Robert Francis (1901-1987)

Catch

Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,

Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, every hand,

Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,

High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,

Make him scoop it up, make him as-almost-as-possible miss it,

Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,

Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,

Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,

Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down,

Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning,

And now, like a posy, a pretty one plump in his hands.

Barbie's Shoes

Hilary Tham

I'm down in the basement

sorting Barbie's shoes.

sequin pumps, satin courts,

western boots, Reebok sneakers,

glass slippers, ice-skates, thongs.

All will fit the dainty, forever arched

feet of any one Barbie: Sweet Spring

Glitter-Eyed, Peaches and Cream,

a Brazilian, Russian, Swiss, Hong Kong

Hispanic or Mexican, Nigerian

or Black Barbie. All are cast

in the same mold, same rubbery,

impossible embodiment of male fantasy

with carefully measured

doses of melanin to make

a Caucasian Barbie,

Polynesian Barbie

African-American Barbie.

Everyone knows that she is the same

Barbie and worthy of the American Dream

House, the Corvette, opera gloves, a

hundred pairs of shoes to step into. If only

the differently colored men and women we know

could be like Barbie, always smiling, eyes

wide with admiration, even when we yank

off an arm with a hard-to-take-off dress.

Barbie's shoes, so easily lost, mismatched,

useless; they end up, like our prejudices,

in the basement, forgotten as spiders

sticking webs in out darkest corners,

we are amazed we have them still.

The Pitcher

by Robert Francis

His art is eccentricity, his aim

How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

His passion how to avoid the obvious,

His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He

Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,

But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate

Making the batter understand too late.

Raymond Carver

[1939-1988]

Photograph of My Father

in His Twenty-Second Year

October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen

I study my father's embarrassed young man's face.

Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string

of spiny yellow perch, in the other

a bottle of Carlsbad beer.

In jeans and denim shirt, he leans

against the front fender of a 1934 Ford

He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity.

wear his old hat cocked over his ear.

All his life my father wanted to be bold.

But the eyes give him away, and the hands

that limpy offer the string of dead perch

and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you.

yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either,

and don't even know the places to fish?

Robert Frost

Dust of Snow

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.