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Ed Ochester's new book is SNOW WHITE HORSES: SELECTED POEMS, Autumn House Press (219 Bigham St., Pittsburgh, PA 15211), $14.95, available from the publisher or from amazon.com or barnes&noble.com Forthcoming books include a chapbbook, COOKING IN KEY WEST (Adastra Press, 2000) and THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE (Story Line Press, 2001). He's published eight other books of poetry, and has published poems in American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Nation, Chiron Review, Pearl, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Mother Jones, Virginia Quarterly Review and many other magazines. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at Bennington College, co-edits the poetry magazine 5AM with Judith Vollmer, and lives in Appalachia in rural western Pennsylvania. His work is currently available at The Pittsburgh Quarterly Online http://trfn.clpgh.org/tpq/ , as is that of former Feature Marilyn B Bates and Feature Editor, Andrena Zawinski. |
Four poems from SNOW WHITE HORSES:
Monroeville, PA
One day a kid yelled "Hey Asshole!" and everybody on the street turned around
Working at the Wholesale Curtain Showroom
"Can you type?" Jake said. "Maybe ten words a minute." "That's ok," Jake said, "we just get a couple letters now and then, what we need is a smart kid to be nice to customers, you don't have to know nothin about curtains, just be nice when people come through the door, talk nice to the buyers you don't have to know nothin about curtains just show them the way to the samples, we got all the stuff, the styles, the prices, printed on the cards. What we need is a nice educated kid, like you, you'll do fine."
And I did, and this is in praise of Jake, may he have prospered, who payed me for nothing, and who knew the great secret of living: "be nice," and who once sent me with roses to the apartment of a female buyer with the warning: "this is a fine lady, look around and tell me what the place looks like, you can tell a lot about people from the look of their place," and I came back and said "she's got a nice place, and she's really pretty, and she's got a full set of the Yale Shakespeare books in her living room," and Jake said "oh shit, I'll never get anywhere with her if she's an intellectual."
Poem for Basho
If I am timorous and hesitant to intrude on your privacy,
forgive me, for though every poet in New York has written a poem to you
it is different here where one farm does not wish to violate another
farm's solitude, but if after 300 years you were in this valley
perhaps you would write about the mouse who every night travels out
to eat at the dog's dish. And I think you would like the wind stunted spruce
and the way the drip, drip of the sink gathers the night around it.
Basho, here is my yellow glass. I am alone, but happy because I do not have to be alone.
You understood that, surely? How one of the pleasures of silence is finally
returning to your friends. Even though, no doubt, they thought you slightly peculiar.
What are the colors of flowers at night? And Basho, will you have another glass of rice wine
or whiskey? Basho, may I show you a poem I've just written? Basho, what are 300 years?
Mary Mihalik
She'd tried to kill herself before. Six kids, no money.
She was drunk they said, doing 80, 90
on the slick blacktop twisty and at dusk, and they
said there were no skidmarks where she sailed under
the coal truck going slow uphill out of the crossroad and
sheared the top of her Chevette clean off and the rumor was
that when the cops came, in the back seat they found her head.
People said all she needed was a job, and I guess they're right.
And probably everyone thought she needed love but everybody
says you've got to earn that, though I think love's a gift,
the way money is for some, who have a lot and never earned it.
I don't know. But a few nights later when I walked past there, the insects
were at their cheerful static. Aside from them the woods were silent.
And there were fireflies.
From THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE (Story Line Press, 2001), first published in The Nation, Dec. 20, 1999
Whatever It Is
I took some stones from the overgrown fireplace not too far from the maples my father planted that have outlived the house. I have the tiny diamond Aunt Barbara got from the man she never spoke about in my presence; today only three people in the world have any memory of her. Here's a diary entry I made as a teenager: "Cicero says one of the 'six mistakes of man' is to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected."
The stones are in the basement. The diamond's in the vault. Since I live in the country, every spring I give a handful of my hair clippings to the birds, tie it in a bunch near a feeder and let them pick at it to weave into their nests, and perhaps into their songs, these little descendants of dinosaurs who sing and sing and we smile at them because we think their song says "nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about."
© Copyright, 2000, Ed Ochester.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.