July 8, 2020

Charles Harper Webb

CRABBY

“They’re so cute,” 9-year-old Kara tells the Petco
boy as—antennae waving, black stalk-eyes
straight out of a cartoon—the hermit crabs

drag their moon shells, conch shells, top, tun,
cone, and cowrie shells across the pilfered sand.
Past-owner of rats, hamsters, parakeets,

ferrets, sea monkeys, goldfish, pink chicks,
and a plecostomus, as well as dogs, cats,
and turtles (to which the hermits seem related,

yanking in, then boiling out of their shells),
Kara aches to expand the circle of her love.
“That one!” she cries, and the boy plucks up

the biggest, in its shimmering mother-
of-pearl spiral. For just $4.49 (plus $50
for food, sand, extra shells), Crabby is hers!

But does he frolic in the terrarium
that once housed two dwarf hamsters
that became eight, then twenty-four, then none

when I laid down the law? Does he eat
the food (steak, lettuce, special pellets)
she drops into his scallop-dish? Does he

revel in the mist she sprays three times a day,
or clamber to the top of his crow’s-nest
to mime “Land ho,” or perch on her shoulders

and whisper sea-secrets into her shell-
like ear, the two of them forging a link
across time and speciation? He does not.

Stone-still, he sits in the same spot
so long (three days) she thinks he’s dead.
Lifting him sadly, she turns him upside-

down, sees the orange legs and one big
purple claw blocking the entrance to his shell,
then plops him into her open palm, risking

the spill of fluids and the stench of sea-death
as she begs, “Come out, Crabby Crab,”
until at last that purple claw grabs

onto the soft flesh of her hand, and won’t let go
even when, with outraged cries, she flings Crabby
out the sliding door onto our lawn

where, frying in the August sun, he can only
cling to a scrap of Kara’s skin, and hope
the polar ice melts soon, and the seas rise.

from Rattle #67, Spring 2020

__________

Charles Harper Webb: “My childhood, like my wife’s and son’s, was marked by periodic, usually unsuccessful efforts to make wild creatures (frogs, bugs, lizards, baby birds, etc.) part of my family. This poem commemorates such an effort, and remembers the victim.”

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April 16, 2020

Charles Harper Webb

EXAMINED LIFE

My skin’s the perfect temperature.
My pajamas fit exactly right.
No bed-wrinkle makes me shift

or twitch. Too bad my bladder
is so tight it shoves me out of bed.
When I get back, sleep’s water-jar still

barely balanced on my head,
my wife’s coming awake
the way a coral reef rises with a falling

tide. As our son rattles his crib
in the next room, she slides away.
Observe you’re comfortable,

and comfort decays. Beside our bed,
blinds start to clack. Cold wind
whips trash around the chambers

of my head. The Ego sighs,
and pulls its flannel work-shirt on.
The Superego sweeps the floor.

“Why bother?” growls the Id.
“What’s in it for me?” “Pipe down,”
I say, and split the drapes.

Psyche examined Love; it fled.
Outside, rain darts though gusts
of visibility.

from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

__________

Charles Harper Webb: “When I was sixteen, playing in rock bands and preparing to become a physicist, if someone had said, ‘You’ll end up a poet,’ I’d have assumed they’d end up swinging a rubber hoe on the funny farm. Now I find I’ve written poems for more than half of my life. So why (besides the groupies and big bucks) do I persist? For one thing, I hope to give to others some of the pleasure that good poems have given me. But I also want to wring more out of the time that I have left—to live, whenever I can, with my awareness, intelligence, and imagination fully engaged. Poetry does that for me.” (web)

 

Charles Harper Webb is the guest on Rattlecast #37. Click here to watch!

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May 22, 2018

Charles Harper Webb

SWIMMING LESSON

We want to give our son the power
to flutter-kick across death’s bright
blue surface, dive down deep
to where the treasure lies, and swim it up.
We want him to love pool parties—

to guard the lines of half-dressed girls—
to backstroke, butterfly, and walk
on water for their awe-struck eyes.
We want a swimmer’s body for him:
slow pulse and strong heart.

Yet in the pool, our laughing boy
becomes a screaming fiend.
He screams louder when teenaged
Lorelei drags him toward the deep.
“Mommy! Daddy! No!” he shrieks.

Our waving only makes things worse.
He thrashes, flails. “Help me!”
he wails, seeing us wring hands
we don’t bring to his aid. “We love you,”
we swear each night before bed,

and soothe night-fears with “Honey,
you’re safe here.” But now, like dying
gods, all we can do is watch
his faith in us fight to the surface once,
twice, three times, then disappear.

from Rattle #30, Winter 2008

__________

Charles Harper Webb: “Though the first part is about my son, the poem arrived after I watched a girl in my son’s swimming class react to the lesson as if it were her own execution. Clearly, she thought it was.” (web)

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August 26, 2016

Charles Harper Webb

ICE

was Granny Clark’s cure for all ills.
Ice for a banged forehead or skinned knee.
Ice for headache, sniffles, fever. Ice
for chills. For bruised feelings, a drink

from the icebox, as she still called it.
In the old days, she explained,
people chopped ice from lakes in winter,
and stored it in ice-houses underground.

Twice a week, the ice-man brought—
swinging from tongs—a sweating
block, and plopped it in the box.
She’d hoped to be an ice-girl, then.

