Best Poem - Beauty

Click on this link or photo for YouTube poetry reading by John Alspaugh

The Dreambody – John Alspaugh

“All animals are men
In hiding, crouched
Under the tight skin
Of twilight, the young
Lion stares at himself
On the surface. Sleek flanks
Now and again let out
A ripple like wind
Glistening still water.
Ears twitch at the thought
Of a gnat.
He might decide to take
A slow drink, beginning
Almost to grin
At years of dark slender trees,
Slouching behind those bars
With more than my testimony.
While I dream of new reasons
He steps cautious timed steps.
Months pass and each night
His eyes grow more judicial,
Held low and steady,
Alert to my own heartsound,
As he pauses then turns back
Toward the water where again
He settles to drink
From his own reflection
Which slowly consumes his whole body
As he laps, wading deeper and
Deeper, slinking back
Through the mirror-of-sleep.”

“There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies blow;
A heavenly paradise is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits do grow;
There cherries grow that none may buy,
Till Cherry-Ripe themselves do cry.

Those cherries fairly do enclose
Of orient pearl a double row,
Which when her lovely laughter shows,
They look like rose-buds fill’d with snow:
Yet them no peer nor prince may buy,
Till Cherry-Ripe themselves do cry.

Her eyes like angels watch them still;
Her brows like bended bows do stand,
Threat’ning with piercing frowns to kill
All that approach with eye or hand
These sacred cherries to come nigh,
Till Cherry-Ripe themselves do cry!

“she tries to get things
out of men
that she can’t get
because she’s not
15% prettier” 

“I saw a beautiful man today
at the café.
Very beautiful.
But I can’t see
without my glasses.

So I ask the woman next to me.
Yup, she says, he’s beautiful.
But I don’t believe her 
and go to see for myself.

She’s right. 
He is.

Do you speak English?
I say to the beautiful man.
A little, the beautiful man says to me.
You are beautiful, I say.
No two ways about it.
He says beautifully, Merci.”

“My Michelangelo!
What Bernini could compare?
Could the Borghese estate compete?
Could the Medici’s famed aesthete
produce as excellent and sweet
as this famous derriere.

Did I say derriere?
Derriere too dainty.
Buttocks much too bawdy.
Cheeks so childishly petite.
Buns, impudently funny.
Rear end smacking of collision.

Ah, misnomered beauty.
Long-suffering
butt of jokes.
object of derision.
Pomegranate and apple
hath not such tempting
allure to me
as your hypnotic
anatomy.

Then
I am victim
of your spell,
bound since mine eyes
did first espy
that paradise of symmetry.

And like Pygmalion transfixed,
who sincere believed
desire could unfix
that alabaster chastity,
grieved the enchantment
of those small cruel hips—
those hard twin bones—
that house such enormous
happiness.”

“When I watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when I watch you
in your old man’s shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week’s grocery
I say
When I watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
I stand up
through your destruction
I stand up”

“She does not know
Her beauty,
She thinks her brown body
Has no glory.

If she could dance
Under palm trees
And see her image in the river
She would know.

But there are no palm trees
On the street,
And dish water gives back no images.”

I DIED for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
when one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
‘For beauty,’ I replied.
‘And I for truth,—the two are one;
We brethen are,’ he said

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.”

“How and where they met is cause for speculation.
All up and down the avenue, blondes—lacquered
in intelligence, sarcasm, babeness, and money—
gossiped into the ears of investment bankers
so impeccably groomed you could see them
checking their Windsor knots in the chrome
toes of their wing tip shoes.

He was so handsome that when he walked in
the room just rearranged its axis from south
to north, the scene came to a halt and hovered
as though the weight of him had tilted the planet
and everything was beginning a slow slide off.
Martinis tremble in their fragile glasses.
Against her mink a gardenia erupts in a Vesuvius

of white. These two haven’t met. Until they do,
her job will be to pout beside her wealthy father who,
weighted with an enormous white mustache
(what brilliance: in this scene, hair is money),
is lying in the sedate and lacquered gleam of the coffin.
Above his stern but kindly visage some pricey 
lilies droop.  He’s dead; she sulks.

