Poetry by Keith Ratzlaff

Group Portrait with Ukuleles

Once I was a boy
in a classroom
of boys learning to play

the ukulele. In the end,
even the stumpfingered
learned three chords:

G, C, D7. Our big felt picks,
our whiny
little strings. We were part

of the American Folksong
Revival
in spite of ourselves,

in spite of our penises
and voices
rising and falling like elevators.

Imagine us, our 25 faces
still forming,
heads slightly out of round,

singing, "I Gave My Love
A Cherry,"
or "Big Rock Candy Mountain."

There was the recital
we never gave
because, to tell the truth,

we weren't very good.
One boy is dead
now, three are welders,

two joined the Navy, one
sells used cars,
half a dozen are farmers,

one has been convicted
of exporting
Nazi literature to Germany.

I don't remember any of us
as mortal
or talented or cruel.

All we ever learned was that
chord progression,
knowable and sequential --

beautiful as gears shifting --
something useful
and at the bottom of all

the music we imagined we
could care about.
We knew who Mozart was

but there wasn't any Mozart
for the ukulele.
That would have wrong

and we knew it -- some of us.
Or none
of us. Either way.

(Click here for an interpretation of this poem by Ben Jacobs and Ben Noll.)
(Click here for an imitation of this poem by Ben Noll.)


Portrait of her Mother as the 19th Century
She's holding a rabbit,
wearing a flowered dress
that melts into a background of flowers.
I mean, a woman wears a dress
and lies on a bed sheet
printed with flowers
so busy and Victorian
we almost can't see how tight
she's holding the rabbit--
who looks at us over his shoulder,
ears spread in a a little V
at her neck like a collar,
like birds going somewhere.

The dress is printed zinnias,
a 1970's pattern meant to fool us
into thinking it's not an idea
left over from the 19th Century,
like flowered wallpaper,
like the language of flowers--
china rose for beauty,
chrysanthemum for truth,
zinnia the old maid flower--
like photography,
like the working class
and the working class portrait,
like the idea that art can save your life.

She's 10, the daughter I mean,
in Guatemala. Someone's given
her a camera to save her life.
She's sure this is the best photograph
she's ever taken--the illusion
of floating above her mother
like an airship, cutting her
off at the knees, off at the forehead
the rabbit's black fur
echoing her mother's storm of hair,
the animal small, her mother's hands
large and muscular like the hands
Leonardo and Picasso gave women.
But she can't know that,
about the hands and Leonardo,
or that next year this photograph
will make the Times and make her famous.
She's 10, she doesn't know anything
about art, or love, or her mother--
a woman who would never pose like this
for anyone else, who is holding a rabbit
over her heart to kep it from running away.
Her heart, I mean, the rabbit.



Poems posted with permission from the author.


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