Another one of my favorite poets, Roy Bentley. Granted being friends with him as a lot to do with it. I don't like all of his stuff, but some of it really hits the mark. From his soon to be published book of poems 'Far' that will be part of the Cherry Grove Series. The Politics of Spit Without our uniforms, the haircuts betray everything: we’re servicemen and enlistees since no one gets drafted into the Air Force, which makes us doubly hated in Champaign, Illinois in 1973. It’s the Ray-Bans and white-sidewall, trimmed- around-the-ears hairlength in the Age of Aquarius. Still, I’m stunned when someone lets go a huge you-know that lands at our feet then a smaller one that hits me like the realization America isn’t one country. We’re just standing there, stupefied, checking ourselves like the ones in the Real War must have had to after a fire fight. A command to oneself not to fold, not here, little coins of cruelty abloom on this broadcloth shirt. It is when I stand like this— shamed, changed forever, past the splatter, that I feel what it is to be taken in by an idea of one’s own worthiness, to die to that and learn about the nature of Power and its companion Humiliation. I think this stuff soaks in, and it does. Marked this way, I can begin. Another one of his, one of my favorites and one that helped him win an NEA... The Heron Tattoo When I think of summer in Seattle, I think of the tattoo parlor on Evergreen Way in Everett, Washington, where Gloria Regalbuto paid eighty dollars to have a Great Blue Heron tattooed above her right breast, in four colors, in answer to the tiger above my left breast. I had never watched anyone being tattooed— you can’t really watch when they do it to you— and I saw blood rise up from her, oxygenated, bright, sulphur-colored, the never-completed blood of her history and her apprenticeship to it. She bled her mother’s cruelty, the lesser bumps of girlhood in Cleveland’s Little Italy; she bled her artist-father’s successes, his failures, the art of being able to talk Cleveland Browns football from a hospital bed; she bled the surface of her face changing from stunningly beautiful to just beautiful to the uncertain nights lessening its best features; she bled early menses, Catholic school, the lie that pain is your ticket to Heaven. Then, it slowed; the work was done—the rainbow-outline of body restricted to shades of blue and deep-forest green, the white top-beard of the bird’s head, the legs so identifiable as Bird as to be nearly a caricature. When I think of love, being loved, that’s what I see, that bruise of a bird standing on a lakeshore of flesh and seeing itself and the world in eyes that happen to be looking down, trying to disappear into another whose blood’s mirror is theirs and shining with what is and isn’t about to fly.
Today is the anniversary of James Wright's birth, so here are two of my favorite James Wright poems: "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home. Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love. Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other's bodies. And the poem "Two Hangovers", NUMBER ONE I slouch in bed. Beyond the streaked trees of my window, All groves are bare. Locusts and poplars change to unmarried women Sorting slate from anthracite Between raliroad ties: The yellow-bearded winter of the depression Is still alive somewhere, an old man Counting his collection of bottle caps In a tarpaper shack under the cold trees Of my grave. I still feel half drunk, And all those old women beyond my window Are hunching toward the graveyard. Drunk, mumbling Hungarian, The sun staggers in, And this big stupid face pitches Into the stove. For two hours I have been dreaming Of green butterflies searching for diamonds In coal seams; And children chasing each other for a game Through the hills of fresh graves. But the sun has come home drunk from the sea, And a sparrow outside Sings of Hanna Coal Co. and the dead moon. The filaments of cold light bulbs tremble In music like delicate birds. Ah, turn it off. NUMBER TWO I Try to Waken and Greet the World Once Again In a pine tree, A few yards away from my window sill, A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down, On a branch. I laugh, as I see him abandon himself To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do, That the branch will not break.