Poems by Bobbi Lurie

Bobbi Lurie is a Mexican poet. She writes with a graceful ease. Her poems essentially define the expression of a person coming on terms with his own microcosm as well as the macrocosm. The lines are both a pilgrimage depicted, as well as a traveler sketched. The words are a majestic journey of exploration of the psyche of both the individual and the society. The poems at the same time portraying the polity of the society; also become the symbol of the disillusionment that has become the major characteristic of the modern times. — Anchit 

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BURNING

The arms of the trees open wide
We are here for such a short time
Do not imagine this dream is yours

LOTUS

a lotus grows in my throat
it is blue
i feel it blossom as
an old woman feeds me
sugar cookies
they are poison she says
her hands are etched
with cuts and scabs
her eyes are powder blue
they look through me like a lens
there is no such thing as a friend
in this world she says
people just appear
i see i am
alone
people are just mirrors she says
the lotus in my throat
grows towards my forehead

JANUARY SALES

It's the January sales
and I'm buying.

Trapped in the endless, airless halls,
nullified through the phosphorescent fluorescence

and the lonely beating of my thoughts,
walking behind all the girlfriends,

as I lug my bags, sorry already
for the weight of fashion.

And when I get home
I see other clothes hanging

hanging in my closet...
new, unused, reflecting all the places

I did not go,
the ways I was not seen.

And not until I lay naked in my bed
can I feel

the white longing in my bones
which can not be dressed.

VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF LONELINESS

1.

He stares into the page, writes his name in red
letters, wipes his nose on the sleeve of his shirt, hopes
no one is looking. But the teacher looks up at him
then down, writes something quickly in her book. The boy
stares out the window, sees crows
                        standing on the lawn in a row.

2.

Outside children ask:
Will you be my friend? Will you promise not to
talk behind my back?
             He does not understand.

3.

He sees them huddled in groups, knows how it is to walk
outside them, how they talk in whispers,
twitter when he passes.
                         And that moment of relief
when they sometimes let him stand
                        in their midst. What they say
bores him. He can’t wait to leave, walk
into the open field,
                        the kindness of horizon,
the clarity of trees.

4.

Wide open door into the closed room.
The way the child sits, the way
he moves his hands, the way he holds his pen,
she records this in her book.                                                 

5.

Trampled grass sprang back when he walked
through the field to see her. But the boy can not
                                                spring back
as she takes notes on each of his gestures,
            as she consults her charts,
writes her report.

6.

The room closes more.
She notes startle reflex in her book, writes
he is too quiet, unable to answer with eye
contact, does not answer my abstract
questions, is not animated like the others.
                        She sees a drowned face,
eyes staring forward from the bottom of a well, tells
his mother, call any time,
                        though it’s taken the mother months to see her.
There are support groups you can join, she says, as she jots
Autistic on the cover of his file,
            places it on her shelf, crammed with books,
looks away, checks her watch.

7.

The boy walks alone through the field of children
and trees and basketball courts and balls and
screaming and jump ropes.
                        The air turns quiet as he leans
against the chain link fence, presses his body
against it as he watches cars pass,
telling stories to the tree,
            laughing at the tree’s response.

KABUL

This afternoon I went to the jar, sank my finger in the honey.
No one saw me so I let the sweetness linger on my tongue.
At night I paint black around my eyes.
I wash it off at morning.
When everyone’s asleep, I draw on scraps of paper
I’ve collected, the backs of labels, edges torn from newspapers.
This is my secret.

***

Coming back from the highway with my brothers,
I dropped my spade, went to lean against the shed,
Heard Father’s voice coming from within.
He was laughing with Abdullah who says he’ll buy me
For three bags of wheat
When Father’s done with me.
When he does I’ll slash my body with petrol,
Strike the match like Laida did.
I watched those two fools empty a giant vat of honey
Into another vat, saw them pull out long tubes
They scraped with their hands, licked with their tongues.
Beneath the amber honey, I saw guns.
Father caught me looking, jumped off his chair,
His hands were claws dripping towards me,
Shoving me hard against the wall, grabbing me there.
Whore!! he screamed then spit on me.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak.
I covered my face.
Back in the tent
Mother was making lentils,
Hunched over the fire.
I pulled the spoon from her hand, stirred the pot
As if I were her daughter.

***

Today, walking with my brothers, I saw Bashir.
He was leaning against a wall, one leg missing.
I knew, still a shock went through me
Seeing the dirty rags tied around his stump, the blood dried,
What looked like pus.
And how he stood as if he had a leg.
Strange how we never speak
But I walk through him with my eyes,
Enter his hidden rooms.
He was speaking with Khangal about the enemy
But his soft eyes were blazing holes in me,
Forcing me to see the sky and trees with deeper color.
Khangal saw me looking, threw his spade hard against my leg,
The pain was so intense. I bled and bled,
Putting pressure on the wound with just my hand,
My burkha drenched in blood,
He pulled me up by my hair.
I burned in the part of me which was not hurt.

