ONE JULY DAY
Amber beads of venom welled out
above the x-incisions the nurse made
in the skin in the back of my brother's hand.
We had to hold him down to let her punch
out the escape hatches. Bill was 11 and
still skinny. I remember his screams.
He never saw the snake. He had reached
into the dark under an abandoned shed.
The hospital was ten miles away, and Mama
drove like a lunatic down that empty two-lane blacktop.
As he screamed, and we watched the nurse,
her lips pressed together, daub away venom
they called for the only doctor, a local drunk.
Without clear ID of the snake species, the doc
waffled on giving antvenon. Wrong one could
kill, he said. Bill was stripped and put in a bed,
still yelling. His arm swelled to the elbow, as if
inflated from within, and began turning dark.
Word went out, somehow, and all the men in our
tiny town converged on that shed with hoe and rifle.
Three snakes were found in the fields around, two rattlers
and a copperhead. One rattler was huge. Odds were maybe 2
out of 3. Bill began throwing up, and a minute later
emptied his bowels. He stopped screaming then.
Seizures began arcing him up from the bed. Mama
started yelling, told the doctor to give him the rattler
antivenon, now goddammit.
Bill made the front page, grinning from his hospital bed
and holding a rotted arm up to the camera. He lost
the use of one finger and had lifelong scars. That night
Aunt Sarah had found someone to drive her from Dallas
and she sat with me in the cold hall, letting me cry
against her shoulder. Daddy got there -- I don't remember
when he got there, to be honest. Not that first night
As we waited to see if the antivenon was the right kind.
Venom has a small smell, too. It was beautiful, that colour.
I am the only person alive now who was there. Why does
it matter, what happened that day? It's just a narrative
created by stardust that passed through briefly. But
it's all I have.
Copyright Maggie Jochild
3:17 pm, 3 May 2015
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Sunday, May 3, 2015
NEW POEM: ONE JULY DAY
Saturday, December 13, 2014
NEW POEM
A brindle cat both broad of beam
and bright of eye accosted me
while I was on my morning walk,
demanding in her high clear voice
a wedge of cheese, and gramarye.
I had no victuals to hand
but spells I knew like alphabet.
I taught her how to see the dead
and when to flee a dooméd home.
I showed her flowers she could eat
to let her hear the breath of mice.
She left me then, her hunger strong
and I strolled on, ignoring all
the outraged curses aimed at me
from tiny voices in the grass.
copyright Maggie Jochild, written 13 Dec 2014, 8:56 am
Friday, October 3, 2014
A CRIP'S ANTHEM
Eyedrops and eardrops and squirts up each nostril
Two-puff inhalers and count out today's pills
Bloody one finger for sugar machine
These are a part of my morning routine
Click out the insulin and stick in my tummy
Plan for a brekkers high-protein and yummy
Drain off the Foley and ingest caffeine
These are a part of my morning routine
Then comes clean-up, lots of rolling,
Scoutie watches, licks my toe
I finally am ready to face a new day
Your public awaits, Child of Jo
copyright 2014 Maggie Jochild
Saturday, November 30, 2013
NEW POEM: BABY BROTHER BLUES
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Talvikettu (Winter Fox), 2012-13 by Paula Mela
BABY BROTHER BLUES
When I woke up this morning
The light was fulla ghosts
When I woke up this morning
That sun was streaming ghosts
There's no place that don't have 'em
From caprock to the coast
My brown-eyed baby brother
He ain't with us no more
My brown-eyed baby brother
He ain't with us no more
The darkness kept on knocking
And he walked through that door
My mama and my daddy
They said they loved him same
My mama and my daddy
They said they loved him same
But mama held me closer
And handed me her name
The place we learn injustice
Live mighty close to home
The place we learn injustice
It mighty close to home
We learn to keep our mouth shut
Before we ever roam
It ain't my fault we lost him
They tell me that's a fact
It ain't my fault we lost him
A silver-dollar fact
But what I wouldn't do now
To whistle him on back
© Maggie Jochild; 30 Nov 2013, 11:37 am
Monday, July 1, 2013
NEW POEM: SUNBATH
(by Umberto Manzo)
SUNBATH
Five minutes of naught but
copperized air between me
and our home star:
My allotment for the year.
We are laced together
by narrative and saying yeah
to one another's memory.
What could go wrong?
I am ravenous for wind on my neck,
the smell of soil,
finding folks of my own inclination,
locking my door.
Now as I hear the ball drop
and run down the channel to
a final click, number announced,
I know exactly what the loss
will be. Nothing for it
but to face the approach
with heat on my cheeks,
fingers curled in faith,
lips repeating love.
Maggie Jochild, 4:15 am, 29 June 2013
Sunday, June 30, 2013
NEW POEM: SAGA DOMESTICA
SAGA DOMESTICA
All the stories a family shapes and reshapes
are mine alone now. Scraps surfacing
without anyone to reminisce over:
the time daddy chased a peeping tom
pounding down the gravel beside the trailer,
me having caught his face at my window,
and guns suddenly emerging from beneath
my parents' pillows. Or the goat, Blossom,
who became a pet we let sleep in the kitchen
at night. The chihuahua who would only come
if you yelled "Hush!" Mama's cherry pies,
the string of poodles with French whore names,
Daddy's fried quail, the unexplainable joke about
Van Horn, Grandmommy's seizures, what Bill said
when he broke his arm, the poinsettia that took over --
all now up to me to remember, save or set free.
