random_ai_poems.txt

After Making Love You Weep
Anne Sexton

After making love you weep a little.
Being full of water, you thought,
would keep you from burning.
But all night long you dreamed
of fiery landscapes in which
a palm tree with one green leaf
rises like a bride
and a cake of ice melts in your hand.


===============


A Curriculum Vitae
Richard Brautigan

I wear reading glasses, and in the winter I have to wear an overcoat.
I could have been Pope, but I would not eat the right food.
I would drink more wine, perhaps, and I would not have so many people dying because of me.
A lot of women are glad that I was not Pope.
My hobby is not collecting knives.
My hobby is watching my breath as it comes out of my nose in the winter.
My hobby is my work.
We are all here to say something about the enormous riches of creation.
If I ran for a political office, I would ask for a high office, perhaps the office of Treasurer.
When they would ask me what kind of Treasurer I wanted to be, I would say a Cheerful Treasurer, a Warm Treasurer, and a Crazy Treasurer.
A lot of men and women have died for life.
I have never asked to be placed before anything nor asked to be placed after anything.
I would wish to be placed near the sound of laughter and waves crashing on the shore.
My secret weapon is that I believe you can win the respect of others by not being mean.
I know that everything is connected with everything else.
If it were otherwise, it would be too sad.
I think there is a place where we can be together.
If you stand in one place long enough and listen very carefully, you can hear the grass grow.


===============


Lion and Bambi
Marilyn Hacker

But then there’s the lion
who strolls up to the
little deer and licks his
paws with her tongue,
picks him up gently in
her mouth, carries him
to the ridge of leaves
she has made their
bed, and lays him down,
and licks his forehead,
and nips his neck with
her tongue, just enough
to bruise the skin and leave
small droplets of her spittle,
each a bead of adoration.


===============


Sleeping in the Forest
Ted Hughes

I think it would be going too far to say 
that they were going to Heaven, but the threat
of Hell was for the moment in abeyance
and they had the run of that wild stretch of foreshore
that we all know so well: dead seagulls, plastic-corks,
empties, but who’s complaining? A fine day.
Sand, sea-grape and cold sunshine. So they’re dragging
a gutted piano along the strip of reddish sand
that edges the marshy patch, though how they got it there
I can’t imagine. Also a supermarket trolley,
one with an infant seat that might just be viable
still, and a kitchen table with iron legs, and some broken
chairs (how did they get those there?)—they’re setting
up house on a hummock of grass above the shore
with its back to a scraggy palm-grove that they say
they are going to plant with pines. They climb
all over the piano, and blow through the ripped-out
keyboards, and start testing the pedals. Then they start
a long wrangle about whose trolley it is
and whether to dismantle it or not. Then someone starts
singing and the others join in the same song
(which I’ve heard before somewhere) and they kick
the pile of furniture into a heap for a bonfire.


===============


From True Confessions
Al Purdy

I was forty when I learned the true meaning
of poetry. I was stricken. It was a poet
who taught me the truth: a Canadian poet
with three strokes, his feet and hands useless
like sandbags. Speechlessness descended
like a hush over his life. After a stroke
is when the life is duller, blander, and smaller,
he said in his strange pidgin Canadian.
Where do I go, he was asking, when I enter
and my feet will not walk out of the language?
What form can I take? He tried to explain,
the sounds coming out first in a whistle
and then giving way to love and loss
in the poetry of pure laughter.
I couldn’t breathe. Yes, he said, poetry
is so beautiful. The best, most beautiful.
The most beautiful poem can end only in death.


===============


from “The Layers”
Stanley Kunitz

Touch me,  my bewildered beauty.
  Bend to me, my lovely enemy.
Our hearts are battling, my stricken angel,
  My grief, my grief.
I will never know the light
That circles over these gentle hills
  While underneath a smoldering demon rages,
Vengeful as a blazing funeral pyre,
  The way through my bewildered self to you.
I swear no cruelty and yet I dwell
In a burning house, where the dumb servants watch
  And feed me to myself.  The air is heavy
With the breathing of innocents
  Bewitched, lost, bewildered, as I am.

Death’s mask is his love for us.
  Our tears are worn by Death as a trophy.
He ripens with the famine, thrills in the plague,
  And stalks us here in the city,
  His home.  God is his servant.
Only Hell permits him to smile.
  I know him and his service well.

Touch me, O Death, and try your skill.
  I bring you a sacred thirst.
In your service I am graced,
  Because your great love allows me no rest.

