Not only how far away, but the way that you say it
Is very important. Perhaps you may never get
The knack of judging a distance, but at least you know
How to report on a landscape: the central sector,
The right of arc and that, which we had last Tuesday,

And at least you know

That maps are of time, not place, so far as the army
Happens to be concerned – the reason being,
Is one which need not delay us. Again, you know
There are only three kinds of tree, three only, the fir and the poplar,
And those which have bushy tops to; and lastly

That things only seem to be things.

A barn is not called a barn, to put it more plainly,
Or a field in the distance, where sheep may be safely grazing.
You must never be over-sure. You must say, when reporting:
At five o’clock in the central sector is a dozen
Of what appear to be animals; whatever you do

Don’t call the bleeders sheep.

I’m sure that’s quite clear; and suppose, for the sake of example,
The one at the end, asleep, endeavours to tell us
What he sees over there to the west, and how far away,
After first having come to attention. There to the west,
On the fields of summer the sun and the shadows bestow

Vestments of purple and gold.

The still white dwellings are like a mirage in the heat,
And under the swaying elms a man and a woman
Lie gently together. Which is, perhaps, only to say
That there is a row of houses to the left of arc,
And that under some poplars a pair of what appear to be humans

Appear to be loving.

Well that, for an answer, is what we might rightly call
Moderately satisfactory only, the reason being,
Is that two things have been omitted, and those are important.
The human beings, now: in what direction are they,
And how far away, would you say? And do not forget

There may be dead ground in between.

There may be dead ground in between; and I may not have got
The knack of judging a distance. I will only venture
A guess that perhaps between me and the apparent lovers
(Who, incidentally, appear by now to have finished),
At seven o’clock from the houses, is roughly a distance

Of about one year and a half.

(Lessons of War: I. Naming of Parts)

4.30: a miniscule smidgin of possibility, originally uploaded by Scrivenings.

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Shaving

It is really the most miniscule thing,
but you see sometimes when I shave,
my daughter follows me into the bathroom
to watch–she’s sixteen months–and each
time she insists that I take the brush,
smear it around the lather in the cup,
then dab a small lump onto her hand,
which she studies, intently. Some mornings
I must do this five or six times before
I’m done scraping the remnants of yesterday
from my face. The brush is from a past life,
the present of an ex-girlfriend, and it’s
at least ten times my daughter’s age.
As for the badger, whose bristles
we are sharing, it must have been Swiss,
like the brush, and long turned to dust.
But I watch my daughter in the glass
and her pleasure seems so simple that I
don’t mind the bother as she pokes
the lather, sniffs it, tastes it and
smears it over her hands and face up there
on the third floor of the house where I
shave in a small bathroom without windows.
I am forty-five. I had never thought,
actually, that to have a child at my age
would be different than any other age.
Probably, I’m even more patient. But
I think how in twenty years when she
is getting started, I’ll be checking out,
that is, if all goes right between times.

Let them keep it, I’ve always thought.
Let them fend off the impending collapse.
But you know those parties where late at night
the whole place starts busting apart–
too many arguments, too many fights,
and you’re just as glad to get moving,
that’s how I always thought I would feel,
stepping into the big zero, but now
I see I’ll be abandoning my daughter
there in the midst of the recklessness:
the bully with the grabby hands, the lout
eager to punch somebody out, and my daughter,
who, in these musings while I shave,
is still under three feet tall and poking
at the lather smeared across her hand.
I joke, you know, I say we’re raising her
to be the girlfriend of a Russian soldier,
or next week she’ll begin karate lessons
and learn to smash carrots with a single blow.
But it all comes back as I watch her
in the mirror. Who is going to protect her?
Even now, anything could happen. Last summer,
for instance, I rented a cottage from a fellow
who had a place up the hill, and one day I heard
these bees whipping past me, and you know what?
It was him, my landlord, fooling with his .22,
shooting beer cans off a wall with me strolling around
down below. But that’s how it is all the time,
the load of bricks crashing behind us
as the flower pot smashes at our feet.
And cancer and car accidents, everyone’s

