English 103
Fall, 2010
I once had a professor tell me that if you hooked everybody in the room up to a polygraph test and asked the question, Are you going to die one day?, everybody would answer yes, but the polygraph would say that everybody was lying. In other words, very few of us actually believe that life is finite, that we're anything but indestructible and destined for greatness. That's not necessarily a bad thing; ignorance is bliss, after all. On the other hand, having a deeper understanding of the human condition--while troubling--can also give you a deeper, richer appreciation for the world around you.
The same can be said for the goal for your next paper, a "Researched Argument." By identifying a problem--not just something nebulous and distant that you don't really care about, but something you're genuinely concerned about or invested in--and maybe even trying to come up with a solution, we learn more about our society, more about ourselves, and most importantly, more about how to express ourselves in such a way that we might actually get somewhere.
With that in mind, read through the following poems—some openly controversial, some more subtle—and try to get a feel for what these are saying about identity, society, and/or human nature. In other words, whether the poets take an aggressive, humorous, or laid back approach, what issues are boiling beneath the surface?
Suicide Song
by Tony Hoagland
But now I am afraid I know too much to kill myself
Though I would still like to jump off a high bridge
At midnight, or paddle a kayak out to sea
Until I turn into a speck, or wear a necktie made of knotted rope
But people would squirm, it would hurt them in some way,
And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely.
No longer do I live by the law of me,
No longer having the excuse of youth or craziness,
And dying you know shows a serious ingratitude
for sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated
Pickles they place at the edge of your plate.
Killing yourself is wasteful like spilling oil
At sea or not recycling all the kisses you've been given,
And anyway, who has clothes nice enough to be caught dead in?
Not me. You stay alive you stupid asshole
Because you haven't been excused,
You haven't finished though it takes a mulish stubbornness
To chew this food.
It is a stone, it is an inconvenience, it is an innocence,
And I turn against it like a record
Turns against the needle
That makes it play.
Soldiering
by Daniel J. Langton
A gun on either side of me, a pond
with blood and foam, shit and corpses in it;
among the lily's pads, empty boxes
of bullets, bandages and processed food;
a quiet made up of too much blatant sound,
grass and weeds smashed by up-to-the-minute
shards of metal riven to find the fox's
hole I dug to do some transient good.
It is morning in her bedroom, soon she'll
dress and wander to her coffee, safe as sun,
while I huddle beneath a canopy
of shells, not sea shells, not the bursting shells
of peas, just chunks of murder left undone.
War is mere death, love made a man me.
Gone
by Douglas Goetsch
It’s easy to want someone dead.
Take this guy who removed
the muffler from his Harley,
now tearing down the block
at 3 a.m., or the dickhead
flicking a lit cigarette from his car
to the sidewalk. Something tells
me the woman tossing chicken
bones under the bus seat, now licking
her fingers, is of no use to the world.
Doubtless if they were weeping
in confessionals over their small
though highly revealing offenses,
or scribbling apologies in journals,
I’d feel differently. And don’t get
me wrong: I’d rather not be the one
to gun down the Harley guy—
though there are excellent sight-lines
from my fire escape. I’d just
as soon he plunge quietly into
a tectonic gap in 7th Avenue,
volunteer for long experiments
in orbit, beta test those new
exploding cell phones.
I never feel this way towards kids
I teach in the detention center,
though when they’re older, fully
tattooed and towering over me
with hardened contempt, hollering
back to one another as they march
in gangs through the subway car—
yeah, maybe then I’ll want them
gone. They tell me they want to die
young, draw graffiti that translates
to leaving a good corpse. They brag
to one another about throwing
their pets off the roof, and how
badly their stepfathers beat them.
When I was six my father’s father
shuffled to where I was playing
on the living room rug, took my
head in his hands and rammed it
into the coffee table. I later was told
he’d been down the hall trying
to take a nap and heard me laughing.
I was six and he flung my head
into a table. He’s dead now. What else
do you need to know about him?