You, Death, have the last word: “Love.”

---
"which opened and rolled up to heaven,”

Anne Finch

Far from this place a nymph I found,
  When April last we’d no more snow.
Deep in a dell I shew’d her, love,
  Where flowers perfum’d all the grove.
  And as the sun began to move
I found our bed upon the moss,
  Which opened and rolled up to heaven.

  There by the streams the water flows
  I found my love her head reclin’d,
  Love open’d then my heart’s pretence
  And with the joys of angels fill’d
  Our ravish’d souls, when we’d begun
Those hours, which only lovers know,
  Which opened and roll’d up to heaven.

  Thither, thither, love, I soar
  And with thee to the altar go.
  Tell all I feel, that wond’rous char
  When both are in our beds a star,
  Which opens and rolld up to heaven.

-   You’re dancing
===============


Amsterdam
Christian Wiman

The body is dark but alive. Alive is easy;
it must merely continue, and, at times,
sleep a little. To be dark is something else.
The mind can call out to its object, It is light,
and the body, dark, can answer, You are right.
What I mean is, Go on. O fogbound brain,
Blest man of chimera, but still man, go on.
The land is high, but what is higher, the sky
or being there in the firmament of clouds?

---

from Bishop’s  “Anaphora”
Elizabeth Bishop

O love, O celibate.

No one will ever understand
the subtlety of your sentences,
the logic of your incoherence,
how confused, how rich,
how unhappy and how happy
you’ve been.

Now you have made your exit:
and I am left with your cravat,
shoelaces, tweed suit and moleskin vest,
your shirts and braces and the brand-new
coat with the velvet collar,
ready for the flood of gifts and advice
you never got.

No one will understand.
I will do my best.
I won’t skip anything, or stint,
although it may be no one
cares about and no one will see
what I write.

All can see, each of us,
that there’s a tree, a street, a leaf,
a car, a hand, a green bough, an opened door,
but how can we trap
the moments that are bare?

The immortal fish play on and on
as if death were a frolic
or a holiday, and only stones were cold.
They drift about like riddles
under the eyes of the ancient deeps
as if they knew that time is not a line
but an undying presence,
a crowd of waves, a billion
little incidents
taking place.

----

Empty Vessel
Roger McGough

Where is he now

This man with a light in his head

Famous for throwing himself out of bed

With a thump

Fingers first

On the midnight mat?

What happened to all

Those larky mornings?
===============


The River
George Mackay Brown

I am walking on the banks of the River Almond
and it is a Scottish river.
I am walking by the Scottish sea
and it is the same sea in which Ulysses sailed
and it is many generations away
when the painted canoes of the Indians
were hung upon these same green walls of rock.

The riverbed is white and grained with quartz.
There is no tide; the limpet shells are empty
and the seaweed lies like shadows
on the sea-cliffs and the cut stone.
A seal comes to land on a rock,
and the hard pebbles on the shore
are crunching under my feet.

I am walking between the fields,
taking my way to the headland of Foula
where the birds gather and sing all summer.
I am walking to the headland of Foula,
and it is an island in the edge of winter
where the fields are full of snow.
It is an island where the sea sings and runs
all year long and the sea is being poured upon the land.

Every day the sun returns again
and the oil lamps are dying out
and the night is thickening with birds.
But what is the light of midnight
compared with the light of the setting sun?
It is only a dream.
Only the stranger dreams: the islanders sleep.

The burn stains the white grass at the peat stack.
Somebody is walking with me
and the hillside is full of people,
every one of whom I know.
I have only to turn my head
to make sure they are still there.

I can see a castle at a bend of the river.
Its shadow is long upon the grass.
The river becomes the track of the sky.
The track of the river is itself
the sky under which we are walking:
walking as we walk in our dreams,
suddenly illuminated.


===============


What the Right Hand Was Doing
Dorothy Parker

He said, “What the Right Hand was doing,
Oh, my God, think of the Left but don’t, 
That’s a vision of terror for me.

Yet my neighbor from Number Three,
(Who had to the neck at my keyhole been peering) 
Says that there is nothing that’s canine

In that act, after all, but that he,
For this pity he gives the Devil thanks,
Frequently does the same thing with his

Innocent, untrained right hand, though he
Would prefer to have both employed.
Well, that may be, but what of the Divine? 
That man’s no theologian, is he?”

I said, “No, that he is not, for he’s
A market researcher and lives next door.” 
He mused, “What the Right Hand was doing.

