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by Paul Hostovsky
Expensive delicate boat
with a hundred chances on board
floating above the drowned brown
pennies with their one chance each
piled on top of each other
on the abject bottom.
It wavers, shivers, turns
over and the green
president goes under and in
god we trust and all that fancy
acanthus leaf amounting to a wish
that was taken for granted. But wasn’t.
Originally posted 2009-11-07 00:59:14.
by Paul Hostovsky
There’s a poem in Gerald Stern’s mouth.
If you’ve ever gone to see him read
you’ve noticed that thing he does
with his lips, pursing them, flaring them,
wetting them like a pair of water birds
come to drink and mate in the middle
of his face, preening themselves between
the words, making love between the lines.
And between his two front teeth that big
caesura shining down on us from inside
the poems-it’s always there, like the sun,
which brings us to his eyes, which blink a lot
perhaps from his habit of looking directly
into the poem, where it lives, in the mouth.
Originally posted 2008-10-16 16:26:21.
by Paul Hostovsky
I’m rooting for gray.
Because there’s too much
black or white in the world.
Too much win or lose.
And much too much
rain or shine. Go gray!
Give me a gray day
with a very fine rain–
more like a mist
coming at the bottom
of the 4th, deepening the colors,
darkening the greens
and browns of earth,
the shoulders and backs
of the chattering infield–
rain, like baseball chatter itself,
that undying optimism,
then maybe a little sun
peeking through at the top
of the 9th. Or maybe not.
Originally posted 2008-12-16 01:33:20.
by Paul Hostovsky
Someone has left an orange pylon
here. I look around but there’s no
work going on here, only this sign
of work. Maybe it’s a sign that work
needs to go on here. I look for the bump
or the hole. But there’s nothing. Maybe
it fell off a truck on its way to somewhere
else where there’s work. No work here though,
just this orange pylon and the problem
of what it all means. I sit down across from it,
my chin in my hands. It’s looking very
orange. Very official-looking. You could
put it in your life and people would know
to avoid you, to stay away or go
around. You could really get some work done,
dig real deep, take as long as you like,
scratch your crotch and go for a liquid lunch
and not come back for days, years, your work
still waiting for you here, all undisturbed,
this finger holding your place, pointing
to itself pointing to your work pointing up.
Originally posted 2009-02-03 20:35:30.