Poetry Monday

Congratulations to A. E. Stallings for winning a genius grant from the MacArthur foundation for her poetry. That's a big bucks prize: half a million dollars. I don't read (or follow, really) the contemporary poetry scene, but I am a big fan of Stallings. Her poems make me jealous that I can't write like her.

Drinking Song

by A. E. Stallings

The moon is chalky, white & thin;
The moon is bitter as aspirin.
She drinks it down with a glass of gin.

Clear and strong the moonbeams fall
As the proof of alcohol,
And everything they touch, appall.

But there are stars for all her ills--
A scattering of spilled, white pills.
The glass is sweating a it chills.

Poetry Monday

Fear of Happiness

by A. E. Stallings

Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had:

As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator

I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight,

Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through,

Though someone always said I’d be all right—

Just don’t look down or See, it’s not so bad

(The nothing rising underfoot). Then later

The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch,

Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view,

The merest thought of airplanes. You can call

It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep;

But it isn’t the unfathomable fall

That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch,

It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap.

Poetry Monday

A poem about movies, the day after the Oscars.

Noir
by A. E. Stallings

Late at night,
One of us sometimes has said,
Watching a movie in black and white,
Of the vivid figures quick upon the screen,
"Surely by now all of them are dead"--
The yapping, wire-haired terrier, of course--
And the patient horse
Soaked in an illusion of London rain,
The Scotland Yard inspector at the scene,
The extras--faces in the crowd, the sailors;
The bungling blackmailers,
The kidnapped girl's parents, reunited again
With their one and only joy, lisping in tones antique
As that style of pouting Cupid's bow
Or those plucked eyebrows, arched to the height of chic.

Ignorant of so many things we know,
How they seem innocent, and yet they too
Possess a knowledge they cannot give,
The grainy screen a kind of sieve
That holds some things, but lets some things slip through
With the current's rush and swirl.
We wonder briefly only about the girl--
How old--seven, twelve--it isn't clear--
Perhaps she's still alive
Watching this somewhere at eight-five,
The only one who knows, though we might guess,
What the kidnapper whispers in her ear,
Or the color of her dress.


(a note: it seems the movie that Stallings is discussing might be the 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much. If she is, then the actress who played the girl, Nova Pilbeam, is still alive, in case anyone cares. I love this poem and wish I'd written it because I have the same thoughts when I watch old movies. There's the lovely Nova below.)