Mm-hm. The Left’s treachery to abhor—
Ah, that’s a long-worn, well-trodden track
That the world has known what the right hand’s about. 
But what’s the dear Left been thinking of?”

A Thorn in the Flesh
Jack Gilbert

First there is the right hand
and then the left hand,
and they are two completely separate things.
They are joined by one body and that is you.

You move the right hand and then
the left hand,
and then some part of you,
the body or the mind,

reads their sentence.
And then there are the separate rooms of your life,
and the things that have happened to you.

These rooms are separate one from another
and from yourself,
and each action occupies its own room.

So when it happens
it has not happened before
and it never happens again.

There is that great vacant space
between the event and its memory,
as much vastness between any two moments

as between a planet and a flower.
There are your attachments,

and there is your need,
your left hand and your right hand,

and these attachments and this need
become, like a storm,

separate from you,
and they hold you against yourself,

when you want
===============


You think
Jimmy Santiago Baca

You think we are doomed.
I don't know. The dream comes and I
instruct my other self, my silent self
to never speak a word. He listens,
but most of the times talks back
and makes me worried. He says,
I do not want to make it.
I am talking about the future
we shall witness,
you know, I talk about the woman
who is holding her children
while the soldiers split her
in two from head to knees,
and the blood gushing out
in perfect waterfalls of red,
dark brown.
You see, the child screams
and their mother
is split in two like a guava.
A memory gushes out
from the mouth of the child.
Our future men
don't live long
maybe they are dead
by the age of fourteen,
or sixteen
they have been in wars,
lived without health,
like the caveman's existence.
They live half their lifetimes
in the utter darkness.
They do not have
street lights and video games
like us, you see, it's true,
our time is now. This here
is the best time we'll ever have.
That's why I instruct my silent self
to not complain about our time
or take it for granted.


===============


Change Song
Tess Gallagher

She wakes in the night into a dark of dreams. 
She has a dream: She finds her face in a mirror, her right eye wide open,
left eye closed as if asleep. She can see from the open eye
the streetlamp at the end of the alley. She wants to leave the house,
climb down the broken trellis, go out the alley to the street
to look up in the light at her face. She is naked. She is in a pair
of yellow boots with green knees, shoes meant for mowing,
a man’s boots. In the glass, she sees her bare breasts, shaved armpits. 
She knows in the light she would see the wrong lips, green bole,
I tree carved on her belly. She opens her mouth: “Girl from the highlands,
there is no dance song for this.” Then the dream she couldn’t find
all day unfolds again. Not a dead bird, not a seeding sunflower,
no. Flowers: gunpowder roses. Homingbirds, tiny lamps in their beaks, 
with cruets and goblets made of ice, all so fragile they melt
as she puts them one by one in water. She goes outside.
The ground where nothing is supposed to grow is covered with white flowers
like snow. She thinks the blue petals in the grass must be lupine,
or is it death camas? She is blind without the yard light. Blue flowers, white
flowers, she can’t tell if they’re flowers or frost. As she stands there
the willow tree begins to break into minute leaves, and then into flame.
She must pull up her roots, take hold, lift herself skyward.
It’s so cold, still snowing, though it’s spring, the season for lilies.
They are waiting for her to open the earth with her eyes.
She can’t die in her boots. It’s unbearable to be buried in a man’s shoes.


===============


So You Say
Elizabeth Bishop

So you say there is no argument?
Then I’ll give you one. 
Here it is. 
We haven’t any words to talk with
or write with, 
except a few, that is. 
It isn’t man who says
what this is and what that is
and so on and so on. 
And I can see how 
that would be, how it would have to be.

So, all right, how does it feel
then? 
How does it feel to be 
made out of inorganic stuff
held together by organic 
cohesions? 
Let me put it another way.
What hurts so much? 
We have invented a God who does not laugh. 
Who does not boast or weep,
who loves us, 
who is with us here, 
who has no use for power 
and beauty
that someone else might die for
in a war.

You don’t like this God? 
No, I didn’t think so. 
I don’t much like Him either. 
I want a God with guts,
gaiety, and charisma. 
But He is what we have,
if we need Him. 
If anyone needs Him.


