speed and our human tendency to rush into things (often missing the boat) and our view of the "stationary nature" of chairs, tables, is delightful. Ex. Facial movements and gestures, quarrels of chairs... and the fact that "They move
a little quicker than raindrops sculpt a rock."

The discussion focussed not on the cleverness, the contrast of our "persistent thought" and their inflexible humility, but the end:
"... Humbly, they allow

themselves to be pushed around, piled
in a corner, sold from an auction block.
Yet they always offer us the other cheek.

Let us crouch before them to gather up
the rich bounty of their wisdom. But no,"

Very tongue-in-cheek, with an enjambment/stanza break "they allow / themselves" which seems reluctant.
Martin offered the comment about turning the other cheek: if a nobleman struck a peasant, he used the back of his hand. So to turn the other cheek would force the noble to strike again, but use the palm of his hand,
thus putting the aggressor in the wrong. We would expect the a different last line after "But no,"...
not crouch, not gather up wisdom, but this:

"they don’t like us; they have never liked us."
I love the irony of the assumption -- which in a way opens the possibilities of examining relationship.

Going back to the "they / us" situation -- the enjambment for humans lies in the rushing:
"...as we rush and

rush and then arrive at our end. They see us
as we might see a speeding bullet. You ask
what has persistent thought brought them?"

Here, the human tries to explain what the non-human is about, in a way reminiscent of how each individual projects his worldview on others. Without ever saying how much we want to be "liked", or accepted,
or the problem of rushing about which interferes with creating opportunities for others to get to know us,
we end up with the world view of the non-human who has no use for us, much as we might need to sit on the fact.


Understanding the time period of poem delivers important context, as in the Brooks 14 line poem, written in 1963.
The hell mentioned in the title could be understood in a general sense, or the hell created by racial prejudice, and assassination of Martin Luther King, whose dream lies in "the puny light" of "wait". Note that the sentence continues with a semi-colon followed by eight lines introduced by "hoping"with the delayed object of what lies inward in little boxes of her will. The delay, the wait is drawn out, and she returns to the honey and bread of the beginning lines, but with a new twist --
Hoping...
"My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love."
What is "old purity"... what land of milk and honey keeps us going...is at risk?

The two clipped sentences on line five hint at hell: "I am hungry. I am incomplete." -- with no promise, guarantee of food, only the slim hope of "wait". The risk that inner "food" can survive outer "starvation" is great.
See APR Nov/Dec issue for Jane Hirschfield's discussion of this poem in her article about transformation.

The Hirshfield poem brought up quite a bit of discussion about cellophane/saran wrap, transparency,
promise of sealing (in freshness,) and the cost of transformation from "noble tree" to weightlessness.
What protects, yet reveals is not so simple: we struggled with the lines:
"Your art is audible. immodest:
to preserve against time."

and image of the flute, and old words in translation, "seen through".
This yearning for an "I" to be such a "you".

O Pen -- poems for Nov. 11 (Armistice Day)

Droplets by C.K. Williams
The Letter by Dana Gioia
Seeing for a Moment by Denise Levertov
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen
Radishes in War Time by Stan Sanvel Rubin
Apples in War Time by Stan Sanvel Rubin
Noise by Alicia Hoffman

11/11 when day and month match, and eleven marches like two soldiers lined up to remember
those who died in battle -- and might-have-beens layer, pocked with pauses remind us that no matter what experience, the well-crafted poem "unfastens the psyche's fortifications" to quote Jane Hirschfield somewhat out of context. If we steel ourselves against pain, we lose sight of the constant shifting involved with living that has nothing to do with "finding solutions once and for all".

The first poem by C.K. Williams threads one sentence into four stanzas filled with commas, hesitancies,
on a rainy day in fall. The sounds, particularly the "f"s have a tremulous quality played against
the relatively hard "d"s (din and downpour) "g"s (gush, gutters)and final nasal of the first and last words (Even / again), rain, not, note, nocturne, own. Interior "n"s, (planted, piano, constant, inside, mingling, intensity, wondering, longing, anymore, never, instant repeating "ings" push the "faltering, fading" into its own radiant passing. The intimacy of an "I and you" allows the reader insight into the thought of endings, in seasons, in storms, in living, juxtaposed by the practice of notes.

