In memory of Jay Kashiwamura

In Chicago, it is snowing softly
and a man has just done his wash for the week.
He steps into the twilight of early evening,
carrying a wrinkled shopping bag
full of neatly folded clothes,
and, for a moment, enjoys
the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper,
flannellike against his gloveless hands.
There’s a Rembrandt glow on his face,
a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek
as a last flash of sunset
blazes the storefronts and lit windows of the street.

He is Asian, Thai or Vietnamese,
and very skinny, dressed as one of the poor
in rumpled suit pants and a plaid mackinaw,
dingy and too large.
He negotiates the slick of ice
on the sidewalk by his car,
opens the Fairlane’s back door,
leans to place the laundry in,
and turns, for an instant,
toward the flurry of footsteps
and cries of pedestrians
as a boy — that’s all he was —
backs from the corner package store
shooting a pistol, firing it,
once, at the dumbfounded man
who falls forward,
grabbing at his chest.

A few sounds escape from his mouth,
a babbling no one understands
as people surround him
bewildered at his speech.
The noises he makes are nothing to them.
The boy has gone, lost
in the light array of foot traffic
dappling the snow with fresh prints.

Tonight, I read about Descartes’
grand courage to doubt everything
except his own miraculous existence
and I feel so distinct
from the wounded man lying on the concrete
I am ashamed

Let the night sky cover him as he dies.
Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven
and take up his cold hands.
……………………………………
by Garrett Hongo (born 1951)

A far-off time arises in my memory,
The house in Petersburg Quarters,
A humble daughter of the modest gentry,
Born in Kursk, you’re here taking courses.

You are cute, — you have many admirers.
This white night, it is only us two,
Sprawling out on your windowsill, tireless,
From your skyscraper, observing the view.

Streetlamps, like gaseous butterflies,
Trembled from morning’s first chills
And the words I whispered in quiet sighs
Resembled slumbering hills.

By some chance, we were caught here together,
By one mystery, in timid fidelity,
As the landscape beyond the Neva, –
Lands of Petersburg stretching unendingly.

In those distant, impregnable thickets,
On this vernal and pale white night,
The nightingales’ thunderous singing
Awoke all the woodlands in sight.

A frenzied chirping of pure emotion
From a little, soaring songster
Evoked both, passion and commotion,
From the depths of mesmerized forests.

The night, like a barefooted wanderer,
Moved there slowly in a leisurely walk
And behind it, from the windowsill, rambling,
Ran the trail of an overheard talk.

Within an earshot of our conversations,
In fenced enclosures of the garden,
The apple and the berry trees, with patience,
Put on the sunlight’s glowing garments.

And trees, like phantoms, seeming white,
By the roadside, stood in a line,
To pay their dues to the receding white night
That has witnessed so much in its time.
…………………………………………
by Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
translated by Andrey Kneller

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering

streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard,
she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade

is essential to bread. He copied this down, but
he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before
older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern

downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern.
When he first arrived, he did not know enough English
to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part

of Lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic
leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color.
Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding

and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal.
After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years
of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.
………………………………………….
by Alexandra Teague

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe
simpler that I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks
………………………………………………
W.S. Merwin (born 1927)

Philip Levine (born 1928) won the Pulitzer for his book "The Simple Truth"

The following excerpt is from the essay Where the Angels Come Toward Us by David St. John in his book of Selected Essays, Reviews and Interviews, published in 1995:

One of the valid conventional wisdoms about Philip Levine is that he is one of the few urban — as opposed to suburban — poets. He is, certainly, our most gripping poet of the city. Perhaps this is because he sees the used and abused city, the working city, not the city of galleries, museums and restaurants. He sees and records the workings of the ravaged and exhausted city; he witnesses the blood and courage of those who live and work within it.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Levine’s poetry is the place that anger is granted in his work. One of the few sources of power left to many of his speakers is to touch their own frustration and rage, and it is that current that electrifies their presence in these poems. The daily injustices that build into a larger sense of outrage accrue in Levine’s poems much as they do in his speakers’ lives — slowly and inexorably. It is an especially clarifying anger that we find at work throughout Levine’s poetry, an anger that grants us the perspective of the real, and not a literary, world. It is an anger that we experience as a relief, the same relief we feel when the lens of a movie projector finally comes into focus; it is the clarity of truth that provides our sense of relief. No other American poet so clearly acknowledges the place and necessity of anger — in our lives and in our country — and it gives Levine’s poetry an energy and an unkempt integrity that is unique.

In Levine’s search for an authentic American voice, we can see the influence of daily speech, as well as the echo of black speech. It’s not simply Levine’s empathy with the oppressed and victimized that gives rise to a poem like They Feed They Lion. It is also his desire to unleash the full power that he sees latent in American speech, in all of America’s voices. We can hear it crashing forward in this poem, along with echoes of Whitman, Yeats and Christopher Smart:

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,
They Lion grow.

One facet of Levine’s special genius is that those “literary” influences are always an internal fuel for his poems, never an exterior decoration. They Feed They Lion concludes with:

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

Just as Philip Levine chooses to give voice to those who have no power to do so themselves, he likewise looks in his poems for the chance to give voice to the natural world, taking — like Francis Ponge — the side of things, the side of nature and its elements. And Levine is in many ways an old-fashioned troubadour, a singer of tales of love and heroism. Though it comes colored by the music of his world, what Levine has to offer is as elemental as breath. It is the simple insistence of breath, of the will to live — and the force of all living things in nature — that Levine exalts again and again.

Here is the poem in its entirety:

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,
They Lion grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
……………………………………………………………..
Other Pulitzer finalists in 1995 were Allen Ginsberg for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992 and Kenneth Koch for his book On The Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988 and One Train.

Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952)

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing
inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Yusef Komunyakaa (born 1947) won the Pulitzer for his book "Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems"

Facing It

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way — the stone lets me go.
I turn that way — I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

Birds on a Powerline

Mama Mary’s counting them
Again. Eleven black. A single
Red one like a drop of blood

Against the sky. She’s convinced
They’ve been there two weeks.
I bring her another cup of coffee

& a Fig Newton. I sit here reading
Frances Harper at the enamel table
Where I ate teacakes as a boy,

My head clear of voices brought back.
The green smell of the low land returns,
Stealing the taste of nitrate.

The deep-winter eyes of the birds
Shine in summer light like agate,
As if they could love the heart

Out of any wild thing. I stop,
With my finger on a word, listening.
They’re on the powerline, a luminous

Message trailing a phantom
Goodyear blimp. I hear her say
Jesus, I promised you. Now

He’s home safe, I’m ready.
My traveling shoes on. My teeth
In. I got on clean underwear.
…………………………………………………………………………
Other Pulitzer finalists in 1994 were Brenda Hillman for her book Bright Existence and Allen Mandelbaum for his book The Metamorphoses of Ovid.