===============


Love in America
Charles Simic

There’s a plastic bird above a movie theater
By Times Square with an electric billboard
Above it saying Go Girl Soft Drink. 
When you get tired of shady characters,
Madison Avenue, and the used bookstores
You can always get a big mug of ice cream,
Go inside and watch Marilyn Monroe
Dance with the geraniums in the window.
I know a gloomy bar on First Avenue
Where all the strippers look like Boris Yeltsin.
Those frightening skinheads on the corners
In stilettos and fishnet stockings,
With the sun going down, it looks like a zoo.
There are writers who’ve never been published
Reading something aloud to each other.
A man in a blue uniform stands on a ladder
And holds a stone Buddha in his arms.
He asks for nothing.  He knows what is needed
And without hope he stands in the middle
Of the human river with a bunch of flowers
In the crook of his arm, no longer young,
Listening to the bargains and the blues,
The squeaking of the wheels, the humming of fans,
And the dentist drilling someone’s teeth
In a cellar down the street, and day and night
The electric buzz, a moon in a cloudy sky,
Sirens, and a transistor radio singing
“You are so beautiful,” “Goodbye, Norma Jean,”
“This is for the young in heart,” while next door
In a library two old men are playing chess.


===============


The Death of Mister Sullivan
Sylvia Plath

They called it suicide, 
And then by construe 
Blood on the stucco

Won’t come out, so 
Liviturque Livius
Erudition

And discussed it 
Until the mountain wind
Came shoveled through,

The beat of water 
And the loss of heat, 
And airy cold

We shivered in 
Under our load
Of scarves and suits.

How curious, you 
Were interested more
In the element

Of fire at work 
In him than brute
Physiology

Gratuitous acts 
Of anger and love 
Or a sensible

Draught of air 
Striding the throat, 
Or kettle-whine.


===============


The Drunk in the Furnace
Richard Kenney

The factory gates are locked,
unlike the human head, which stands open.
But the Sun, too, will be closed
and every hair accounted for.

Look at the wisps of snow,
as if black tendrils,
searing the November sky—

your approach to death is a damp kiss,
your loving lunge, pitifully wild,
snapped by the lintel of the grave.

Let the hum along the axis
of your desire, the anxious pant,
in the course of your wanderings

cease, and the furnace—the oven,
the incinerator—keep its gob
shut. The planet is quiet. It is late

in the year, the holidays.
You’ve got your December presents:
in the broken parking lot,

a small heap of snow, yellow
as the silver caps of trees,
is dissipating like a distress signal.


===============


The Narrow Path
Paul Celan

A fine rain. And when they came to the place, to their place,
I sensed how their steep path rose through the luxuriance.
From long ago he knew and loved each stone.

I entered unbidden the loneliness of their garden; 
in parting I saw the narrow path ascend
in switchbacks hewn from rock under the dense greenery.

On the heights, artfully concealed, stood the house.
And I pictured him in it, the long day through,
watching his slow fire and the boiling water.

The neighboring slope was a vastness of pine trees.
Silent under the noonday storm and evening-red thunder.
Only at times the moorcock’s cry.


===============


Elegy
James Schuyler

The first red leaves fall and with them
my mother, who was also my daughter.
The phone rings with a dead man’s voice
for someone I might never have loved
has died suddenly after a long fever.
Another friend never writes again.

And all the houses are sold, it seems
except the one I keep losing. Someone
calls the weather mild for November,
and I think how all the men I’ve known,
even the best, were wrong about so much.

This evening I sat at my window
in a room of winter light. The bare bough
swung back and forth, a blackbird sang
in the leafless maple. Far below
the canal was bright as a newly-washed knife.

In a while my daughter came through the door
with the good news. The wars were over,
the dead men were coming home.
We were young. We didn’t need hope


===============


Two Variations on the Same Poem
James Tate

I never meant to pick up this rock
But here it is in my hands again.
My wife found it in the parking lot
when she slipped and fell back on the ground.
She didn’t want to hobble home so she just stayed there.

The curious thing about the rock is how its weight
is the same all around. It’s the same weight
when I hold it in my hand as when it’s lying on my chest
at night. There are two places it wants to go,
but it chooses my chest. I wonder why?

This morning I drove down to the lake.
There were no birds left. A huge water-bird
came out of the fog but I swear it wasn’t a swan
or a heron or a goose. It sang me one of its songs,
and I swear I didn’t recognize it.

Old man, old man, it said.
Oh, it was just a heron after all.
All my life I have tried not to be a liar
and yet, and yet. I have never lied
except out of necessity. I have lied
every day. I have lied in my sleep.
I would have lied when I was dead
except that I died suddenly in my sleep.

I wanted to be known as an honest man
and I wanted also to be known as a good liar.
I wanted to write poems with both of these ingredients,
but as I look back on it, I don’t see how I could have done it.
I wanted to keep them separate. The sky was never
blue enough for me and I often asked for more time.

