phillip crymble (@phillipcrymble) · DIRTY

phillip crymble

@phillipcrymble

poet | phd | umichwriters alum | fiddlehead poetry editor | record collector | author of not even laughter | one-armed bandit | he/him

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phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· 28d

Andrea Cohen

Self-Portrait with Eraser

I drew the eraser
first because I knew
it better than I knew myself and because
it had been around the block before me
and because it would,
after having its way
with me, rub up against everything I'd ever loved.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· 28d

Cole Swensen

All This Time You've Been Driving

The rain is not
falling rather
we are rushing up to it Translucent wingless insects vanish into the thought
The night grinding backward overhead swallow slow the black honey
flows through you a road that keeps moving as later we're reading
or talking or asleep.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· 29d

Theodore Roethke, from The Far Field: Last Poems (1964)

HEARD IN A VIOLENT WARD

In heaven, too,
You'd be institutionalized. But that's all right,-
If they let you eat and swear
With the likes of Blake,
And Christopher Smart,
And that sweet man, John Clare.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 12

One more by Carol Ann Duffy to close out the weekend

And Then What

Then with their hands they would break bread wave choke phone thump thread
Then with their tired hands slump at a table holding their head
Then with glad hands hold other hands or stroke brief flesh in a kind bed
Then with their hands on the shovel they would bury their dead.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 12

Sadiqa de Meijer, from the May 2026 issue of @thewalrus.ca

Wish You Were Here

BY SADIQA DE MEIJER

Where the seedling body,
wearing a smock or a backwards old
dress shirt, makes a map: two wells of colour in an egg carton,
glossed paper, thick-handled brush. Start with a burst
of solar egg, streak with sea. That clotted bloom of overlap, beheld
-duckweed, algae, moss-paint's a skin and then it's a sinking dream
for the gaze. Verdant island
blotting at the shores,
and the grass is nowhere greener, nowhere is it greener than this place.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 11

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 11

Keeping the Carol Ann Duffy party going with this brief lyric from Selling Manhattan (1987)

LOVESICK

I found an apple.
A red and shining apple. I took its photograph.
I hid the apple in the attic. I opened the skylight
and the sun said Ah!
At night, I checked that it was safe, under the giggling stars,
the sly moon. My cool apple.
Whatever you are calling about, I am not interested.
Go away. You with the big teeth.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 10

Another by Carol Ann Duffy, this one from Mean Time (1993)

DRUNK

Suddenly the rain is hilarious. The moon wobbles in the dusk.
What a laugh. Unseen frogs
belch in the damp grass.
The strange perfumes of darkening trees. Cheap red wine
and the whole world a mouth.
Give me a double, a kiss.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 10

her shroud like washing / blown onto the grass Carol Ann Duffy

CAROL ANN DUFFY
Wish
But what if, in the clammy soil, her limbs grew warmer, shifted, stirred, kicked off the covering of earth, the drowsing corms, the sly worms, what if her arms reached out to grab the stone, the grooves of her dates under her thumb, and pulled her up? I wish. Her bare feet walk along the gravel path between the graves, her shroud like washing blown onto the grass, the petals of her wreath kissed for a bride. Nobody died. Nobody wept. Nobody slept who couldn't be woken by the light. If I can only push open this heavy door she'll be standing there in the sun, dirty, tired, wondering why do I shout, why do I run.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 9

Sylvia Plath

170
Poppies in July
Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm?
You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.
And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.
A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!
There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?
If I could bleed, or sleep!-
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!
Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, Dulling and stilling.
But colorless. Colorless.
20 July 1962

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 8

Another by Jane Hirshfield, this one from The Lives of the Heart (1997)

Da Capo

Take the used-up heart like a pebble and throw it far out.
Soon there is nothing left.
Soon the last ripple exhausts itself in the weeds.
Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery. Glaze them in oil before adding
the lentils, water, and herbs.
Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt. Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat.
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 8

Jane Hirshfield

"NOTHING LASTS"

"Nothing lasts"-
how bitterly the thought attends each loss.
"Nothing lasts"-
a promise also of consolation.
Grief and hope
the skipping rope's two ends,
twin daughters of impatience.
One wears a dress of wool, the other cotton.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 7

Henri Cole

Oil & Steel

My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
which he preferred to Modern Fiction.
One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,
except the one that guarded his corpse
found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.
"Dead is dead,” he would say, an antipreacher.
I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet
and some motor oil-my inheritance.
Once I saw him weep in a courtroom—
neglected, needing nursing-this man who never showed
me much affection but gave me a knack
for solitude, which has been mostly useful.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 6

Dean Young

Because of Bears

I'm told to fill out a form
in order to qualify for another form. Do not sit here says a sign on an otherwise perfectly calm chair. Don't speak do wah diddy even if spoken to. Plastic flowers in dusty derangement, last gasps of a dry-docked mermaid but no, it's just no one on the other end.
On TV, a spaceman gets covered in sinister goo. I'm told to hang the food from a tree. Hypnotic the rain, heavy the heart in the hand. During the interview, I'm tossed a small blue rubber ball. I catch it and zing it right back. I let it bounce off my face.
I catch it and put it in my pants. I attempt to catch it and miss then burst into tears.
You can keep your crappy job.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 6

Linda Gregg

Not The Moon Nor Pretend

If this woman is simple
do
you love her less?
Is she less important?
If she looks like sadness but is love itself
do you want not to see her? If you see only face and hair, don't you imagine the hands lifted in some larger scene? Can't you tell she will last
until the world is done?