Whether stillness is the white space, the curved breath of a comma, the way consonants embrace vowels,
each of the poems present a texture of "moments" that allows objects of the world to change.

**
Hirschfield remarks “A good poem turns fresh ground inside us, to meet fresh need. Gioia addresses the universal nature of expectation, which drives our desire, attitudes. Where is that letter that contained "life instructions"? Surely it went astray... and we laugh at the irony. Martin pointed out how expectations have changed looking at pre and post world war II; Judith quoted from As You Like It,
and it seemed the poem succeeded in "ploughing" us to identify new ways of recognizing need.

The Levertov poem: One comment was that it had to be written in first person, as it was addressing something quite impenetrable. "It" is repeated 4 times: It was... three times. It was a cocoon; it was deep water; it IS first things -- foiled against the word, eschatology, learned as a child:
( "The department of theological science concerned with ‘the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell’.) Kathy thought of Merwin's poem, "The Old Ones" -- they have come the whole way.
Dogs as Cerberus or plural watch dogs roused from sleep... Levertov takes "Seeing" as understanding in glimmers of things -- something that happens "for a moment" if we are there to perceive it.



The "war poems" roused much discussion -- Abraham/Isaac, and what didn't need to be; the short history of human kind and how Neanderthals acted (only able to cooperate in small groups) vs. Homo Sapiens ; the lie next to the cud... corrosion of tissues... analogous to corrosion of truth.
corruption... collusion of profits...

The two Rubin poems at first blush seemed "slight" -- which the discussion seemed to discount. Wartime brings us to a certain way of thinking... so a "distant" war as metaphor is less powerful than the images Owens provides us. Comments: heart of the radish lies on the red surface, bleeding...
apple ... no one tending the orchard. // Apple as reminder of back home. Forbidden fruit... Greek legend.

We concluded with Hoffman's poem, the final one in her book, "Like Stardust in the Peat Moss".
What is noisome... and what is it we say we do, tell about, as opposed to the silent unfurling being of a fern.

Poems for Nov. 4 -- O Pen

From the Poetry Foundation -- Poems for Halloween
"Thomas Moore, Edgar Allan Poe, and Christina Rossetti tell rhyming tales perfect for chilling spines around the campfire. Shakespeare’s singing charmers from Macbeth and Sexton’s “lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind” are some of poetry’s most infamous witches. We’ll never look at tree branches with an innocent eye again, thanks to Paul Laurence Dunbar and Louise Glück; Adelaide Crapsey and Mary Karr ensure the same for darkened windows. Michael Collier and Michael Waters mischievously depict the gender play and genial debauchery of costumes, while W.S. Di Piero and Carl Sandburg warn us that Halloween is a day when real danger might look fake, and vice versa. We get a peek into the demons and spirits of other cultures via Annie Finch and Rae Armantrout: whether you say ghost, genie, or djinn, the tingle in the spine is universal.
“Djinn” by Rae Armantrout
“All Souls” by Michael Collier: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178287
“To the Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window” by Adelaide Crapsey: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175531
“The Haunted Oak” by Paul Laurence Dunbar: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173459
“Field of Skulls” by Mary Karr: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171884
“A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” by Thomas Moore: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174046
“To -- -- --. Ulalume: A Ballad” by Edgar Allan Poe: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174155
“Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174262
“Her Kind” by Anne Sexton: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171268
“Song of the Witches” by William Shakespeare: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171942

I picked three from here: What is real, and what spirits lurk in trees... followed by three poems


Samhain BY ANNIE FINCH
All Hallows BY LOUISE GLÜCK
Theme in Yellow BY CARL SANDBURG
*
and

Ordinary Life by Barbara Crooker
Study by Alicia Hoffman
The Lost Garden by Dana Gioia

**
DISCUSSION

I love this group! I love that Judith, as the walking memory, will pull out the pronunciation of Samhain (don't pronounce the M) and Rich picks up her invitation to set All Hallows by GLÜCK to music, and the wonderful interactions as we all strive in our way to understand the threads pulled up by the poems.