At the same time, I have always had enough.
I lie and do not lie. But everything I say is true.
I could never get myself to say that what is true
is just one thing and what is not true is just something else.
As a matter of fact, I never did get anything right.

The great question of our time was this:
How long could this stand-off continue between
the liars and the truth-tellers before there was bloodshed?
The answer depended on how these two sides were defined
and how things finally came out was hard to say.

I turned my radio on to a good
===============


Song of the Lion
Carl Sandburg

I

When I am the fog, the rain,
I wrap the tender
grass around the wheel
of the wind
and hear the spokes moan.

When I am the grass, the wheel,
I turn the earth,
wheeling on my stone
spines, and twist
my roots into the earth.

When I am the earth, the stone,
under the grass, the rain,
the fog, I turn with the light,
waiting, trembling,
changing, and changing again.

And when I am light
I am the man
who sings at evening
under the blue sky
and the head of gold.

II

The wing of the sunflower
where it is dark,
the doves are asleep.
The other wings of gold
are cupped and rising
from the sweet fire.

I am the song
that men who know me
sing and laugh and run
when they lift my heart,
my heart like a fire,
before the sun.

The throat of the doves,
the black doves,
glowing with greenish
gold, the heart of the sunflower,
shining, are my song.

III

The goat goes up the hill
with all his black
belly dragging the dust,
a blue thread in his beard,
green words in his eyes.

He curls a ring
of smoke and milk
around the world.
He climbs the hill,

pulling the dirt
on his belly, and
knocks four times
his head on the moon.
His hoofs are trees.

The moon drives the goat
down the wind.
The blue thread
pulls the goat’s beard

against the moon.
His hoofs are stars
that beat and walk
down the moon’s back.
His eyes are moon-seeds.

IV

The wind comes
up from the bed
of the sea, running
over the broken
cobblestones
of the dead cities.

He comes over
the purple and gray
mountains, the wind,
running into my voice.

I am the one
who follows the wind
and walks through
my voice with him.

The sea is green
as lemon trees
when the wind
===============


Postcard from Germany
Jane Hirshfield

Clear-heeled children are jumping again through the minefield that once was their nation.
Dry grasses, pruned by now to the shortest possible length, thrust themselves into the soil:
grim hope of more than winter. Farmhouses stand open, to the light and wind and rain.
Here was once the tensest heart of one man’s murdering.

If there were wise animals, there would be a special one for standing now in these rooms
there would be a great-pawed bear who could stand up by memory and smoke in these high-ceilinged rooms
and smell among the scant furnishings the dire reek of human hope and human waiting.

But no animal is that wise, nothing that must eat and breathe has that kind of mind.
The German earth breathes in and out, and in and out go we, touching, tasting, hearing.
The mind’s landscape is harrowed, as a field’s, and grows again in an even stranger fashion.


===============


Independence Day
Adrienne Rich

(Yom ha-Zikaron, Israel)

I am your span, your bridge.
No less your mirror, no
less the cold flame of your selves,
precariously rooted in the rock.

My father built this house with me,
wrestled with pines for space:
treefalls crashing towards
his wife and daughters down
in the green chute of the canyon.

I lay in your birthbeds
and rocked you when you cried,
stilled you by singing in a song-sleep.

I took my shoes off at the door of the old house
and crossed it barefoot each time,
in cool black and white tiles
and the old man in the bed, half-blind,
his thin mouth perpetually downcast.

Wife and unmarried daughters,
silent wives and loose tongues,
my father’s mother and her white
skirts blowing over the hill:
why are they all still there in me,
and I can still be blown off my feet
by the wind of your fragrant anger?

Would you tell me what happened?
I have no right to ask you.

I read you the laws of the forests,
the laws of the fields and orchards.
I told you that like water, politics seeks
always and only its own level,
its own deep places. I taught you
to feel for the rock under water
because there was no other for us.

Could I ever really tell you,
living as we did, that courage
was not the absence of fear,
or that politics was not simply power?

Now what comes to me from you,
what arrows move me to speak,
and drive me out to the shore
to set up my scarecrow wisdom—

was it still one of the ten plagues
to you, I who loved you?
that I was never afraid to write
“I was wrong, I was wrong...”

But the flood is in the desert
too, after the long drought.
And the green hill is in the distance
on the fourth of July, no less.

A man too has his sorrow.
And the music you turn your radio dial by:
is that enough of the fifth of March?

