The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Sun 1/13/2008)

[RetroLounge]

See How We Are

When I first arrived in this city I heard
coins falling through the air like rain,
light collecting on dusty sleeves,
in gum boxes and tins;
the addicts walked by a smoking pail
humming into their hands.
We hiked one afternoon
along the river, picnicked in the ruins
of a trolley station and played
with Herbie. We tossed sticks
in the water and called him back
while darkness drifted toward us like smoke
from the opposite shore.
Herbie leaned against a palm tree
and ran his paws in place,
trying to bark but just coughing.
Doves rose anyway
into the after-blue of evening,
and you whispered, Cerulean, pointing
at the sky, though around us there was no one.
Well, I am afraid too.
I take my face sometimes and point it
at your picture, taped with several postcards
to a mirror, one of bones in a desert
reaching for a cup of water, one from Yale.
I wish you were with me like a coin.
One night the moon rose to the height of buildings
and was as real, at least, as a window.
A man took my arm to steady himself,
each step the vertical earth.
His face had slid around his neck
and he whispered, "Thank you, love, there,"
pressed his hands to the air, veered away.
Some days I take my face and point it at your picture,
I say, I love you, I give up. It helps.
God knows where you are,
which is why I pray beneath
the Walk and the Don't Walk, my finger
on the button, or scream back at the drunks
in their own voices, butchering the gin dialect,
the ya-hoo of surrender.
But I am right here this second,
like a weed in the sidewalk. Like a weed.

James Harms

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James Harms is Director of the West Virginia Writers' Workshop as well as the MFA Program in Creative Writing at West Virginia University. He is the author of four books of poetry from Carnegie Mellon, Freeways and Aqueducts (2004), Quarters (2001), The Joy Addict (1998), and Modern Ocean (1992), as well as a limited edition letterpress volume, East of Avalon (2000). He is the recipient of the PEN/Revson Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes, as well as awards and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, West Virginia Commission on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and others. His poems, essays and stories have appeared in such journals as Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, The Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Chicago Review, Verse, and elsewhere.

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:hi:

RL

[Tuesday Afternoon]

1. two poems on the front page of "teh Lounge"

definition of famous.

:hi:

[Lyric]

2. Thanks for this, Retro.

I haven't read anything yet by James Harms that isn't phenomenal and haunting.

:hug:

[xchrom]

3. ferlinghetti, ginsberg, -- just a couple of poets i see there.

wow -- this was really good.

[RetroLounge]

4. Yes.

:hi:

RL