Annie Finch seduces the reader with sound, stiching past/present, neolithic amber, ancestors and dual meanings (veil, leave). What hedge of memory do we peep through, peel away, preserve, we who "die ourselves". This poem is satisfying, and a perfect meditative trigger for All Soul's.

I didn't know that the superstition of looking at the moon through tree branches will bring trouble, but Gluck certainly brings a chill with her "toothed moon" (optimists see a smile, pessimists see a threat)
like the choice of seeing "...barrenness/
of harvest or pestilence." "Come here little one... and the soul creeps out of the tree" transcends the sense of eerie vacancy, perhaps like Demeter longing for the return of Spring and her daughter. I loved the story of believing that Jesus lived in the knothole of a family's magnolia tree! But is such childlike thinking not the realm of poetry -- where truth relies on an army of lies ?(to quote Winston Churchill).

The delight of anthropomorphizing a pumpkin who speaks in the first person in Sandburg's poem reminded some of his children's stories (Rutabaga Tales) set in the land of Liver and Onions.


I had read the Barbara Crooker poem "All Saints" in the beginning -- and we enjoyed yet another way of looking at "ordinary" -- where the usual accidents didn't seem to happen. The sounds (alliterative B, L, P, SK's) the rounding of edges from "squares of light" to "circles of sunlight", the chuckle elicited by the line "I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb" the magic of the baby's roadways made in the "sofa's ridges and hills" paint a magic that we often forget to tap into.
The final 10-line, comma-stuffed sentence, speaks of the meal consumed only to illustrate the pause of a different kind of light:

The chicken's diminished to skin & skeleton,
the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,
but this has been a day of grace
in the dead of winter,
the hard knuckle of the year,
a day that unwrapped itself
like an unexpected gift,
and the stars turn on,
order themselves
into the winter night.

We are not the ones in charge of the stars turning on. But are left with an example of how to unwrap a day like a gift.

Alicia Hoffman's opening poem from her new book, "Starlight in the Peat Moss" works on the same theme. She picks an artist’s word, Study, and like Michelangelo, carving away stone to find what is revealed, calls on Light to help us see beyond the ordinary.
X-ray leads to the reassurance that “It’s not a far stretch, this dark/room of ourselves.”
But Study might also be the location, or the continuing verb of what we do to render
into art and word what is so close to us, and yet not known.

Finally, the Dana Gioia poem, the Lost Garden, gave rise to a long discussion about desire --
how he treats the "subtraction of desire..." as a quality. What is loss? Why is "cool" for something normally hot, something positive?
We brought up stages of grieving and how it is a blessing to be reminded of the
image of who we are inside oneself... "Oh I still have that inside me."
We don’t wish for what is not... the game of "if only" or "I wish, which impoverishes the present.
We better understand the "I want" of the way we were, still can glimpse the possible "perfect Eden"--
Luscious language, beguiling with an old-fashioned flavor, yet avoiding cliche.

All these poems ask to be read again, pondered again.

Poems for Lunch -- November 6

I read the November issue of Poetry after our discussion 10/31 about Whitman's "Wound Dresser" and felt as if Tom Sleigh had been privy to it. Tom Sleigh's article starts with his return from Mogadishu, Somalia and sources of rage. And then he continues with insights about the much-neglected David Jones, the great English/Welsh/Cockney painter and poet,author of "In Parenthesis" in part about his experience in WWI.
The title of this long work perhaps can shed light on Whitman's use of parentheses. WWI was like a "curious existence in parentheses" -- but how do you make sense of the 19,000 men killed in one day in Mametz woods?
Jones makes the terror and chaos real through the accents of the voices, rhythms of vernacular and slang, and sensual detail.