Nothing equals our name.
Nothing equals our love.
===============


Hard Rain
Robert Francis

I am a psalm of dark trees.
The ground was hard.
Day came down to the hoot of owls.
The air was icy. The weather of November.
The time of long shadows was mine.
Today was for twigs. 
Morning 
became sunset at noon.
The wind was black. 
In the whole of it, I
could feel only the moment when God said
It is good,
and in his best time
It was so.


===============


Ode to John Keats
Billy Collins

He knew all about it. Keats did.
The body betraying, the Soul
troubled. Hardly twenty-five, he was an old man,
tired, dying. I’m not talking
about the big things which you and I
have come to calling our lives, I’m talking
about poetry, that “magnificent nothings,”
to paraphrase Dickinson. He had that
recipe down. In this age of glut
and repetition, when the CD
boasts seventy-seven  extra tracks
and the movie star complains
she must live in twenty different
houses at the same time, it is nice
to get a glimpse of a writer
whose wife had to throw the cat out
of the room because of the stench
of ink, not prestige, who had to
place her hand over his mouth to stop
the coughing. Keats is the first
postmodern poet. For most of us,
our poems are the box scores
of our feelings, the yellowing record
of a game we barely remember.
We are blindsided by life’s losses
in season. He knew all about it. 
He saw a leaf once and knew
at that moment he would have to die,
that his time was up.
It’s a credit to his genius
that he gets better with time. 
Most poets today could use
a little more closure. Like those
detective novels, they need an ending.
It’s not bad enough that we live on
the last edge of a continent. We must
need to end each affair with a poem.
But think what he could have written
if he had lived! If he had
been given another three decades,
or even three months, for that matter.
Think of those lost poems he might have
written in the evening once the coughing
subsided. There you are, lying
in the grass, on your back. 
Overhead, a jet writing a poem
in vapor across the sky. “I carry 
his heart with me,” she said. For most
of us, to go on living is a sort of failure,
but the hundred or so completed poems
are only a minuscule portion of
what might have been. In a later poem
he will say that he can never have
===============


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===============


Valentine for Ernest Mann
Jean Valentine

Sitting up late at night
we sing like the sleepless
dark from sleeping.
The pounding at my window
is from your sleepless
heart. Come in, I say, come in.

Everything is open.
Enter. If it’s sleep you want
I could be your place
to sleep in. If it’s talking
we’ll talk all night.

Is this love, you’ll ask
from a dark body of water.
We swim together
keeping our balance.
All day I move carefully,
measuring my steps

for my own balance.
No one else is doing this.
All these nights I wait
for your hand knocking
in the dark, your childish
face, sleepy, looking

out of its skin at me.
What about the boat
we said we would take
on that day we were talking,
what about the mountains

they said you’d go to,
if I lay down to sleep
with you for awhile
beside me, what about
our mountain then,

our boat? This is love,
this is love, this.
The heart beats at my window
all night. How beautiful
he sleeps, his hands full

of flowers. His face open
like the flowers.
It is a lonely love
I have for him.
I can get up and touch

his hair as he sleeps
at my window all night.
The moon asks us to come
up close in its eye.
Say your name, I say,

over and over
so I can hear you breathing,
your name, your name,
say it out loud, I say,
let the moon hear.


===============


The Theory
Gregory Orr

We are the verbs of light and dark, we say,
green and yellow, red and purple, breaking
and gathering the tables and chairs, the stars, 
and we are saying this while we feel the feelers
of the brains; and when we wonder
if we are a mere configuration of nothingness, 
or if the hologram, though finite, 
encloses something that could be infinite, 
like the cell and the whale, like the hidden
that reveals—no promise—only itself—
in the split vision of the sea anemone, 
a kind of glory, a free and apart-from-them 
standing forever, every moment, in the essential.

To Elizabeth, Who Married Richard II
Philip Larkin

How long does it take to change? When was love 
grown this stale, this thin, these shades of anger?
The words we said did not admit of brakes,
and all the stamps of all the post offices
do not stick stamps on spoiled bad debts for life.
How long does it take to change? When did you know
it would be this unlike your novels, where the man
keeps calling, but keeps on going? They are all
the happy marriages. How did it come about
that in my life alone there is no one,
no one to come about? The scrubbed empty stage
yawns, and its gaping curtains settle. I hear
an usher’s footsteps in the empty stalls.