Now—kids grown, husband fled to a bank-
teller with frosted hair—she rocks
on her porch, and sips iced tea, and thinks
how Eskimos would feed

an old, sick Grandma special herbs.
“Thank you for spending time
with us. Return in a nice new body soon,”
they’d croon, entrusting her to ice.

from Rattle #52, Summer 2016
Tribute to Angelenos

__________

Charles Harper Webb: “I consider myself an L.A. poet for the very prosaic reason that I’ve lived in and around L.A. for more than half of my life. As a long-time professor of English and creative writing at Cal State Long Beach, I’ve helped to turn a number of fine poets loose on the world, and am pleased to take part myself in the local literary scene. As the editor of Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, and two earlier Stand Up anthologies, I helped to define and call attention to an entertaining, reader-friendly style of poetry that grew up in L.A., and still flourishes here. I’ve lived in L.A. for so long that my poems are full of it (L.A.—not, I hope, that other ‘it’). But even more than L.A. imagery, many of my poems have, I think, an L.A. sensibility: casual, performable, leavened with humor. As critic Wilhelm Blogun quipped at a party, ‘As poets go, you’re a Schopenhauer in duck’s clothing.’ How L.A. can you get?”

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August 24, 2016

Charles Harper Webb

THE NEW HUMILITY

So the last will be first, and the first last.
—Matthew 20:16

At first, jockeys rein their horses in.
Then they make them stand still
at the gun. When everyone does that,

they back up—at a walk, first; then, a run.
Workers try to earn the least, drive
the worst car, and dive deepest into debt.

Fashionistas vie to wear the shabbiest
clothes: coarse fabric, bad fit, full of holes.
When those holes get so big the clothes fall

off, people compete for Worst Body—
fattest, flabbiest, skinniest, most
malformed. People wear sores as kings once

wore jewels, until the point is reached
where hideous is beautiful. Then the trend
must be reversed—the fewer blebs,

fat-rolls, scars, humped backs, the better.
Football teams have lost so many yards,
points-given-up seem like points gained.

Horses lose more gloriously by running—
faced forward, all-out—in the wrong direction.
People forget they ever ran a different way.

from Rattle #52, Summer 2016
Tribute to Angelenos

__________

Charles Harper Webb: “I consider myself an L.A. poet for the very prosaic reason that I’ve lived in and around L.A. for more than half of my life. As a long-time professor of English and creative writing at Cal State Long Beach, I’ve helped to turn a number of fine poets loose on the world, and am pleased to take part myself in the local literary scene. As the editor of Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, and two earlier Stand Up anthologies, I helped to define and call attention to an entertaining, reader-friendly style of poetry that grew up in L.A., and still flourishes here. I’ve lived in L.A. for so long that my poems are full of it (L.A.—not, I hope, that other ‘it’). But even more than L.A. imagery, many of my poems have, I think, an L.A. sensibility: casual, performable, leavened with humor. As critic Wilhelm Blogun quipped at a party, ‘As poets go, you’re a Schopenhauer in duck’s clothing.’ How L.A. can you get?”

 

Charles Harper Webb is the guest on Rattlecast #37. Click here to watch!

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November 6, 2014

Charles Harper Webb

BURKA

The day after a door crushes his thumb,
the stain that flutters out of his cuticle
looks, at first, like a black squid
floating up through a pink sea. Then,
poised above the nail’s half-moon,
it seems a black burka with a white
slot through which dark pupils stare.

“Her face is scarred,” he thinks.
“She wears the burka to spare me.”
Then he thinks the eyes are Mom’s—
not crazed, as in the nursing home.
Forgiving. Warm. Or they belong
to some woman he misunderstood,
rejected, deceived, who loves him

still. Each day, the fluttering mark
climbs higher on his nail’s flesh-
colored wall. Bit by bit, it tops
his fingertip, is clipped, and falls,
re-joining—like everything he loved
has done or soon will do—
the dark.

from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
Tribute to Love Poems

__________

Charles Harper Webb: “When I was sixteen, playing in rock bands and preparing to become a physicist, if someone had said, ‘You’ll end up a poet,’ I’d have assumed they’d end up swinging a rubber hoe on the funny farm. Now I find I’ve written poems for more than half of my life. So why (besides the groupies and big bucks) do I persist? For one thing, I hope to give to others some of the pleasure that good poems have given me. But I also want to wring more out of the time that I have left—to live, whenever I can, with my awareness, intelligence, and imagination fully engaged. Poetry does that for me.” (web)

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August 31, 2013

Charles Harper Webb

BLACKDOOG™

Its wet fur smells like pepperoni pizza.
Its skin kills ticks and fleas on contact.
Its droppings—green!—blend perfectly

with grass, and break down into weed-
killing fertilizer that won’t stick to shoes.
Blackdoog bites only criminals,

but sniffs those out unerringly. Its gills
(for water-rescues), blue stalk-eyes,
and elephant-trunk make it ideal to kick-

start conversation. Its gentleness
and nurturing drive, along with mammaries
that produce human milk, make it perfect

for the nursery. Its manual dexterity
and general “handiness” let it fix anything
around the house, and program the VCR.

Its sole drawback is its intelligence—
150 minimum on the Stanford-Binet—
which gives it an off-putting air of authority,

and a tendency to stare into space,
ignoring commands to fetch and beg.
My doog—when my wife left me

for his litter-mate, and I was at my loneliest—
would levitate into my tallest oak
to contemplate, alone, the falling night,

the white light rising from its fur
giving it the look of an ascended master,
or a moon caged in the branches of my tree.

from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

[download audio]

__________

Charles Harper Webb: “When I was sixteen, playing in rock bands and preparing to become a physicist, if someone had said, ‘You’ll end up a poet,’ I’d have assumed they’d end up swinging a rubber hoe on the funny farm. Now I find I’ve written poems for more than half of my life. So why (besides the groupies and big bucks) do I persist? For one thing, I hope to give to others some of the pleasure that good poems have given me. But I also want to wring more out of the time that I have left—to live, whenever I can, with my awareness, intelligence, and imagination fully engaged. Poetry does that for me.”

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