amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds

START

2006-07-13T14:05:00.000-07:00

Directions: Please start on this page. Click on one of the colors below- whichever you like- and then keep clicking on the links (the linked items on this page are this color and are underlined) for at least a few minutes. If the links take you off of the website, please continue clicking on whatever peaks your interest. When you are done please leave a comment on this page (the main page) describing your link journey. I left an example on the comments below to clarify.

RED

ORANGE

YELLOW

GREEN

BLUE

PURPLE

BLACK

WHITE

Tattoo

2006-07-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

Tattoo
-Ted Kooser

What once was meant to be a statement—
a dripping dagger held in the fist
of a shuddering heart—is now just a bruise
on a bony old shoulder, the spot
where vanity once punched him hard
and the ache lingered on. He looks like
someone you had to reckon with,
strong as a stallion, fast and ornery,
but on this chilly morning, as he walks
between the tables at a yard sale
with the sleeves of his tight black T-shirt
rolled up to show us who he was,
he is only another old man, picking up
broken tools and putting them back,
his heart gone soft and blue with stories.

Shooting Kinesha

2006-07-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

Shooting Kinesha
-Daisy Fried

“I hate what I come from,” says my cousin Shoshana,
22, jawing per always, feather earrings tangling
in her light brown hair. Shoshana hangs on to Kinesha,
her kid, to stop her running off. Our cousin Deb’s
wedding just got out; we’re standing at the bottom
of the wedding hall steps. “White people
don’t have culture, except what they stole
from our African brothers.” Shoshana’s
wearing black, per always, me too, her in leather,
me in acetate-velour. “Weddings, U-G-H.”
Shoshana spells out ugh like it’s spelled
in books. “I hope yours was cooler than this.”
I nod. I always nod at Shoshana, whatever she says.
Shoshana checks, rechecks her watch, watching
for her boyfriend. I’m waiting for my husband too.
I’ve been a pain in the ass to him all morning.
Shoshana sips cheap California champagne
to hide her upset feelings. Kinesha breaks loose,
veers close to the street and parked cars and traffic,
thrashes her lace anklets and buckle shoes
into a crowd of part-white pigeons.

“In London I only hung out with Jamaicans,”
Shoshana says. “People gave me looks on the bus.
Ouch.” She detangles an earring. “Once I ripped
an earlobe on these. Anyway, I want you to meet
my boyfriend. He’s cool, he’s sticking by me.
He says he knew he could when I wouldn’t
dime him out after they caught me with his pot
in the Kingston airport. Kinesha’s his. He’s
the only guy I’ve loved since, you know, Ken?”
Ken’s the one who died beside her
of an overdose in the Motel 6 in Ohio
the time she was 16 and stole her dad’s Beamer
to run away. “You heard?” Of course I did,
in this family. “Kinesha’s Kinesha
to remember him,” she says. “I still miss him.”
I nod. I poke Kinesha’s belly, her nose.
“U-G-H,” says Kinesha, annoyed. I’m bad with kids.
“I’m teaching her to assert herself,” Shoshana says.
Her wrist-chains jangle. I twist my wedding ring.
An organ somewhere plays “Ode to Joy.”

Here comes the third bad cousin, Christina,
scruff-haired in the pale-pink prom dress
the bride her sister made her wear. $90,000
per year doing something with websites and she
can’t even keep her hair in order. “Isn’t it awful?”
Christina says, “What do I look like, Gwyneth Paltrow?
You guys look swell.” She’s good with kids:
Kinesha slams herself for a hug into Christina’s
legs. Christina and Kinesha kiss. She says
“Did you like my PowerPoint presentation
on the bride’s life? Did you think it was funny?
Go play with the pigeons.” She puts Kinesha down.
“Deb wanted a poem, but don’t you hate poems?
Was it wrong of me to start with an Eminem quote?”
Kinesha shouts, staggers, stamps at the pigeons;
jaded, they hardly move, only jump-start
halfhearted when Kinesha brandishes
her one-armed naked Barbie above her head,
then turns Barbie into a gun, shoots
at the pigeons. “I feel like we should be
sneaking around back with cigarettes
like we used to, remember?” says Christina.
“Too bad we don’t smoke anymore.”