Neruda
Harold Pinter

He himself picked up the stone.
    He himself threw it. He himself was looking.
    He himself grew tired of looking. He himself put down the stone.
    He himself stopped throwing.
He himself stayed at the window. He himself touched the child’s head.
He himself was there. He himself saw it all.

He himself. He himself. He himself.

They did this to him. He did not know it.
He did not want it. He did not want it. He did not want it.
He did not want it.

They did it to him. He did not know.

That is my vision of what happened.

(...)

I shall look upon him all my life,
walking there before the lights, and the lights
by
===============


The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws
Jack Gilbert

The good of my life has been the love of a good woman.
All the sons of the survivors stand up and applaud.
(Why should we have been any different from our fathers?)
Outside the window, over the cherry orchard,
the late afternoon winds from the north with the snow.
It is expected to be ten below tonight.
There will be problems with the water pipes.
Upstairs in bed, my love is reading the paper.
The most momentous news of our times
is always on the sports pages. My sons are at their computer.
My wife turns the pages slowly, and then starts again.

I am spending too much time alone.

Not enough love. Too many poems.

But all of that will pass soon, when I am with her again.

I walk toward my bed remembering her body in July.


===============


Madness
Robert Hass

It was terrifying to arrive at the wrong place,
knowing it was wrong, knowing everything was wrong,
because the wreck of the past
has so much momentum, lies so heavy with grief,
that for a long time
and maybe always
it pulls you through
the false front of morning.

But first you must go through a windfall of pure going,
disordered, water clear and unstemmed,
and it will cover the highway
in a wash of dogwood petals,
a wash of magenta and pink,
and you will go through it as your mother’s car
went through it going somewhere
with the four of you in it,
each one her child,
making a great hiss of wind.

Today we take it differently:
she is thirty-four,
and the booming early May wind
has opened a door she did not know was closed.
She is naked in the whirling of it,
and there’s no thing she can do now to break
the force of this one, to be
responsible for it or accountable.
When it passes, she’s crouched in a corner of the open meadow,
shaken, broken, alive, and certainly changed.


===============


For Natalie
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I cannot say what love is
because I have lived without it
just as one may live without a leg
or a lung
but it is like any other scar
over which the years pass
and we see only traces
of what we have survived.
If I should kiss your knees
I should find myself moved
to some act of violence.
It is best you should go
lest we disturb
the hollow rooms of our lives.


===============


Stems
Gary Snyder

Cherries blossom, filling the world with a sense of Spring,
Tulips are up, beautifully white in the fading weather.
Thrushes and larks pour out their songs, making my heart happy—
Bright petals shaking off in the wind like fireworks.
The green bud breaks out, and fragrant vines wrap around trellises,
Trees lift up their branches, dusted with flowering blossoms.
Branches bowing under snow, once the snow goes, raising them up,
Birds perching on, celebrating the pleasure of the season.
Days lengthen out; a floating feeling begins to be here.
Ice breaks up with a roar, suddenly the river is moving.
Flowers begin to drip in the hedges and along the banks—
Plum and pear blossoms, beautiful white magnolias.
All the beauty of Summer is in the mellowing warmth,
Night brings frogs in the river, while birds sing through the morning.
Insects, beetles and worms, love the new warmth and break from their
cocoons,
Cicadas start singing, first in May and then all summer.
The curve of my heart goes forth to the curved bud opening—
The filament reaching out, the tender leaves and the stem,
Beauty is in the flowing and in the firmness, life moves
out into the open,
The green world is born out of that which will die and be born again.
When the wild geese fly, O the exaltation! the bent branch is
weightless.
The field of reeds is bending and flowing, and the herons find food.
Evening is bright and smiling, the last light comes slanting low
To the hillside, shining on a village, and on the one who goes walking
Alone, who goes by the village in the evening. Who loves this life.


===============


To George Sand
Robinson Jeffers

“Your eyes are like arrows of gold in my heart.”
—Catalonian Ballad

The salt streams from my eyes, my heart
is in splinters in my breast,
a beast without burrows.
Stone house,
white stone cyclopean walls
keep out the living: but the dead are whole,
their transmuted bones are not of stone.
Do not your eyes pour rivers,
how does the rose-garden fare?
What is a dirge, my love, in a great wind,
an iris of light by the fountain?
I cry you by many names,
a dirge is the very torrent of our blood.
We said: “This day a thousand years
shall not see us forget each other.”
Sweet grief for this,
for a chief joy being done with
when our bones are bodiless,
the unbegotten generation done with.

