HEAVEN MELT THE RIME, OVER TEXAS

TOPOGRAPHY – Poetry by Sharon Olds

After we flew across the country we got in bed, laid our bodies delicately together, like maps laid face to face, East to West, my San Francisco against your New York, your Fire Island against my Sonoma, my New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas burning against your Kansas your Kansas burning against my Kansas, your Eastern Standard Time pressing into my Pacific Time, my Mountain Time beating against your Central Time, your sun rising swiftly from the right my sun rising swiftly from the left your moon rising slowly form the left my moon rising slowly form the right until all four bodies of the sky burn above us, sealing us together, all our cities twin cities, all our states united, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

ALWAYS ON THE TRAIN – Poetry by Ruth Stone

Writing poems about writing poems, is like rolling bales of hay in Texas. Nothing but the horizon to stop you. But consider the railroad’s edge of metal trash. Bird perches, miles of telephone wires. What is so innocent as grazing cattle? If you think about it, it turns into words. Trash is so cheerful. Flying up, like grasshoppers in front of the reaper. The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers, squares of clear plastic–windows on a house of air. Below the weedy edge in last year’s mat, red and silver beer cans. In bits blown equally everywhere, the gaiety of flying paper, and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.

HOUSE – Poetry by Carl Sandburg

Two Swede families live downstairs and an Irish policeman upstairs, and an old soldier, Uncle Joe. Two Swede boys go upstairs and see Joe. His wife is dead, his only son is dead, and his two daughters in Missouri and Texas don’t want him around. The boys and Uncle Joe crack walnuts with a hammer on the bottom of a flatiron while the January wind howls and the zero air weaves laces on the window glass. Joe tells the Swede boys all about Chickamauga and Chattanooga, how the Union soldiers crept in rain somewhere a dark night and ran forward and killed many Rebels, took flags, held a hill, and won a victory told about in the histories in school. Joe takes a piece of carpenter’s chalk, draws lines on the floor and piles stove wood to show where six regiments were slaughtered climbing a slope. “Here they went” and “Here they went,” says Joe, and the January wind howls and the zero air weaves laces on the window glass. The two Swede boys go downstairs with a big blur of guns, men, and hills in their heads. They eat herring and potatoes and tell the family war is a wonder and soldiers are a wonder. One breaks out with a cry at supper: I wish we had a war now and I could be a soldier.

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