Mercury Poetry: Two poems from Joan Logghe
Sweet name for a new place.
I cruise your supermarket with poetry
in my heart. I finger the Pendleton,
spend a lot of time at the Pendleton blankets,
and if time is money I own a Chief Joseph.
If time is money I sleep in a Best Western
with metal stallions rearing out front...
The Lost Poets of the Russian Revolution
I have always loved poetry, its power and resonance in the human heart; and I have always had an affinity for the Russian poets, especially those of the October Revolution of 1917, how they used their words to further that revolution.
My meager study is cursory at best, a mere dip in a great sea of verse. Yet, it might whet your appetite to explore further, as Russian poetry holds a unique place in literature. As Joseph Brodsky says in his essay on Osip Mendelstam, “For those raised in the English-speaking world, it is difficult to comprehend that Russian poets have long had a political status as great as that as more public figures and that Russian poetry frequently has a political impact.”...
Mercury Poetry: The woods eat war and forget it
The metal jackets of bullets
rust in the dark river
beyond the weaving grass.
Lightning bugs rise up
in their landscape gaping
with old graves overgrown.
Tractor guts rot and ripped
up soil becomes nutritious...
Mercury Poetry: Between Portales and Clovis
On the road from Portales to Clovis
sand mixes with cloud,
the air thick with grainy patches where dust
joins with air in a raucous dance
ignoring the people below
ignoring the animals in their burrows
ignoring the cows eating, heads down, haunches up,
not a care in the world...
Mercury Poetry: Central and San Mateo
A group of
strangers waits
for the bus, all
looking down the
street at the same
moment for
something that
will carry them
into the future,
and one of them
takes his shirt
off, as if to say:
this is my city
Mercury Poetry: Without Warning
At the bus stop and out of the corner of my eye
I see myself waiting,
awkward bundle at my feet.
I am wearing the same sky blue fleece
though it hangs looser against my body.
My hair, still long and full and brown,
frames the younger me in her oblivion...
Weekly Poem: The Poet at Thirty-four—for Joseph Lease
We are we & when we are not we
the poet thinks we are a gun
in his head the poet thinks we are a rivulet in the forest
the poet thinks we are we
& when we are we we are a naked moonpearled night
& a child fishing thick shadows...
Weekly Poem: Midwest Ranchera
Thursdays, the devil danced at the Black Saddle, cloven
hooves tracking dust for later evidence. He drove a black
Mercury with suicide doors and flames flickering the fins.
Sometimes he slid from the door with his tail forking long
and taut to the floor. Hot-tongued, he would say, Do you
want to touch it? And who didn’t want to touch that tail?...
Weekly Poem: Hot Tub Time Machine
There’s a place
just beyond the present,
where the past goes to die
in the name of progress.
Where prayers
become quaint folks songs,
instead of blueprints,
instead of sheet music to the revolution,
instead of the past words
to our next donut round the sun...
Weekly Poem: GRAMMAR LESSON EIGHT—Chapter Four: Nouns (Gerunds)
Verbs always push around
the nouns of this life
always doing stuff
we think of usually
as verbs
as actions—the word actions
a noun when verbs be-
come nouns when I sojourn forth
becomes sojourning
the fact that the sojourn journeys
forth into this darkness...