Recent Poetry: February 2025

Chantal Ackerman (1950-2015)

Why is your movie
“Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” which runs to more than three hours,
not boring?

In it we see the life of an ordinary woman.
She cooks and cleans. She teaches her son French
(He wants to go to a French-speaking school,
But knows only Flemish). And she turns tricks as a prostitute in their apartment when the son is away.

Only when her carefully observed life goes very slightly off the rails on day 3, does she murder one of her johns.

Why is your movie,
“Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” which runs to more than 3 hours,
Not boring?

Feminism

The history lesson of mankind,
Has only women left behind,
Child-bearing is their basic story,
They just reflect their male’s great glory.

It’s only lately things changed, maybe,
Sex no more requires a baby.
The implications are so vast,
They seem quite small. But hell. They last.

We learned that females can be smart,
And work in medicine or art.
But we cannot just add Ms. Curie,
They can be stupid too. Don’t worry.

It takes some centuries, a noose,
An Ada Lovelace to produce.


The Gift of Tears

I had a crying phase, yeah me,
Who never shed a tear for thee,
With stroke survivors it happens often, I hear,
In my case it went on about a year.

The most embarrassing thing, what made it sick.
Was that a movie or even a card trick,
Would make me cry, though really not so sad,
I saw life’s dissonance. That is always bad.

And then, one day, there came back normal me.
That he was always there we knew. We’d see.
I learned that crying belongs to the body,
Make a big thing of it, and it becomes so shoddy.

At last I understood those very churchly brothers,
Who hid the “gift of tears” from all the others.
It was right and good, and true and real,
But  not a thing that made me a big deal.

The Problem

As Dogen said, the mountain is,
The universe, and so’s Hafiz,
And so is all the food upon our plate,
Cheese soufflé, and that old mejdool date.

If we can see it we will not be blue,
But that’s the prob: believing its not true.


Attention

Simone Weil said the best intention
Is just to offer our attention.
To say, “What are you going through?”
Is a miracle we can do,
When we resist self-interest—rare—
Attention’s almost always there.

American Buddhists

I first became aware of it,
Myself after a one-day sit.
That Buddhism nat’rally came to mind,
For them, but had to be defined,
Against the faith they firstly ever had,
Jews or Christians, or something just as bad.

Every time they talked of Zen,
No matter how or why or when,
It e’er arose, ‘twas always praised,
Not so, the faith where they were bloody raised.

For them Buddhism had to say,
As far as they saw anyway,
That it was NOT the same faith, jolly,
That they were raised in. No. By golly.

What they wanted it to be,
It had to be exactly, see?
Just as liberal as they needed,
With “god” too evil, and too heeded.

And then these folks would all be gone like hell,
On seeing this was organized as well,
They went away so very, very fast,
This fine old truth, it turned out, did not last,
They’d then speak then of their blessed “Buddhist Phase,”
On which they’d be an expert all their days.


Agnes Martin (1912-2004)

Most of the abstract expressionists,
Were men. But we didn’t know about the imbalance
Till you came along, the main quiet and
Spiritual one among them.  And a woman.
Only by meeting you was the imbalance made clear to us. But you approached your great canvases as neither man or woman. But as a simple being, whose gender didn’t much matter, but who saw what was true, and tried to bear witness, as best you could. With grids that didn’t reproduce very well. Not like Jackson Pollock. Not like Franz Kline. Whom you were better than. It took some years  for us to get it.