A Certain Lady
by Dorothy Parker
Oh, I can smile for you, and tilt my head,
And drink your rushing words with eager lips,
And paint my mouth for you a fragrant red,
And trace your brows with tutored finger-tips.
When you rehearse your list of loves to me,
Oh, I can laugh and marvel, rapturous-eyed.
And you laugh back, nor can you ever see
The thousand little deaths my heart has died.
And you believe, so well I know my part,
That I am gay as morning, light as snow,
And all the straining things within my heart
You'll never know.
Oh, I can laugh and listen, when we meet,
And you bring tales of fresh adventurings, —
Of ladies delicately indiscreet,
Of lingering hands, and gently whispered things.
And you are pleased with me, and strive anew
To sing me sagas of your late delights.
Thus do you want me — marveling, gay, and true,
Nor do you see my staring eyes of nights.
And when, in search of novelty, you stray,
Oh, I can kiss you blithely as you go….
And what goes on, my love, while you're away,
You'll never know.
My Dad
by Ryan Croken
I was standing out looking over the field,
and my dad called and he asked what I was doing,
and I said I was waiting for the crop circles to appear,
and he said “oh, I saw that on the news,”
and for a moment my dad and I
were nearly in agreement
about something.
Her Soul
by Ryan Croken
Gave
To God
Her soul,
God
said: “Ok
I don't need
This
But Ok.”
Waiting
by George Bilgere
When the guy in the hairpiece and the dark suit
asks me if I want to see my mother
as she lies in a back room, waiting,
I remember her, for some reason,
in a white swimsuit, on a yellow towel
on the sand at Crystal Lake,
pregnant with my sister,
waiting for me to finish examining
the sleek fuselage of a minnow,
the first dead thing I had ever seen,
before we went back to the cottage for lunch.
I remember her waiting up for my father
to come home from God knows where
in a Yellow Cab at 2 a.m.,
and waiting for me in the school parking lot
in our rusted blue station wagon
when whatever it was I was practicing for ran late.
I remember her, shoulders thrown back,
waiting in the unemployment line,
waiting for me to call, waiting for the sweet release
in the second glass of wine
after a long day working at the convalescent hospital
where everyone was waiting to die.
And I remember her waiting for me
at the airport when I got back from Japan,
waiting for everything to be all right,
waiting for her biopsy results.
Waiting.
But when the guy in his ridiculous hairpiece
asks me if I’d like to go back there
and be with her in that room where she lies
waiting to be cremated, I say No
thank you, and turn and walk out
onto the sunny street to join the crowd
hustling down the sidewalk,
and I look up at the beautiful white clouds
suspended above the city,
leaving her to wait in that room alone,
for which I will not be forgiven.
Little League
by Paul Hostovsky
When the ump produces
his little hand broom
and stops all play to stoop
and dust off home plate,
my daughter sitting beside me
looks up and gives me a smile that says
this is by far her favorite part of baseball.
And then when he skillfully
spits without getting any
on the catcher or the batter or himself,
she looks up again and smiles
even bigger.
But when someone hits a long foul ball
and everyone's eyes are on it
as it sails out of play ...
the ump has dipped his hand
into his bottomless black pocket
and conjured up a shiny new white one
like a brand new coin
from behind the catcher's ear,
which he then gives to the catcher
who seems to contain his surprise
though behind his mask his eyes are surely
as wide with wonder as hers.
A Day in the Life
by Marge Piercy
She is wakened at four a.m.
Of course she does not
pick up, but listens
through the answering machine
to the male voice promising
she will burn in hell.
At seven she opens her door.
A dead cat is hammered
to her porch: brown tabby.
Hit by a car, no collar.
She hugs her own Duke of Orange.
She cannot let him out.
She has her car locked
in a neighbor’s garage,
safe from pipe bombs, but
she must walk there. She drives
to work by a circuitous route.
Never the same way twice.
Outside the clinic three
men walk in circles with photos
of six-month fetuses.
They surround her car.
They are forbidden the parking
lot but police don’t care.
They bang on her hood.
