Rochester, Mayo, Reading Poetry Aloud

The Reading by Vittorio Reggianini 1858-1938

 

 I was out of town but decided at the last minute to attend the poetry reading.  I did not have three poems ready to read but offered to be the recorder.  PB was gone.  I had to leave in the middle but S sent the names of the remaining poems.  

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Reading Aloud, October 5, 2023

1  Michael: AT THE ARRAIGNMENT, Debra Spencer

2  Judy:  MONOPOLY, Connie Wanek  --

--   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUBlEKs-Bok

3  Chuck:  from  ENDINGS, Mona Van Duyn

4  Nancy: CHILD OF EUROPE, part 1 Czeslaw Milosz

5  Michael:  PASSENGERS, Billy Collins

6  Judy: COMING AND GOING, Malichi Black

7  Chuck: IN THE NEXT GALAXY,  Ruth Stone

8  Nancy:  CHILD OF EUROPE, part 2, Czeslaw Milosz

9  Michael: YOU CAN TAKE IT WITH YOU, Josephine Jacobsen

10  Judy:  SANDBOX, David Orr

11  Chuck: LET NELLIE STAY, Traditional

12  Nancy: CHILD OF EUROPE, part 3, Czeslaw Milosz

===

AT THE ARRAIGNMENT, Debra Spencer

The courtroom walls are bare and the prisoner wears
a plastic bracelet, like in a hospital. Jesus stands beside him.
The bailiff hands the prisoner a clipboard and he puts his
thumbprint on the sheet of white paper. The judge asks,
What is your monthly income? A hundred dollars.
How do you support yourself? As a carpenter, odd jobs.
Where are you living? My friend's garage.
What sort of vehicle do you drive? I take the bus.
How do you plead? Not guilty. The judge sets bail
and a date for the prisoner's trial, calls for the interpreter
so he may speak to the next prisoners.
In a good month I eat, the third one tells him.
In a bad month I break the law.
The judge sighs. The prisoners
are led back to jail with a clink of chains.
Jesus goes with them. More prisoners
are brought before the judge.
Jesus returns and leans against the wall near us,
gazing around the courtroom. The interpreter reads a book.
The bailiff, weighed down by his gun, stands
with arms folded, alert and watchful.
We are only spectators, careful to speak
in low voices. We are so many. If we—make a sound,
the bailiff turns toward us, looking stern.
The judge sets bail and dates for other trials,
bringing his gavel down like a little axe.
Jesus turns to us. If you won't help them, he says
then do this for me. Dress in silks and jewels,
and then go naked. Be stoic, and then be prodigal.
Lead exemplary lives, then go down into prison
and be bound in chains. Which of us has never broken a law?
I died for you-a desperate extravagance, even for me.
If you can't be merciful, at least be bold.
The judge gets up to leave.
The stern bailiff cries, All rise.

===

 ENDINGS, Mona Van Duyn

I.

Sometimes when I read a book (verse or memoir,
novel, tales, travel, fat or slim)
a collapsed balloon sleeps silently under the door,
sucks me in, inflates, and is once more
the world itself, or the world my favorite guise –
a sly, reckless, outrageous poet who rhymes
it's fiddleheads with its frost ferns, its starspace
with pasture, buttes with gullies, Cloud Ears with cliff-face.
In an air filled with this on unearthly Muzak
of earth, a child, eyes wide, is lifted and held
for a first sight by arms of the artistry
that found the view and breathe “Look!” The child is me.
Innocent endings as anyone at an
introduction, the rapt mind gazes, sees,
clasped, and love's murmur, in the world's strange song.
But by the right hand's wiser senses, all along,
ripping through timelessness, have begun to measure.
Between a thumb and fingers the ground gross thinner,
begins to glow with an efflorescence like pain.
See slowly! I beg my eyes but again and again
the fingers feel how fast the time is coming
when arms will drop, and the child fall through and be gone.
Even more terribly, footnotes, index, or postscript
can fool the alarm to the trap is abruptly tripped.
“I cannot bear it,” I think is, but read on in a rage
for the rest of whatever it is, for the child, for the “Look!”
until the hand on which my heart is depending
holds only the blank page that follows an ending.