***

Tonight Father had guests. I heard them say
They liked the bread.
I baked it
While Mother took a nap.
She did not say
I baked it. She turned her back to me.

***

I feel sickness inside me all the time.
I enter the back rooms with my father,
Creep out like a rat trapped in its maze,
Seek escape in the next cage where Mother stands
Brewing the food, keeping us snared in this affliction called life.
And I think of our martyrs dying for freedom.
I would like to die for freedom.                                                                                             
But I am a woman
And I do not believe in the paradise Father speaks about
While he beats me with his stick.

***

But every day I keep collecting my scraps of paper.
And when everyone’s asleep,
I draw Bashir, his stump, my father with his guns,
My mother hunched over the fire, stirring lentils.
I draw them all out of me.
I open myself to the darkness.
I wait for night to speak.

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 “The Book I never Read, poems by Bobbi Lurie, is one of those volumes that stays in your mind - the images, the stories, the observations - all of it piercing, honest and real. I keep waiting to see her poem Kabul in The New Yorker. In her fearless way she describes life for women in that hard land. And then there are these wonderful insights into our everyday lives, full of humor and her own special sarcasm, like Perusing the Fall Catalogue and Dreaming of a Better Life. Nothing escapes her - movies, family life, what it's like to stand by and watch people disappear into Alchemies and madness. I find her world fascinating and compelling and always look forward to the next volume.” — Joan Torres

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“Bobbi Lurie's "the morphine poems" succeeds as language breaks through language metastasizes through the harboring of pain. The words spread across the page with a content all their own; uncanny, they haunt the body. Paragraphs of disorderly text are ordered; a poetics of life against death seeps through. This is an important and powerful book, concerned with illness that almost tends towards pathology of speech itself. The body refuses to disappear and the words simultaneously convey despair, heartbreak, and resistance. Bobbi Lurie writes unsparingly about sickness and wayward health in a brave and detailed cartography of body and biography, creating a work of brilliance and renewal. Everyone should read this book, which is everyone's journey, one way or another, a journey from life into life. It is a journey that is all too often shamefully hidden, a journey we need to contemplate and embrace.” — Alan Sondheim

Poems By Cate Marvin

Cate Marvin is an American poet. Marvin's first book, World's Tallest Disaster (Sarabande Books, 2001), won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Her second collection, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, was published by Sarabande Books in 2007. She also co-edited Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006). Marvin's honors include the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Whiting Award, and a NYFA Gregory Millard Fellowship. She teaches at the College of Staten Island in New York. Presenting some poems.

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A Windmill Makes A Statement

You think I like to stand all day, all night,
all any kind of light, to be subject only
to wind? You are right. If seasons undo
me, you are my season. And you are the light
making off with its reflection as my stainless
steel fins spin.

On lawns, on lawns we stand,
we windmills make a statement. We turn air,
churn air, turning always on waiting for your
season. There is no lover more lover than the air.
You care, you care as you twist my arms
round, till my songs become popsicle

and I wing out radiants of light all across
suburban lawns. You are right, the churning
is for you, for you are right, no one but you
I spin for all night, all day, restless for your

sight to pass across the lawn, tease grasses,
because I so like how you lay above me,
how I hovered beneath you, and we learned
some other way to say: There you are.

You strip the cut, splice it to strips, you mill
the wind, you scissor the air into ecstasy until
all lawns shimmer with your bluest energy.

Oracle

Dead girls don't go the dying route to get known.
You’ll find us anonymous still, splayed in Buicks, 
carried swaying like calves, our dead hefts swung 
from ankles, wrists, hooked by hands and handed
over to strangers slippery as blackout. Slammed
down, the mud on our dress is black as her dress,
worn out as a throw-rug beneath feet that stomp 
out the most intricate weave. It ought not sadden 
us, but sober us. Sylvia Plath killed herself. She ate 
her sin. Her eye got stuck on a diamond stickpin. 
You take Blake over breakfast, only to be bucked 
out your skull by a cat-call crossing a parking lot. 
Consuming her while reviling her, conditioned to 
hate her for her appetite alone: her problem was 
she thought too much? Needling an emblem’s ink 
onto your wrist, the surest defense a rose to reason 
against that bluest vein's insistent wish. Let’s all 
us today finger-sweep our cheek-bones with two
blood-marks and ride that terrible train homeward 
while looking back at our blackened eyes inside 
tiny mirrors fixed inside our plastic compacts. We 
could not have known where she began given how 
we were, from the start, made to begin where she 
ends. In this way, she's no way to make her amends.