got stories. How can I not think of this
when I watch my daughter messing
with the shaving lather? The whole
world gets vague and insubstantial, like
putting your finger through a wet tissue,
the muggers, rapists, terrorists, the Bomb.
It’s just luck whether you escape or get hit,
making you feel about as safe as a light bulb
in a hailstorm which, of course, is exactly
how it is, except worse. But to have a child
means to expand the dimensions of the dark place,
until I wind up imagining this small
blindfolded creature toddling out on a rope
over the abyss and it’s my daughter, my daughter,
this sweet morsel left over at the violent party,
this Russian girlfriend of the future. Well,
some mornings such thoughts crowd in on me
when I go upstairs to shave, and she
comes toddling after. That lather is so soft,
such a fragile conglomeration of white bubbles,
such a miniscule smidgin of possibility,
maybe that’s why she likes it, dabbing it
with one finger, lifting it up, right there
by the pink ceramic toilet and torn green
shower curtain with silhouettes of fish,
sniffing this small heap of white bubbles,
touching it to her nose, then puff, just
blowing gently, so the bubbles hang, floating,
floating, and then they’re gone of course.
-Stephyn Dobyns

4.29: You don’t know what work is, originally uploaded by Scrivenings.

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What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is–if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.
- Philip Levine

4.28: I am not a painter, I am a poet., originally uploaded by Scrivenings.

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Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
- Frank O’Hara

4.27: Forgive me, originally uploaded by Scrivenings.

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This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
-William Carlos WIlliams

4.26: so steeped in the music of a voice speechless, originally uploaded by Scrivenings.

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The Poems I Have Not Written

I’m so wildly unprolific, the poems
I have not written would reach
from here to the California coast
if you laid them end to end.

And if you stacked them up,
the poems I have not written
would sway like a silent
Tower of Babel, saying nothing

and everything in a thousand
different tongues. So moving, so
filled with and emptied of suffering,
so steeped in the music of a voice

speechless before the truth,
the poems I have not written
would break the hearts of every
woman who’s ever left me,

make them eye their husbands
with a sharp contempt and hate
themselves for turning their backs
on the very source of beauty.

The poems I have not written
would compel all other poets
to ask of God: “Why do you
let me live? I am worthless.

please strike me dead at once,
destroy my works and cleanse
the earth of all my ghastly
imperfections.” Trees would

bow their heads before the poems
I have not written. “Take me,”
they would say, “and turn me
into your pages so that I

might live forever as the ground
from which your words arise.”
The wind itself, about which
I might have written so eloquently,

praising its slick and intersecting
rivers of air, its stately calms
and furious interrogations,
its flutelike lingerings and passionate

reproofs, would divert its course
to sweep down and then pass over
the poems I have not written,
and the life I have not lived, the life

I’ve failed even to imagine,
which they so perfectly describe.
- John Brehm

4.25: a landscape stripped of people and language, originally uploaded by Scrivenings.

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Loud Music

My stepdaughter and I circle round and round.
You see, I like the music loud, the speakers
throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound whether
Bach or rock and roll, the volume cranked up so
each bass notes is like a hand smacking the gut.
But my stepdaughter disagrees. She is four
and likes the music decorous, pitched below
her own voice-that tenuous projection of self.
With music blasting, she feels she disappears,
is lost within the blare, which in fact I like.
But at four what she wants is self-location
and uses her voice as a porpoise uses
its sonar: to find herself in all this space.
If she had a sort of box with a peephole
and looked inside, what she’d like to see would be
herself standing there in her red pants, jacket,
yellow plastic lunch box: a proper subject
for serious study. But me, if I raised
the same box to my eye, I would wish to find
the ocean on one of those days when wind
and thick cloud make the water gray and restless
as if some creature brooded underneath,
a rocky coast with a road along the shore
where someone like me was walking and has gone.
Loud music does this, it wipes out the ego,
leaving turbulent water and winding road,
a landscape stripped of people and language-
how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors.
-Stephen Dobyns