II. 
Setting the VCR when we go to bed
to record a night owl movie, some charmer we missed,
we always allow, for unprogrammed unforeseen,
an extra half hour. (Night gods of the small screen
are ruthless with watchers trapped in there piety.)
We watch next evening, and having slowly found
the start of the film, meet the minors and leads,
enter their time and place, their wills and needs,
hear in our chest the click of empathy's padlock,
watch the forces gather, unyielding world
against the unyielding hard, one's longing minefield
laid for another longing, which may yield.
Tears will solve the leftover salad I seize
during ads, or laughter slow my hurry to pee.
But as clot melts toward clearness a black fate
may fall on the screen; the movie started to late.
Torn from the backward-shining of an end
that lights up the meaning of the whole work,
disabled in the mind and feeling, I flail and shout,
“I cannot bear it! I have seen how it comes out!”
For what is story if not relief from the pain 
of the inconclusive, from dread of the meaningless?
Minds in their silent blast-off search your space
– how often I've followed yours! for a resting place.
and I'll follow, pass each universe in spangled
ballgown who waits for the slow-dance of life to start,
past vacancies of darkness whole vainglory
is endless as death's, to find the end of the story.

===

PASSENGERS by Billy Collins

At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats
with the possible company of my death,
this sprawling miscellany of people–
carry-on bags and paperbacks–
that could be gathered in a flash
into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.
Not that I think
if our plane crumpled into a mountain
we would all ascend together,
holding hands like a ring of skydivers,
into a sudden gasp of brightness,
or that there would be some common place
for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,
some spaceless, pillarless Greece
where we could, at the count of three,
toss our ashes into the sunny air.
It's just that the way that man has his briefcase
so carefully arranged
the way that girl is cooling her tea,
and the flow of the comb that woman
passes through her daughter's hair . . .
and when you consider the altitude,
the secret parts of the engines,
and all the hard water and the deep canyons below . . .
well, I just think it would be good if one of us
maybe stood up and said a few words,
or, so as not to involve the police,
at least quietly wrote something down.

===

IN THE NEXT GALAXY by Ruth Stone

Things will be different.
No one will lose their sight,
their hearing, their gallbladder.
It will be all Catskills with brand
new wrap-around verandas.
The idea of Hitler will not
have vibrated yet.
While back here,
they are still cleaning out
pockets of wrinkled
Nazis hiding in Argentina.
But in the next galaxy,
certain planets will have true
blue skies and drinking water.

====

YOU CAN TAKE IT WITH YOU, by Josephine Jacobsen

2 little girls who live next door
to this house are on their trampoline.
the window is closed, so they are soundless.
the sun slants, it is going away;
but now it hits full on the trampoline
and the small figure on each end.
alternately they fly up to the sun,
fly, and rebound, fly, are shot
up, fly, are shot up up.
one comes down in the lotus
position. the other, outdone,
somersaults in air. their hair
flies too. nothing, nothing, noth
ing can keep keep them down. the air
sucks them up by the hair of their heads.
i know all about what is
happening in this city at just
this moment, every last
grain of dark, i conceive.
but what i see now is
the 2 little girls flung up
flung up, the sun snatch
ing them, their mouths rounded
in gasps. they are there, they fly up.

=====

Czeslaw Milosz  1911-2004

CHILD OF EUROPE by Czeslaw Milosz
Stanzas 4 and 8 , (of 8) 

4
Grow your tree of falsehood from a single grain of truth.
Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality.
Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself
So the weary travelers may find repose in the lie.
After the Day of the Lie gather in select circles
Shaking with laughter when our real deeds are mentioned.

Dispensing flattery called: perspicacious thinking.
Dispensing flattery called: a great talent.
We, the last who can still draw joy from cynicism.
We, whose cunning is not unlike despair.
A new, humorless generation is now arising
It takes in deadly earnest all we received with laughter.

8

The laughter born of the love of truth
Is now the laughter of the enemies of the people.
Gone is the age of satire. We no longer need mock.
The sensible monarch with false courtly phrases.
Stern as befits the servants of a cause,
We will permit ourselves sycophantic humor.
Tight-lipped, guided by reasons only
Cautiously let us step into the era of the unchained fire.

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