The Whole Schmeer

Sketches: By the Sea
by Samuel Menashe

1.
That black man running
Headlong on the beach
Throws back the white
Soles of this feet
Lighting strikes
Twice on the sand
Left foot and right,
My pen in hand

2.
Hearing the sea
Not seeing it
On the other side
Of the dunes
Is enough for me
This morning
The distance I keep
From the sea I hear
Brings distance near

3.
At night, off shore
Sometimes the lights
On the fishing boats
Sink out of sight
That string of lights
Salt water wets
Makes the fish rise
To tridents and nets

from New and Selected Poems, Expanded Edition
(Library of America, 2008)

For Some Slight I Can’t Quite Recall
by Ross Gay

Was with the pudgy hands of a thirteen-year-old
that I took the marble of his head
just barely balanced on his reedy neck
and with the brute tutelage
of years fighting the neighbor kids
and too the lightning of my father’s
stiff palm I leaned the boy’s head
full force into the rattly pane of glass
on the school bus and did so with the eagle of justice
screaming in my ear as he always does
for the irate and stupid I made the window sing
and bend and the skinny boy too
whose eyes grew to lakes lit by mortar fire
bleating with his glasses crooked
I’m not an animal walking in place
on the green vinyl seat looking far away
and me watching him and probably almost smiling
at the song and dance I made of the weak
and skinny boy who towering above me
became even smaller and bizarre and birdlike
pinned and beating his wings frantically
against his cage and me probably
almost smiling as is the way of the stupid
and cruel watching the weak and small
and innocent not getting away.

from Bringing the Shovel Down
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011)

Year of the Dig
by Danielle Mitchell

Ashes of the soul is a kind of potato. I save the National Geographic to prove it at parties. Seventy-seven plays, forty-five operas, seven movies & five ballets have been made on Cleopatra, but her tomb evades us. Makes the daughter-in-law cry is another potato. Proxemics is the study of our need for space from each other. A Dominican woman thinks she found the site; her teachers assume she will fail; she stakes red flags around a temple of Isis anyway. Out-waits the Arab Spring. They say Cleopatra decided where & when & by whom she’d be found. In her immaculate sarcophagus, hugging the jar of pickled asps that she has hugged for centuries with a smile carved onto her eternal lips. The torture of this. Would she like us to know she spared no expense with the glitz, scarab-encrusted-everythings but how in the end Mark Antony’s bones were thrown in a sack among the maids’ intestines. Our plans fail like stars over cities. In the worst year of my life, there were people gathered in listening to the story, a thousand times told. There’s a potato called Guinea pig fetus, there’s Cleopatra the hostess knowing where & when & by whom down to the hour of day, napkin rings. This is the difficulty with parties.

from Makes the Daughter-In-Law Cry
(Tebot Bach, 2017)

The Stones
by Wendell Berry

I owned a slope full of stones.
Like buried pianos they lay in the ground,
shards of old sea-ledges, stumbling blocks
where the earth caught and kept them
dark, an old music mute in them
that my head keeps now I have dug them out.
I broke them where they slugged in their dark
cells, and lifted them up in pieces.
As I piled them in the light
I began their music. I head their old lime
rouse in breath of song that has not left me.
I gave pain and weariness to their bearing out.
What bond have I made with the earth,
having worn myself against it? It is a fatal singing
I have carried with me out of that day.
The stones have given me music
that figures me for their holes in the earth
and their long lying in them dark.
They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground,
and I must prepare a fitting silence.

from Collected Poems, 1957–1982
(North Point Press/FSG, 1984)

Did I Miss Anything?
by Tom Wayman

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 percent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here

from Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973–1993
(Harbour Publishing, 1993)

Goodbye, Iowa
by Richard Hugo

Once more you’ve degraded yourself on the road.
The freeway turned you back in on yourself
and you found nothing, not even a good false name.
The waitress mocked you and you paid your bill
sweating in her glare. You tried to tell her
how many lovers you’ve had. Only a croak came out.
Your hand shook when she put hot coins in it.
Your face was hot and you ran face down to the car.

Miles you hated her. Then you remembered what
the doctor said: really a hatred of self. Where
in flashes of past, the gravestone
you looked for years and never found, was there
a dignified time? Only when alone,
those solitary times with sky gray as a freeway

And now you are alone. The waitress
will never see you again. You often pretend
you don’t remember people you do. You joke back
spasms of shame from a night long ago.
Splintered glass. Bewildering blue swirl
of police. Light in your eyes. Hard questions.
Your car is cruising. You cross with ease
at 80 the state line and the state you are entering
always treated you well.

from What Thou Lovest Well Remains American
(W.W. Norton & Company, 1975)

Autumn Refain
by Wallace Stevens

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never—shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness that comes to me out of this, beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never—shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

from Ideas of Order
(The Alcestis Press, 1935)

Avery County
by Sarah Stickney

The evening before leaving
I shot Eric’s 12 gauge
out the back of his shack
into the flourishing green
of the big, June woods.
My first time with a gun—
there is no promise but lots
of intimacy like Ashbery says
of the sea. A buzzard slopes over
the highway. Who knew
this rural fix for east-coast neurosis
was waiting for me with its dogwoods,
its poor possum roadkill,
and the high, evening clouds
that bring shy wild turkeys
up the hillside. Hegel says
the wounds of the spirit heal,
and leave no scars. But time
is just like the rest of us
and wants more drinks
when it starts having drinks at the bar.

from the journal The Carolina Quarterly