Shoshana takes out her Newports, lights up.
I’m remembering we never much liked each other,
only hung together at family gatherings
because we were supposed to be the bad ones.
I hate what I come from. I say “My father
just told me again my poems are ‘too full
of disgusting sex.’ He said ‘Why don’t you
write more like Derek Walcott?’ I’m sick
of him throwing deep-thinking
genius men up at me.” Christina rolls
her eyes, shakes her head, fudges hair tendrils
back into her frizzy twisted updo, vibrates
her lips, blows air out. “Can you tell I’m
drunk already?” she asks. I nod. She shrugs.
“Well, why not, Deb didn’t invite single guys
for me like I asked her. Selfish as always.”

Shoshana checks her watch. “I’m gonna kill him.”
I wish I wanted to kill my husband.
Right now, I hate everything, everybody,
and don’t have a friend in the world
except my husband. It’s true he dislikes me
more and more these days but at least
he likes my poems and hates Derek Walcott.
Kinesha sprays Barbie bullets at everything,
Barbie’s head as bald as her elided crotch.
“I didn’t buy her that racist, sexist doll,”
says Shoshana. Christina and I nod.
“She found my old one. I pulled
all her hair out when I was 14
and shaved my head the first time.”
Kinesha moves away from the settling pigeons,
turns her Barbie gun on us, shoots.
Rat-a-tat-tat. “Ugh, you got me,”
we say, and “BANG!” I say. We turn
our hands into guns, three bad cousins,
Mother, Bridesmaid, Wife-and-Daughter,
for all our different reasons, shooting the child.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

2006-07-11T13:57:00.000-07:00

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
-Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

Commuters

2006-07-11T13:56:00.000-07:00

Commuters
-Edward Hirsch

It's that vague feeling of panic
That sweeps over you
Stepping out of the #7 train
At dusk, thinking, This isn't me
Crossing a platform with the other
Commuters in the sad half-light
Of evening, that must be

Someone else with a newspaper
Rolled tightly under his arm
Crossing the stiff, iron tracks
Behind the train, thinking, This
Can't be me stepping over the tracks
With the other commuters, slowly crossing
The parking lot at the deepest
Moment of the day, wishing

That I was someone else, wishing
I was anyone else but a man
Looking out at himself as if
From a great distance, through water,
Turning the key in his car, starting
His car and swinging it out of the lot,

Watching himself grinding uphill
In a slow fog, climbing past the other
Cars parked on the side of the road,
The cars which seem terribly empty
And strange,
and suddenly thinking
With a new wave of nausea
This isn't me sitting in this car
Feeling as if I were about to drown

In the blue air, that must be
Someone else driving home to his
Wife and children on an ordinary day
Which ends, like other days,
With a man buckled into a steel box,
Steering himself home and trying
Not to panic

In the last moments of nightfall
When the trees and the red-brick houses
Seem to float under green water,
And the streets fill up with sea lights.

A Light Left On

2006-07-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

A Light Left On
-Mary Sarton

In the evening we came back
Into our yellow room,
For a moment taken aback
To find the light left on,
Falling on silent flowers,
Table, book, empty chair
While we had gone elsewhere,
Had been away for hours.

When we came home together
We found the inside weather.
All of our love unended
The quiet light demanded,
And we gave, in a look
At yellow walls and open book.
The deepest world we share
And do not talk about
But have to have, was there,
And by that light found out.

notice the convulsed orange inch of moon

2006-07-11T13:51:00.000-07:00

-e. e. cummings

notice the convulsed orange inch of moon
perching on this silver minute of evening.

We'll choose the way to the forest - no offense
to you, white town whose spires softly dare.
Will take the houseless wisping rune
of road lazily carved on sharpening air.

Fields lying miraculous in violent silence

fill with microscopic whithering
. . . (that's the Black People, chérie,
who live under stones.) Don't be afraid

and we will pass the simple ugliness
of exact tombs, where a large road crosses
and all the people are minutely dead.

Then you will slowly kiss me

Refrigerator, 1957

2006-07-11T13:42:00.000-07:00

Refrigerator, 1957
-Thomas Lux

More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.

High Windows

2006-07-10T21:05:00.000-07:00

High Windows
-Philip Larkin

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives -
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.