My attic needs purging but Sundays I miss them
fierce, miss the smell of dumplings, bickering over
what to watch, somebody hogging the couch, and
people who knew what I looked like that first day
of first grade, brown dress and red ribbon, a dime
for the week's milk tight in my fist, as I prepared
to live without them.
by Maggie Jochild, written 3:15 p.m., 30 June 2013
Monday, May 27, 2013
NEW POEM
ON THE VALUE OF ANOXIC HALLUCINATION
We are given more sensory apparatus than we can handle
at once. Maturity means learning to ignore.
Time elephant-charges by us or stalls out
(You know that's true) .
We obey two rules: stay alive, and
write a story to fit the chaos. What you do for me
is listen. All I ever wanted.
by Maggie Jochild, written 27 May 2013, 10:23 p.m.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
30 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE
(September, 1956, New York, NY by Vivian Maier)
TAXIWhen I go away from youThe world beats dead Like a slackened drum. I call out for you against the jutted stars And shout into the ridges of the wind. Streets coming fast, One after the other, Wedge you away from me, And the lamps of the city prick my eyes So that I can no longer see your face. Why should I leave you, To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night? By Amy Lowell | ||||||
Monday, April 29, 2013
29 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE
(Hare on Bedfordshire farm; photo by Owen Hearn)
TWO TRAMPS IN MUD TIME
Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"
I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.
Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.
The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.
A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake; and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn't blue,
But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.
The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheelrut's now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don't forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.
The time when most I loved my task
The two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You'd think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.
Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
The judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.
Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right--agreed.
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.
By Robert Frost
Sunday, April 28, 2013
28 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE
(Seated Mother Goddess flanked by two lionesses from Çatalhöyük, Turkey; Neolithic age about 6000-5500 BCE, today in Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara)
I'm not a girl
I'm a hatchet
I'm not a hole
I'm a hole mountain
I'm not a fool
I'm a survivor
I'm not a pearl
I'm the Atlantic Ocean
I'm not a good lay
I'm a straight razor
look at me as if you had never seen a woman before
I have red, red hands and much bitterness
By Judy Grahn
Saturday, April 27, 2013
27 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE
MY PAPA'S WALTZ
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
By Theodore Roethke
Friday, April 26, 2013
26 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE
(Georgia O'Keefe with her lover Rebecca Strand)
XII
Sleeping, turning in turn like planets
rotating in their midnight meadow:
a touch is enough to let us know
we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep:
the dream - ghosts of two worlds
walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other.
I've walked to your muttered words
spoken light - or dark - years away,
as if my own voice had spoken.
But we have different voices, even in sleep,
and our bodies, so alike, are yet so different
and the past echoing through our bloodstreams
is freighted with different language, different meanings -
through in any chronicle of the world we share
it could be written with new meaning
we were two lovers of one gender,
we were two women of one generation.
rotating in their midnight meadow:
a touch is enough to let us know
we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep:
the dream - ghosts of two worlds
walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other.
I've walked to your muttered words
spoken light - or dark - years away,
as if my own voice had spoken.
But we have different voices, even in sleep,
and our bodies, so alike, are yet so different
and the past echoing through our bloodstreams
is freighted with different language, different meanings -
through in any chronicle of the world we share
it could be written with new meaning
we were two lovers of one gender,
we were two women of one generation.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
25 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE
WILD NIGHTS
Wild Nights--Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile--the Winds--
To a Heart in port--
Done with the Compass--
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor--Tonight--
In Thee!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile--the Winds--
To a Heart in port--
Done with the Compass--
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor--Tonight--
In Thee!
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
24 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE
(Mary Jo Atkins Barnett, December 1964, Dilley, Texas; gone 28 years today)
THE COURAGE THAT MY MOTHER HAD
The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.
The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.
Oh, if instead she'd left to me
The thing she took into the grave!-
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
23 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S SELECTION FOR YOUR POETRY PLEASURE
ABOU BEN ADHEM
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe
increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said
"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still, and said "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men."
The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said
"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still, and said "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men."
The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
By James Leigh Henry Hunt
Monday, April 22, 2013
22 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE
(Blackheaded gull on water reflecting offices at docklands of Canary Wharf; photo by Eve Tucker)
ADVICE TO MYSELF
Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic—decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
21 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE
(Painting by Andrew Wyeth)
MEETING THE LIGHT COMPLETELY
Even the long-beloved
was once
an unrecognized stranger.
Just so,
the chipped lip
of a blue-glazed cup,
blown field
of a yellow curtain,
might also,
flooding and falling,
ruin your heart.
A table painted with roses.
An empty clothesline.
Each time,
the found world surprises—
that is its nature.
And then
what is said by all lovers:
"What fools we were, not to have seen."
Saturday, April 20, 2013
20 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE
THE COMING OF LIGHT
Even
this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.
By Mark Strand, from New Selected Poems.
Friday, April 19, 2013
19 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S SELECTION FOR YOUR POETRY PLEASURE
(Coyote Buttes, Utah)
EVERY LAND
The holy land is everywhere. —Black Elk
Watch where the branches of the willows bend
See where the waters of the rivers tend
Graves in the rock, cradles in the sand
Every land is the holy land.
Here was the battle to the bitter end
Here's where the enemy killed the friend
Blood on the rock, tears on the sand
Every land is the holy land.
Willow by the water bending in the wind
Bent till it's broken and it cannot stand
Listen to the word the messengers send
Life from the living rock, death in the sand
Every land is the holy land.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
18 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE
(Lion sleeping before storm in Kalihari; photo by Hannes Lochner)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning
in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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