But this is all a long way off.  Now we’re
at the Ritz where, as we’ve seen, the joint’s atremble.
the tablecloths on the table so white, so limp.

They look like they have fainted.  When he walks in,
she says, there is no here here, let’s go down the street
to Izzy’s.  The street’s grown quiet.  Not even the moon
can move. Its grainy bulk, stolid and sinister at once,
won’t bulge. Behind them—the pale, small stares of the hotel
lobby, a taxi hauls a smudge of exhaust into place,
and a town staggers to its feet as he follows her like a prisoner
into the sentence of this story.”

“Beauty is not a set and flawless rule;
She spells the mist, and with a silver wing
Hovers upon the shades of grey and brown
No less than on a rich embroidery.
She is a kind of rhythm, an accord
Of dreaming notes, so vague and mystical
That on a breath irrelevant, they fade.

She subtly whispers her imaginings,
And hath a tender breath more delicate
Than far-blown scent of gorse on distant hills.
If we but catch the glimmer of her wing,
Then witchery! We needs must follow her!…
If never on our path she comes along—
Then are we lost, for always we are blind.

The phantasy of yearning, and of hope,
She comes to naught in Comprehension’s grasp;
No feather balanced on the Southern gale
Is more impalpable than Beauty’s face.
We shall pursue her till our days are out;
If e’er she vanish, Life is spent—’tis time
To draw the curtain for a last goodnight!”

“Friends, mine are ugly feet:
the body’s common wreckage
stuffed into boots. The second toe
on the left foot’s crooked
enough that when a child
asks what’s that? of it,
I can without flinch or fear of doubt lie
that a cow stepped on it
which maybe makes them fear cows
for which I repent
in love as I am with those philosophical beasts
who would never smash feet
nor sneer at them
the way my mother does:
‘We always bought you good shoes, honey,’
she says, ‘You can’t blame us
for those things,’ and for this 
and other reasons
I have never indulged in the pleasure
of flip-flips shy or ashamed 
digging my toes like ten tiny ostriches into the sand
at the beach with friends
who I’m not sure love me,
though I don’t think Tina loved me—
she liked me, I think—but said
to me, as we sat on lawn chairs
beside a pool where I lifeguarded and was meticulous
at obscuring from view with a book or towel
my screwy friends,
You have pretty feet,
in that gaudy, cement-mixer, Levittown accent
that sends all the lemurs scaling my ribcage to see
and she actually had pretty feet
and so I took this as a kindness incomparable and probably
fell a little bit in love with her for that afternoon
with the weird white streak in her hair
and her machinegun chatter and her gum snapping
and so slid my feet from beneath my Powerman and Iron Fist comic book
into the sun for which they acted like plants opening their tiny mouths
to the food hurtling to them through the solar system,
and like plants you could watch then almost smile,
almost say thank you, you could watch them
turn colors, and be, almost, emboldened,
none of which Tina saw
because she was probably digging in her purse
or talking about that hottie on The Real World
or yelling at some friend’s little sister to put her ass in her trunks
or pouring the crumbs of her Fritos into her thrown open mouth
but do you really think I’m talking to you about my feet?
Of course she’s dead: Tina was her name, of leukemia: so I heard—
why else would I try sadly to make music of her unremarkable kindness?
I am trying, I think, to forgive myself
for something I don’t know what.
But what I do know is that I love the moment when the poet says
I am trying to do this 
or I am trying to do that.
Sometimes it’s a horseshit trick. But sometimes
it’s a way by which the poet says
I wish I could tell you,
truly, of the little factory
in my head: the smokestacks
chuffing, the dandelions
and purslane and willows of sweet clover 
prying through the blacktop.
I wish I could tell you
how inside is the steady mumble and clank of machines.
But mostly I wish I could tell you of the footsteps I hear,
more than I can ever count,
all of whose gaits I can discern by listening, closely.
Which promptly disappear
after being lodged again,
here, where we started, in the factory
where loss makes all things
beautiful glow.”

“Mary, you know I’ve no love-nonsense,
And, though I pen on such a day,
I don’t mean flirting, on my conscience,
Or writing in the courting way.

