Nathaniel Bellows, “Horticultural”

I did not saw the fallen tree—not all
of it had fallen—because somehow each spring,
the rotted half still mysteriously bloomed.

In the orchard we hung iron fruit, syrup-coated
decoys to fool devouring convoys of insects.
The harvest suffered but survived the early frost,
and we grew sick of the sweetness of peaches.

We ate from the garden till it was spent, then
threw its left-behinds at each other—failures
still in their beds, scabbed over with saltmarsh hay.

Although the holly never went out of leaf,
we only clipped the branches, the berries
for the cold season when Joy took root in the house
and crept from room to room like a scarlet vine.

From Why Speak? Bellows will read tonight at Morningside Bookshop; he was also the first poet to read on the NY Times website back in 2002.

(And, yes, I had so much fun running poems for National Poetry Month I’m going to keep at it for a while. Enjoy!)

3 May 2007 | poetry |

Albert Goldbarth, “The Initial Unpublished Discovery”

In another poem, I chronicled my descent
to a level of shadow and intermittent fiery light.
It was a world of empty faces—almost sucked out,
as if eggs the weasels got at had been turned to faces.
Wanderers and their hunched-up stalkers,
mutterers to angry private gods… that’s who I found
down there. I was talking about
our dream life—our subconscious—but a friend said
that she thought I’d meant the New York subway system,
ha ha. Nonetheless, I give to the neurobiologists
this first identification of a mechanism, somewhere in the brain,
I call “the turnstile.” It allows our passage
into the depths. And what’s the morning
—what’s the clear new start—if not our exiting
back into this life through the same round gate?

From The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, a new collection spanning the last thirty-five years of Goldbarth’s career. Shortly after he won his second National Book Critics Circle award in 2002, Eric McHenry celebrated Goldbarth’s “wacky, talky, and fat” poems in Slate. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “[his] erudition and wit found expression in compulsively wordy but dazzling compositions.”

23 April 2007 | poetry |