Once Jones said he wanted poetry to “be incarnational” – literally “dressing the spirit in flesh”.
There are no Keatsian sound effects, no lushness of orchestration as in Owen’s “Spring Offensive” in which the soldiers experience the traditional enchantments of pastoral.
The walk across no-man’s land is described as “small, drab, bundled pawns severally make effort/moved in tenuous line.” (p. 192)

When is a poem an “alibi for thought, a lot of word-masquerading, a rhetorical jumping up and down and waving of hands... to get someone to pay attention. The marks on the page have less permanence, less vividness of effect than the henna staining the camel and goat seller’s beard in a refugee camp.

He ends with the thought that the artist in necessarily empirical rather than speculative.
The question for the artist for Jones is “Does it?” rather than “Ought it?” – and that perception can’t be faked because it’s important to be... incarnational.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/87/2#!/20585867 (The Wall)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/97/4#!/20588159 (The Tutelar of the Place)


In contrast Wilfred Owens' poem below is highly anthologized.

Sleigh The entire issue had gripping poems about experiences that leave the reader gasping about what "reality" is like in other parts of the world and other times. Vantage points of the poor, the crazy, those about to board a train for Auschwitz-Birkenau, not having chosen an injection, those who didn't thanks to mercury chloride. Poems of parts of the world rife with violence where
"Memory shrinks // until it fits in a fist
memory shrinks // without forgetting
in chiseled columns. A strange poem about kisses and a nine-tailed fox and secrets and singing sentence into stone. All in all, a sense that poets are trying to make things new just as Marianne Moore and modernists were trying. The same problem -- how do we write -- and what matters in our poems. What keeps us reading poems?


So the line up for next week:

October nor'easter by Marge Piercy
Dulce et Decorum Est -- Wilfred Owens
Bad Year Anthem by Matthew Nienow
Things by Lisel Mueller

**

So often we think in opposites: right/wrong, black/white and indeed in art, the play of light/shadow, positive/negative (whether space or syntax) is fundamental to fleshing out an idea. Piercy gives us four stanzas in which the word "hard" is repeated (although stanza 2, transformed to hardly touched-- which hints at a series of possibilities). She threads the vowels so the ear can travel through the eee-ip--eee
rip of storm, the ay-uh... uh-ay of "rain scuds" (which feels like a noun but kicks the wet off the ocean as a verb). By the third line, the water is scimitar and if you had any doubt about the power of a Nor'easter,
you will be convinced of how it strip everything down to the bone. But isn't that what happens in life as we survive yet another year, arriving at fall's shorter days? Piercy ends with a novel and beautiful luminescent stone. But it is the "If" of standing bare that allows her to see "my bones/
still shine like opals/where love rubbed sweetly,/hard, against them.

Owens' poem leaves me raw. It is interesting to me how even with a snapshot of a real scene, the conversation goes to the political exigencies behind war. It is easier to focus on "issues" as opposed to the grim reality of slaughter. I had forgotten that Vietnam was both the first and last war televised.


Comments on the Nienow poem included assessing how a young, 30-year old poet thinks and a sense that he is on the edge of saying something very wise as he lives his boat-building life. What is this duality he senses in stanza 2: "I stand aside as what is removed is whisked alongside me.
The smallest particles of what is removed thicken the air,

making a dream inside which one cannot live. All day! Accessible, clear, not overdone. The loneliness hinted at in the Nienow poem is shared in a plural "we" and our universal impulse to anthropomorphize. It came up that we add the smiley faces to machines to make them friendlier, give us a sense of connection and response. The verb tenses include two conditionals -- like invitation -- give bells tongues so we could listen... "we gave the country a heart,/the storm an eye,/the cave a mouth so we could pass into safety.