Though Beauty hasn’t form’d your
feature,
It saves you, p’rhaps, from being
vain,
And many a poor unhappy creature
May wish that she was half as plain.

Your virtues would not rise an inch,
Although your shape was two foot taller,
And wisely you let others pinch
Great waists and feet to make them smaller.

You never try to spare your hands
From getting red by household duty,
But, doing all that it commands,
Their coarseness is a moral beauty.

Let Susan flourish her fair arms,
And at your odd legs sneer and 
scoff;
But let her laugh, for you have 
charms
That nobody knows nothing of.”

For Naomi Lazard

Sometimes I can’t wait until I look like Nadezhda Mandelstam.
                                                                               —Naomi Lazard

“My friends are tired.
The ones who are married are tired
of being married.
The ones who are single are tired
of being single.

They look at their wrinkles.
The ones who are single attribute their wrinkles
to being single.
The ones who are married attribute their wrinkles
to being married.

They have very few wrinkles.
Even taken together,
they have very few wrinkles.
But I cannot persuade them
to look at their wrinkles
collectively.
& I cannot persuade them that being married
or being single
has nothing to do with wrinkles.

Each one sees a deep & bitter groove,
a San Andreas fault across her forehead.
‘It is only a matter of time
before the earthquake.’
They trade the names of plastic surgeons
like recipes.

My friends are tired.
The ones who have children are tired
of having children.
The ones who are childless are tired
of being childless.

They love their wrinkles.
If only their wrinkles were deeper
they could hide.

Sometimes I think
(but do not dare to tell them)
that when the face is left alone to dig its grave,
the soul is grateful
& rolls in.”

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: 
Its loveliness increases; it will never 
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep 
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep 
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. 
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing 
A flowery band to bind us to the earth, 
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth 
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, 
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkn’d ways 
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, 
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall 
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, 
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon 
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils 
With the green world they live in; and clear rills 
That for themselves a cooling covert make 
‘Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake, 
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms: 
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms 
We have imagined for the mighty dead; 
An endless fountain of immortal drink, 
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.”

“Of the small gifts of heaven,
It seems to me a more than equal share
At birth was given
To girls with curly hair.
Oh, better than being born with a silver ladle,
Or even with a caul on,
Is wearing ringlets sweetly from the cradle.
Slaves to no beauty salon,
Ladies whose locks grow prettier when moister
Can call the world their oyster.

Ladies with curly hair
Have time to spare.
Beneath a windy drier
They need not thumb through Photoplay each week.
They can look higher.
Efficient, tidy, and forever chic,
They own free hours to cook or study Greek,
Run for the Senate, answer notes, break par,
Write poems, chair the local D.A.R.,
Paint,
Or practice for a saint.

Ladies with curls are kind, being confident.
In smiles their lives are spent,
Primrosed their path.
Rising, like Venus, crinkly from the bath,
They keep appointments, punctual to the dot,
And do good works a lot.
In crises they are cool. ‘Mid floods or wrecks,
Examples to their sex,
Steadfast they stand,
Calm in the knowledge not a hapless strand
Of hair is straggling down the backs of their necks.

However brief their lashes, plump their ankles,
The matter never rankles.
They marry well, are favorites with their kin.
Untyrannized by net and bobby pin,
They seldom cry ‘Alas!’
Or wring their hands or need divorce attorneys.
They are the girls boys choose at dancing class,
And they are beautiful on motor journeys.

Ah, pity her, however rose-and-white,
Who goes to bed at night
In clamps and clips!
Hers is no face to lure a thousand ships.
Had she been born unwavy,
Not Helen herself could ever have launched a navy.”

“Of the small gifts of heaven,
It seems to me a more than equal share
At birth was given
To girls with curly hair.
Oh, better than being born with a silver ladle,
Or even with a caul on,
Is wearing ringlets sweetly from the cradle!
Slaves to no beauty salon,
Ladies whose locks grow prettier when moister
Can call the world their oyster. 

Ladies with curly hair
Have time to spare.
Beneath a windy drier
They need not thumb through Photoplay each week.
They can look higher.
Efficient, tidy, and forever chic,
They own free hours to cook or study Greek,
Run for the Senate, answer notes, break par,
Write poems, chair the local DAR,
Paint,
Or practice for a saint.