As she gets out, they bump
and jostle her. One thrusts
his sign into her face.
She protects her eyes.
Something hard strikes her back.
Inside she sighs. Turns on
the lights, the air
conditioning, the coffee
machine. The security system
is always on. The funds
for teenage contraception,
gone into metal detectors.
She answers the phone.
“Is this where you kill babies?”
The second call a woman
is weeping. The day begins.
A girl raped by her stepfather,
a harried mother with too
many children and diabetes,
a terrified teenager who does
not remember how it happened,
a woman with an injunction
against an abuser. All day
she takes their calls,
all day she checks them in,
takes medical histories,
holds hands, dries tears,
hears secrets and lies and
horrors, soothes, continues.
Every time a new patient
walks in, a tinny voice
whispers, is this the one
carrying a handgun, with
an automatic weapon, with
a knife? She sits exposed.
She answers the phone.
“I’m going to cut your throat,
you murderer.” “Have
a nice day.” A bomb threat
is called in. She has
to empty the clinic.
The police finally come.
There is no bomb. The
doctor tells her how they
are stalking his daughter.
Then she goes home to Duke.
Eats a late supper by the TV.
Her mother calls. Her
boyfriend comes over. She
cries in his arms. He is,
she can tell, getting tired
of her tears. Next morning
she rises and day falls
on her like a truckload
of wet cement. This is
a true story, this is
what I know of virtue,
this is what I know
of goodness in our time.
A Work of Artifice
by Marge Piercy
The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.
Breaking Silence - For My Son
by Patricia Fargnoli
The night you were conceived
your father drove up Avon Mountain
and into the roadside rest
that looked over the little city,
its handful of scattered sparks.
I was eighteen and thin then
but the front seat of the 1956 Dodge
seemed cramped and dark,
the new diamond, I hadn't known
how to refuse, trapping flecks of light.
Even then the blackness was thick
as a muck you could swim through.
Your father pushed me down
on the scratchy seat, not roughly
but as if staking a claim,
and his face rose like
a thing-shadowed moon above me.
My legs ached in those peculiar angles,
my head bumped against the door.
I know you want me to say I loved him
but I wanted only to belong—to anyone.
So I let it happen,
the way I let all of it happen—
the marriage, his drinking, the rage.
This is not to say I loved you any less—
only I was young and didn't know yet
we can choose our lives.
It was dark in the car.
Such weight and pressure,
the wet earthy smell of night,
a slickness like glue.
And in a distant inviolate place,
as though it had nothing at all
to do with him, you were a spark
in silence catching.
The Thumb
by Peter Schneider
In a nanosecond David lost his thumb,
the one his mother painted
with pine pitch when he was four
to keep him from forever sucking it.
Unable to distinguish human flesh
the McCormick silo filler
sliced it off—
nail, bone, knuckle—
and blew it skyward
an ounce of humanity
in a thousand tons of silage.
Taken by surprise
David suppressed the truth.
Before the rush of blood
he held up the stump
saw the clean cut
grey bone marrow visible
and thrust it in his mouth
where the memory
of childhood security lay.
Then he swore,
tears rushing to his eyes, and ran
holding the stump with his good hand
blood oozing between his fingers.
Joe, a huge bulk of a man
and a constant neighbor,
jumped from his wagon
caught David like a child
held him to his chest
not intimidated by blood
or the tears of a grown man.
The Five Stage of Grief
by Linda Pastan
The night I lost you
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief
Go that way, they said,
it's easy, like learning to climb
stairs after the amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two. I passed you the toast---
you sat there. I passed
you the paper---you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed so familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining. What could I exchange
for you? The silence
after storms? My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string. In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
and bottles sleep. I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in detective neon.
Hope was a signpost pointing
straight in the air.
Hope was my uncle's middle name,
he died of it.
After a year I am still climbing, though my feet slip
on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green is a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards: Acceptance
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance
its name is in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting.
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I've ever known
or dreamed of. Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance. I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.
To A Daughter Leaving Home
by Linda Pastan
When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.
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