Poems for Lunch -- October 31

Cinquain by Adelaide Crapsey, (1878-1914) (on Poets Walk)
Listen!
With faint dry sound
like steps of passing ghosts
the leaves, frost-crisped break from the trees
and fall

Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I [Round about the cauldron go
Unbidden by Rae Armantrout
When I Buy Pictures by Marianne Moore
The Courtesy of the Blind -- by Wislawa Szymborska
The Wound Dresser by Walt Whitman

**

With That Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
-Hafiz

**
It may well be Halloween, but we gathered today dispensing with Shakespeare's witches, stereotypes in the stew rather quickly.
The Hafiz points out how we cannot be one without the other, what we do not say, balanced by what we long for, but rarely hear. Armantrout carries out this balancing of past, future, done/undone, plural ghosts swarming to singular voice, yet each with something undone, rather like the yellow flowers of the palo verde which bloom at the edge of the green branches in singular blossoms. We might miss the yet "unblushed" yellow, or carry the edges which cut like a scissored blade of grass. The enigmatic last sentence testifies
to our subjectivity, more curious about circumstance, provenance than in the word or thing of itself.

From there, Marianne Moore's poem which presents a tangle of phrases pinned by colons and semi-colons before arriving at the first period. We think to buy, but are "imaginary possessors" balancing "intensity of mood" with the "real" things which seem to have appeared from an antique market.
Perhaps as she said about Gertrude Stein, "Looking harder, one is abashed not to have understood instantly; as water may not seem transparent to the observer but has a perspicuous opacity in which the fish swims with ease.", it took us some time to navigate the waters of her poem.

"Where does the poem prick your interest" is one of my favorite questions. In this poem, we discussed at length this line:
the silver fence protecting Adam's grave, or Michael taking
Adam by the wrist.
first man... archangel Michael --what do we know? Noah's flood took care of any grave... or is Moore referring to the ancient barrow in England? Or an image of Archangel Michael reaching to save souls in purgatory, by Jacopo Vignali, 17th century?
The other details are puzzling as well: 6 shades of blue for artichokes (right up a surrealist's alley)
and snipe-legged 3 part hieroglyphic -- why three parts? and why snipe-legged?

She seems to chide herself, following these details with:
Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or
that detracts from one's enjoyment.

Four "It" amplify the possibilities... Elaine brought up the fact that it must be "lit with piercing glances into the life of things" is in quotes -- as if borrowing from some authentic source.
Back to the "sorts" -- our mood, and the thing itself... and how it is infused with a larger sense of spirituality.

From there, to Syzborska's rather tongue in cheek look at what a poet expects to do, and how the blind will listen... The second stanza seems broad enough to go beyond the poet's experience, which is turned on its head through "the test of darkness", (and perhaps wisdom equated with seers and the blind) as if to capture the feeling of what it is to offer one's own world to someone who "visibly" has a very different one.

He reads-- since it's too late to stop now--

He's like to skip--although it can't be done--
and we as reader can consider the details given... examine our own sense of "courtesy"...

The Wound Dresser bears a complex syntax replete with parenthetical (inner) emotion to end with a question after ten lines: Of those armies so rapid so wondrous what saw you to tell us?

In case the exaggerated adjectives --"unsurpassed heroes" balanced by "(was one side so brave? the other was equally brave)don't have effect on the reader's answer, he asks again:

What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics,
Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

Very different poets, who invite us even after reading, to ask, what remains --
perhaps not bones of the dead, which like names on tombstones will fade leaving no trace--
but what stays with us after reading such fine poems? For me, a sense of gratitude for such a fine group of people sharing thoughts on how to understand both words and the contexts in which they were written.

O Pen -- Poems for October 29

I had started last week's session with a poem by Hafiz, published in the Sun (October 2013 issue, p. 13, versions by Daniel Ladinsky). We didn't have time for the Galway Kinnell, "Why Regret" --
and perhaps again, this week, there are far too many poems. So, take them home, read them and enjoy.
Both Kinnell and Hafiz remind us to engage with ordinary things, common acts. Yes, even when you are the one turned away from the factory, the one whose house is burning and you see it on the news, or you are the one at the airport and thinking about what "vacation" means, there comes a time when "connecting" no matter how imperfect in our mind, is the less painful risk than folding tightly everything you are.