Why I Am Afraid of Turning the Page

Spokes, spooks: your tinsel hair weaves the wheel
that streams through my dreams of battle. Another
apocalypse, and your weird blondeness cycling in
and out of the march: down in a bunker, we hunker,
can hear the boots from miles off clop. We tend to
our flowers in the meantime. And in the meantime, 
a daughter is born. She begins as a mere inch, lost
in the folds of a sheet; it's horror to lose her before
she's yet born. Night nurses embody the darkness.
Only your brain remains, floating in a jar that sits 
in a lab far off, some place away, and terribly far.
Your skull no longer exists, its ash has been lifted
to wind from a mountain's top by brothers, friends. 
I am no friend. According to them. Accordion, the
child pulls its witching wind between its opposite
handles: the lungs of the thing grieve, and that is
its noise. She writhes the floor in tantrum. When
you climbed the sides of the house spider-wise to
let yourself in, unlocked the front door, let me in
to climb up into your attic the last time I saw you
that infected cat rubbed its face against my hand.
Wanting to keep it. No, you said. We are friends.
I wear my green jacket with the furred hood. You 
pushed me against chain-length. Today is the day 
that the planet circles the night we began. A child 
is born. Night nurses coagulate her glassed-in crib.
Your organs, distant, still float the darkness of jars.

Lying My Head Off

Here's my head, in a dank corner of the yard.
I lied it off and so off it rolled.
It wasn't unbelieving that caused it
To drop off my neck and lull down a slope.
Perhaps it had a mind of its own, wanted
to leave me for a little while.

Or it was scared and detached itself
from the stalk of my neck as a lizard's tail
will desert its body in fright of being caught.
The fact is, I never lied. The fact is,
I always lied. Before us, we have two mirrors.
At times, they say, one must lie in order

to survive. I drove by the house, passed
it several times, pretending it was not
my own. Its windows were red with curtains
and the honeyed light cast on the porch
did not succeed in luring me back inside.
I never lied. I drove by the house,

suckling the thought of other lovers
like a lozenge. I was pale as a papery birch.
I was pure as a brand new pair of underwear.
It will be a long while before I touch another.
Yet, I always lied, an oil slick on my tongue.
I used to think that I was wrong, could

not tell the truth for what it was. Yet, one
cannot take a lawsuit out on oneself.
I would have sworn in court that I believed
myself and then felt guilty a long time after.
I hated the house and I hated myself.
The house fattened with books, made me

grow to hate books, when all the while
it was only books that never claimed
to tell the truth. I hated him and I hated
his room, within which his cloud of smoke
heaved. I disappeared up narrow stairs,
slipped quick beneath the covers.

My stomach hurts, I told him, I was tired.
I grew my dreams thick through hot nights:
dear, flickering flowers. They had eyes
which stared, and I found I could not afford
their nurture, could not return their stare,
Meanwhile, liars began their parade

without my asking, strode sidewalks inches
before my doorstep. I watched their hulking
and strange beauty, their songs pregnant
with freedom, and became an other self.
I taught children how to curse.
I bought children gold pints of liquor.

I sold my mind on the street.
1 learned another language. It translates easily.
Here's how: What I say is not what I mean,
nor is it ever what I meant to say.
You must not believe me when I say
there's nothing left to love in this world.

Poems by Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield (born 24 February 1953) is an American poet, essayist, and translator. Hirshfield's seven books of poetry have each received numerous awards. Her fifth book, Given Sugar, Given Salt, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and her sixth collection, After, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize (UK) and named a 'best book of 2006' by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Financial Times. Presenting some poems.

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Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books -

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

The Task

It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world.
We wake into it daily - open eyes, braid hair - 
a robe unfurled
in rose-silk flowering, then laid bare.

And yes, it is a simple enough task
we've taken on,
though also vast:
from dusk to dawn,

from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not
be blinded by the praising.
To lie like a cat in hot
sun, fur fully blazing,

and dream the mouse;
and to keep too the mouse's patient, waking watch
within the deep rooms of the house,
where the leaf-flocked

sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms.

The Heart's Counting Knows Only One

In Sung China,
two monks friends for sixty years
watched the geese pass.
Where are they going? 
one tested the other, who couldn't say.

That moment's silence continues.

No one will study their friendship
in the koan-books of insight.
No one will remember their names.

I think of them sometimes,
standing, perplexed by sadness,
goose-down sewn into their quilted autumn robes.

Almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains,
but not yet.

As the barely audible
geese are not yet swallowed; 
as even we, my love, will not entirely be lost.

A Hand

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body.

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping- 
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin's smoothness,
not ink.

The maple's green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

The Weighing

The heart's reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

The Envoy

One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.

Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don't know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched
as something - terror? happiness? grief? - 
entered and then left my body.

No knowing how it came in.
Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.

Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

Rebus

You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after. 
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live, 
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table. 
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity, 
honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus - slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life - 
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire? 
Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, 
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness. 
The anvil leans into its silence. 
The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

Metempsychosis

Some stories last many centuries,
others only a moment.
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

Yet even today, to look at a tree
and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket
gives off - 
the immeasurable's continuous singing,
before it goes back into story and feeling.

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.
Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,
and then keep walking, unimaginably further.