Kryptonite
Ron Koertge

Lois liked to see the bullets bounce
off Superman’s chest, and of course
she was proud when he leaned into
a locomotive and saved the crippled
orphan who had fallen on the tracks.

Yet on those long nights when he was
readjusting longitude or destroying
a meteor headed right for some nun,
Lois considered carrying just a smidgen
of kryptonite in her purse or at least
making a tincture to dab behind her ears.

She pictured his knees giving way,
the color draining from his cheeks.
He’d lie on the couch like a guy with
the flu, too weak to paint the front
porch or take out the garbage. She
could peek down his tights or draw
on his cheek with a ball point. She
might even muss his hair and slap
him around.

“Hey, what’d I do?” he’d croak just
like a regular boyfriend. At last.

***

Thanks to “J” for sending this which most definitely caught my fancy, particularly since I’d found myself enthralled this past weekend with an A&E documentary, Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman.

Of course, women always have the Kryptonite. Smart ones use it to their advantage.

Names of Horses ~ Donald Hall

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground – old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

***

This poem is one I was “forced” to study in a college poetry course, then proceeded to never forget. Even reading it again just now, I am still overcome by myriad emotional reactions to the sacred-ness, the eternal-ness of all that is right and true that is spoken to, celebrated here. Anybody care to add to this? Please feel free.

I would link you to the site where I found the poem, but it contained pop-ups and I don’t want to subject you to that.

Here is more on the poet, Mr. Hall, which was a fun read for me, as my professor had never forced the issue and so I’d never delved deeper.

xo, Angela

So a certain someone sends me this poem:

poetry readings ~ Charles Bukowski

poetry readings have to be some of the saddest
damned things ever,
the gathering of the clansmen and clanladies,
week after week, month after month, year
after year,
getting old together,
reading on to tiny gatherings,
still hoping their genius will be
discovered,
making tapes together, discs together,
sweating for applause
they read basically to and for
each other,
they can’t find a New York publisher
or one
within miles,
but they read on and on
in the poetry holes of America,
never daunted,
never considering the possibility that
their talent might be
thin, almost invisible,
they read on and on
before their mothers, their sisters, their husbands,
their wives, their friends, the other poets
and the handful of idiots who have wandered
in
from nowhere.
I am ashamed for them,
I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,
I am ashamed for their lisping egos,
their lack of guts.
if these are our creators,
please, please give me something else:
a drunken plumber at a bowling alley,
a prelim boy in a four rounder,
a jock guiding his horse through along the
rail,
a bartender on last call,
a waitress pouring me a coffee,
a drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway,
a dog munching a dry bone,
an elephant’s fart in a circus tent,
a 6 p.m. freeway crush,
the mailman telling a dirty joke
anything
anything
but
these.

I read this poem. I read it twice. I read it three, four more times. And I loved it and I hated it. And it pissed me off. How dare he? Yet I wanted to read more of this man’s poetry, I wanted to find information on this poet, read what others have to say about him. I started looking.

Found this and this and even this.

So I was thinking about my day of gear grinding over Mr. Bukowski, when there occurred a small, but indeed ferocious (trust me, it feels most excellent), epiphany of sorts: That this poem was doing exactly what poetry is supposed to do. If I need to explain this to you, well then you will never get it. So I’m not even going to try. But, let me tell you this, Zen Reader: Charles Bukowski is one fucking awesome poet.

The upshot of all of this is that I’ve decided to add PSOetry to my Categories. Because I do, despite being a PhoneSex Goddess, simply dig poetry. I write it, I read it, I love discovering it and rediscovering it. Plus, because there are so many wannabees out there (and for all I know I just might be one of them), poetry has pretty much gotten a bad rap.

Even erotica sites generally do not accept poems for consideration. Which I find pretty damn sad. I am taking a stand: Poetry is Cool. Poetry is Beautiful. Poetry is Awesome. So, once a week or even more, if you don’t mind (or even if you do. it is my blog, after all), I will be presenting a poem.

Maybe I’ll comment on it, maybe I won’t. Let’s see how it all works out. After all, I really am just doing all of this by the seat of my panties. And it seems to be working, at least so far. So let’s leave it that way. In the meantime, blame it on Mr. B.

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd ~Sir Walter Ralegh

If all the world and love were young, And truth in every shepherd’s tongue, These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold, When rivers rage and rocks grow cold And Philomel becometh dumb; The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields To wayward winter reckoning yields A honey tongue, a heart of gall, Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses, Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten, In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds, Thy coral clasps and amber studs, All these in me no means can move To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last and love still breed, Had joys no date nor age no need, Then these delights my mind might move To live with thee and be thy love.