With That Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
-Hafiz


to hear the poem last week: Galway Kinnell, Why Regret: http://www-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2006/12/15/20061215_kinnell28.mp3
(from Strong is your Hold)

From Jim Daniels, Places / Everyone
Mops
Factory Love
5000 Apply for 100 Jobs
Watching My Old House Burn on the News
**
Vacation by Rita Dove
Risk, by Anaïs Nin

Poems for Lunch : October 24 // O Pen October 29

From Jim Daniels, Places / Everyone
Mops
Factory Love
5000 Apply for 100 Jobs
Watching My Old House Burn on the News
**
Vacation by Rita Dove
Risk, by Anaïs Nin
Backyard by Carl Sandburg

Jim Daniels, "Places/Everyone": The into w/ Simone Weil
"Many indispensible truths, which could save men, go unspoken for reasons of this kind; those who could utter them cannot formulate them and those who could formulate them cannot utter them. If politics were taken seriously, finding a remedy for this would be one of its more urgent problems."

The Rita Dove poem was one of the ones Cathy Smith posted in her

**
We enjoyed the Jim Daniels’ poems, but unlike Li-Young Lee’s poem “Persimmons” where images wind mysteries which invite multiple layers of reflection, his more pedestrian style of observation leaves the sense of having read something interesting,
say about mops, and a chuckle at the personification of a machine, or recognition for the need for connection, but not necessarily a poem that leads to a big “wow”. I’m sure each person could summarize better, but below what I took away.

Mops has a few surprises, “each mop the obvious/ same woman’s hair” not really begging to be better understood – job and woman... then a priest and pleasure, and need for more cleaning – and the unexpected detail that a broom which tells the same story which has a stand-up comedian effect.
(Who likes to clean... who doesn't...)

Factory Love brought back a memory of working in a factory – the attachment and frustrations of machine, on the forklift hi-lo, and yet that universal need to care for someone in a committed way.
5,000 Apply for 100 jobs brought up an observation that “a bit of joy inside that big sadness” is more like relief... and the fictitious “Happy Hour at the Goodwill Store”
is the bright spot – not so much the job one has, as much as feeling momentarily connected.

Each poem was "unexpectedly expository" -- bringing various experiences together...urging us to find ways to connect...

Watching My Old House Burn on the News is indeed a catchy title – and a commentary on what deserves a 60 second spot. Time disappears as the memory of the house in which the speaker was conceived, now abandoned, returns back to what it was like
long ago, rain and crying babies now rain and a mother’s tears – the “like those flames, that fire” refers to the way the tears fall ....

The question came up if others thought the poems were authentic – or rather disingenuous. What do we want a poem to do? Dazzle us with brilliant description, as in Rita Dove’s poem? Convince us of the reality surrounding a working man or perhaps provide a glimpse into the ordinary which allows us a sense of empathy.
We know when a poem moves us to tears, compels us to spend time with it and gives us a sense of satisfaction (a huge thought in 8 simple lines, as in Nin’s poem which starts with “And” – with a whole untold backstory behind it, risk repeated in title and twice in the poem with the opposition of tight bud/blossom and the tightrope of what is painful.

Backyard, by Carl Sandburg was satisfying for the transformative power of moonlight, to turn all to silver... the magic of the moon – how some pay tribute, others ignore, lost in dream, romance in the air and “white thoughts” – and how many different ways to read the last line: shake out more and more / silver / changes.
or shake out more / and more silver changes
or shake out more and more /// silver changes.

**
For O Pen:
Perhaps again, this week, there are far too many poems to thoroughly
discuss, so, take them home, read them and enjoy.
Both Kinnell and Hafiz remind us to engage with ordinary things, common
acts. Yes, even when you are the one turned away from the factory, the one
whose house is burning and you see it on the news, or you are the one at the
airport and thinking about what "vacation" means, there comes a time when
"connecting" no matter how imperfect in our mind, is the less painful risk
than folding tightly everything you are.