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 5

Wendy Cope, from "Fireworks Poems"

I

Faster and faster,
They vanish into darkness:
Our years together.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 4

Walt Whitman

I Hear America Singing

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deck- hand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter sing- ing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day-at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 4

Dean Gorman

Empire

DEAN GORMAN

The start was the end, of course, a dream of perfection. And finally the procession of average ghosts. But before all that I was young enough to change the players I was the center of. Looking back, I seem bound
for summer anguishes. And now my eyes sweep along, for metaphor,
for difficult models of empire.
Relief when I find none.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jul 2

Cecily Parks

GIRLHOOD

was when I slept in the woods bareheaded beneath jagged stars and the membranous near-misses of bats, when I tasted watercress, wild carrot, and sorrel, when I was known
by the lilac I hid beside, and when that lilac, burdened by my expectations of lilacs, began a journey
without me, as when the dirt road sang, O, rugosa rose, farewell,
and ran behind the clipped white pine hedge into the immeasurable
heartbreaks of the field.

--Cecily Parks

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jun 30

Another poem featuring fireflies as it first appeared in CV2

Phillip Crymble

Luminology

It doesn't mean that much to me-people on a trampoline, their roadside garden, sunlight, grades of summer green all chosen as if entries in a catalogue. Field notes leave me wondering what we're afforded. Is it plain to see? Faint laughter, open motion caught, a beat-up truck, enough to please, enough to make the table-cloth the women shake out thoughtlessly toward the fields seem golden. Mist as fine as chalk- dust on the corn rows now—a slow explosion settling. It travels down the furrows, twists and breathes the night, moves deeper still. Fireflies crowd the underside of leaves, lay eggs, cast yellow protein-light that glistens in the nebula. New constellations
burning free, a back-drop ... but I'm one to talk, it doesn't mean that much to me. It doesn't.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jun 29

Robert Frost

FIREFLIES IN THE GARDEN

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jun 28

One more from Wendy Cope's Collected Poems (2024)

The South Bank Poetry library, London

This is a pleasant library. I'd enjoy every minute
But for the danger of meeting other poets in it.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jun 27

David Berman, from "The War in Apartment 1812"

There must be a painless way to remember the way the apple trees tangled up,
and rain came down on the Gulf station, or the pastures on the back of a nickel like the decimals in our initials, falling hard and clean upon everything.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jun 27

Wendy Cope, with the English weather as it once was

English Weather

January's grey and slushy, February's chill and drear, March is wild and wet and windy, April seldom brings much cheer. In May, a day or two of sunshine, Three or four in June, perhaps. July is usually filthy,
August skies are open taps.
In September things start dying, Then comes cold October mist. November we make plans to spend The best part of December pissed.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jun 26

Randall Jarrell

The Breath of Night

The moon rises. The red cubs rolling In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow To the farm's white wisp of smoke.
A spark burns, high in heaven. Deer thread the blossoming rows Of the old orchard, rabbits
Hop by the well-curb. The cock crows
From the tree by the widow's walk; Two stars, in the trees to the west, Are snared, and an owl's soft cry Runs like a breath through the forest.
Here too, though death is hushed, though joy Obscures, like night, their wars,
The beings of this world are swept By the Strife that moves the stars.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jun 23

The William Carlos Williams poem I always come back to

Proletarian Portrait

A big young bareheaded woman
in an apron

Her hair slicked back standing
on the street

One stockinged foot toeing
the sidewalk

Her shoe in her hand. Looking
intently into it

She pulls out the paper insole
to find the nail

That has been hurting her

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jun 22

William Carlos Williams

Nantucket

Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow

changed by white curtains—
Smell of cleanliness—

Sunshine of late afternoon—
On the glass tray

a glass pitcher, the tumbler
turned down, by which

a key is lying—And the
immaculate white bed

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jun 22

A poem for Father's Day as it first appeared in The Walrus

THE WALRUS

MAP

BY PHILLIP CRYMBLE

The trays of coloured pencils on the table. Your list of lakes and waterways. Careful
not to come too close to coastlines-I crudely shade the bigger bays and basins-surround
the land you've laboured at in Copenhagen blue.
Another year of middle school-and now- like last October-I try to help out how I can- attempt to be of use. On Sundays-back in '82-
I'd waken with the chickadees-their chorus- snip the strapping on an outsized bale of papers-— get them loaded for my morning route. My father
never lay in late. Unshaven-with a picnic mug
of Folgers-he'd sit and thumb the funnies-pull his boots on in the entry when I ambled into view.
Together-in our solitudes-we'd throw the last few bundles in the hatchback-cruise the boulevards
and crescents as if looking for a runaway-the old man
slowing down for me to bring the world the news.

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jun 21

Father's Day Urtext

ROBERT HAYDEN

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble· Jun 20

Wendy Cope for the win

Poem Composed in Santa Barbara

The poets talk. They talk a lot.
They talk of T. S. Eliot.
One is anti. One is pro.
How hard they think! How much they know!
They're happy. A cicada sings.
We women talk of other things.