Ladies with curls are kind, being confident,
In smiles their lives are spent,
Primrosed their path.
Rising, like Venus, crinkly from the bath,
They keep appointments, punctual to the dot,
And do good works a lot.
In crises they are cool. ‘Mid floods or wrecks,
Examples to their sex,
Steadfast they stand,
Calm in the knowledge not a hapless strand
Of hair is straggling down the backs of their necks.

However brief their lashes, plump their ankles,
The matter never rankles.
They marry well, are favorites with their kin.
Untyrannized by net and bobby pin,
They seldom cry ‘Alas!’
Or wring their hands or need divorce attorneys.
They are the girls boys choose at dancing class,
And they are beautiful on motor journeys.

Ah, pity her, however rose-and-white,
Who goes to bed at night
In clamps and clips!
Hers is no face to lure a thousand ships.
Had she been born unwavy,
Not Helen herself could ever have launched a navy.”

“Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,
The light gauze hanging loose about her form;
To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls
Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;
But looking at her falsely-smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place.”

“You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I’m all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
Fed me banana-gas through a frog mask.  The nauseous vault
Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.

They’ve changed all that.  Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for me.  He makes me feel something precious
Is leaking from the finger-vents.  At the count of two,
Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard…
I don’t know a thing.

For five days I lie in secret,
Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I’m in the country.
Skin doesn’t have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten.  I grow backward.  I’m twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband’s sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn’t a cat yet.

Now she’s done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby.”

“Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.

Tie the white fillets then about your lustrous hair
And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass
And chattering on the air.

Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our powers shall never establish,
It is so frail.

For I could tell you a story which is true:
I know a lady with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfections tarnished—and yet it is not long
Since she was lovelier than any of you.”

“I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in a chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant notes to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
 Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).”

“While roses are so red,
While lilies are so white
Shall a woman exalt her face
Because it gives delight?
She’s not so sweet as a rose,
A lily’s straighter than she,
And if she were as red or white
She’d be but one of three.

Whether she flush in love’s summer
Or in its winter grow pale,
Whether she flaunt her beauty
Or hide it away in a veil,
Be she red or white,
And stand she erect or bowed,
Time will win the race he runs with her
And hide her away in a shroud.”

(for 2nd & 3rd grade sisters)

cain’t nobody tell me any different
i’m ugly and you know it too
you just smiling to make me feel better
but i see how you stare when nobody’s watching you. 

i know i’m short black and skinny
and my nose stopped growin for it wuz’ posed to
i know my hairs short, legs and face ashy
and my clothes have holes that run right through to you.

so i sit all day long just by myself
so i jump the sidewalk cracks knowin i cain’t fall
cuz who would want to catch someone who looks like me
who ain’t even cute or just a little tall.

cain’t nobody tell me any different
i’m ugly anybody with sense can see.
but, one day i hope somebody will stop me and say
looka here, a pretty little black girl lookin’ just like me.”

“Because a bit of colour is a public service.

Because I am proud of my hands.

Because it will remind me I’m a woman.

Because I will look like a survivor.

Because I can admire them in traffic jams.

Because my daughter will say ugh.

Because my lover will be surprised.

Because it is quicker than dyeing my hair.

Because it is a ten-minute moratorium.

Because it is reversible.”

“She examines her hand, fingers spread wide.
Seated, she bends over her crossed legs
to search for specks or scars and cannot hide
her awe when any mark is found. She begs
me to look, twisting before her mirror,
at some tiny bruise on her hucklebone.
Barely awake, she studies creases her
arm developed as she slept. She has grown
entranced with blemish, begun to know
her body’s facility for being
flawed. She does not trust its will to grow
whole again, but may learn that too, freeing
herself to accept the body’s deep thirst
for risk. Learning to touch her wounds comes first.”

“The pressure…
The pressure is on to be
tall
thin
and blonde
To be worked out enough to be firm
But not muscle-y enough to be masculinely strong
To be demure and deferential when you tell a man he is wrong
To be coiffed and well groomed at all hours of the day
Women are still cooking in the pressure pot
Cause little girls are being raised to be hot hot hot”