Author Archives: Sally Ashton

Linda Pastan’s poem, “The Bookstall,” always makes me smile. It takes a seemingly simple mental task — choosing a couple of books from a library or bookstore — and describes it in delightfully physical and emotional images which absolutely ring true for me.

Kathy Johnson, 67
Retired teacher
San Jose

The Bookstall

Just looking at them
I grow greedy, as if they were
freshly baked loaves
waiting to be broken open–that one
and that–and I make my choice
in a mood of exalted luck,
browsing among them
like a cow in sweetest pasture.

For life is continuous
as long as they wait
to be read–these inked paths
opening into the future, page
after page, every book
its own receding horizon.
And I hold them, one in each hand,
a curious ballast weighting me
here to earth.

Linda Pastan

Some well known poems are known for themes like anti-war or technology.  The message is powerful, but sometimes those poems lack raw, chaotic, true emotion.  Conversely, poems that are known for raw, chaotic emotion from the depths of the human soul like love and depression lose appeal since there are so many of them.  “To the Hustler,” always keeps me on my toes because the poem is not strong enough to hold a powerful message, or hold onto emotion.  The poem searches for it — desperately searches — the search is heartbreaking.

Darrell Dela Cruz
Academic Coach
San Jose

To the Hustler

As Boris Karloff marches to the electric chair in The Walking Dead
you’re jacking off
But when you imitate the mating call of the Double-breasted Yellowbellied
Sapsucker
Out on the café terrace
You attract even the local birds to the telephone wires
Who answer with bird notes of love
because you are wild
and free
and scream with the sheer joy of being 20 years old
a giant of beauty and anarchy
and when you play the guitar and sing
You establish the live connection with pure pleasure!
Well is it love? All
we need is money
You say you will support me
We could bottle the perfume of your crotch and make a bundle
You get hard ons for TV
That I’m no competition for
but I could gaze at your lips and eyes
Forever
browse in your pits
explore those eyes
that see only yourself
in a child’s shamanistic dream

There’s so much to tune into
But when you break your word and lie
I’m unhappy
you’re breaking my trust
and love can’t survive a hustle
watch out baby
cool the hustler’s sleazy charm
life’s a bitch
the magic splits

Continue reading →

Because of the way this poem looks as though it’s stepping down, down, down—I can feel the bear coming down the mountain as I read.  This poem has the perfect use of a colon and a question.  At the end of the fourth stanza, I can’t help but hold my breath at the colon.  And then the question (“how to love this world”) always takes me by surprise, even on the zillionth reading.  I love how the fierce images of the bear (sharpening her claws, her tongue “like a red fire”) add up to an oxymoron of “dazzling darkness.”

I love the joy in this poem.  I admire the precision of Naomi’s word choice and her excellent instructions for allowing happiness to be.

Jean Emerson
Santa Clara County and Sr. Citizen
-therefore exempt from disclosing my age.

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of dust and noise
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

Naomi Shihab Nye

My favorite poem is my guide; it helps me cope with the death of a best friend. Pablo Neruda’s “A Dog Has Died” shows me that I can mourn and celebrate the life and death of my dog Bud. But also, that I must learn to accept his death, and move on.

Justine Fajardo, 23
Student, San Jose

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I’ll join him right there,
but now he’s gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he’d keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing. Continue reading →

In my youth before I wore goggles (that’s what I used to call glasses), everything I saw looked like it had been hit by various bugs and smeared with windshield wipers. But, I never thought my vision was bad. Then I began wearing goggles of my own and my vision suddenly became a newly discovered treasure. When I read Milton, I realized that though I wore glasses, I had brilliant, fortunate light to spend, and that I did indeed need to treasure it. So my vision entailed a mission; I had to be worthy of my sight, because hell, Milton was blind and he still wrote great stuff.