Speak of grief, my lover, my friend,
my lady of silence, speak of
the grief of men, the grief of a woman,
spoken on the threshold of our house
when you looked upon me, first uttering grief:
Speak of the mortal burden that I took
upon my back with the joy of that woman,
to be the offering to fate and time,
the sacrifice to necessity:
to stoop to bear is a great courage
when nothing will be gained, even the bearing.
I am the cupbearer of circumstance
to be the white breath of sweetness, being bitter.
I have borne what I have borne
in pride and joy and agony and triumph:
I have loved beyond all reason, not with reason.
The word that was the bond I broke
in my birthtime, to build myself a house
of disunion. For I am not the man
who is gladly man
or the man who is wholly sad.
I am the union of both
that makes the third thing.
I was the axe and the ringing stone.
But you, lady, you are the wave of the sea
breaking on the shore and the rock
and the rose. You are the victory:
You have conquered, but I am not conquered
in this battle of love. I gave
the most life can give: I died of love
and now in the death-in-life I live
I have only
===============


Piano
May Swenson

Dizzy shadows hide
In dim blue ivory
Tides of dreams in the pearl
Of a girl’s face
Hum my chords dark
Hum their dream
Ghostly unheard
Creeps into them
I play once on myself
Believe me when I am
Poet.


===============


To Ezra Pound
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

To the poet whose strangled words
perfume my ear
a place for the grasses of sleep
on the hill in Italy.

The whistle of a train in the rain.
The last chance for a seed in the brain.
A broken toilet with an audience of rats
and shards of mind and the hunter of time.

The ship goes out of the port of Alexandria
you gave it your love in Rome and never went back.
You were still wild then: you left to go on the barge
that brought you to London. For a long time, I kept
a story about you under my pillow: I was six.

---

Dear Ezra,

it’s never too late
for the playmates of time
to hear the bees humming
and the seeds in rhyme.

The harvest it’s coming, Ezra,
it’s time you came home.
It’s not quite coming to nothing.
Your back’s not quite broken.

You were your own age already
before you knew what birds really sang.
Like a young horse back in the cave,
back in the motherskins

You were galloping for the hatch,
the break, the opening in the dark,
and the rage for the right note
was finally worth all that it cost.

I never knew you, but this you know,
what you wrote made you matter to us.
And though you may be late,
still you must come home to us.

You must come home to what makes life possible,
old Ezra, and all your Canti.

Because in this landscape
you are growing in glory
like a boy’s pecker
on a statue in Rome.

A form forever
bursting its boundaries.

A proof that knowledge
is really one to live by.


===============


To the Gods of Earth and Heaven
Baudelaire

Je voudrais que, pour ma déité de chair et d'os,
Des torches brûlassent mes crânes sombres anémos,
Que les vents remuassent mes cendres d'ivrogne,
Ma mère, oui, qu'elle mourût dans un cri d'horreur.

Parmi les démons de l'horreur et du hasard,
Qui, rampant sur les sables, nous escortaient sournoisement,
Que de fois, me voyant las, sanglant et hagard,
Ils tordaient leurs bras maigres et soufflaient sur ma rage !

Oh ! qu'à défaut de tes kief et de tes fumées,
Mon cœur devînt de fer, mon esprit de diamant,
À mes lèvres opimes tu suspendrais des ammes,
Et je verrais mon ombre comme un géant noir.

La Pâleur et l'Horreur sur ses yeux charmants
Ouvriraient alors un abîme où je puisse tomber ;
Et que de larves affreuses et de crapauds immondes,
Et que de maux, hélas ! que de maux j'aurais peur d'y trouver.

Et toi, qui sur mon âme as la main puissante
Et qui remues, fantôme effrayant et serein,
Les manettes de fer de ma terrible machine,

Je te prie de renoncer à ton imprécation.
Oh ! plutôt que le front de mon Espérance s'enflamme
De fièvre, que dans sa bouche éclatante de blancheur
Les murmures de mort des baisers monstrueux glissent,
Et que sa face s'éteigne dans l'épouvante obscure,
Que le cancer noir vive dans ta poitrine, ô mère,
Que le vertigo tournoie autour de ton gésier,
Et que tu crèves enfin, chienne qui me donnas le jour !

Ah
===============


“Where I Live There Is No One”
Philip Larkin

When day was finally done, 
and every paper boy 
had been to get his papers done, 
and stopped for evening tea, 
and traffic lights were green 
and traffic lights were red, 
and everywhere to walk was tired 
but everywhere to sit was too,
and families arranged their supper, 
and unimproved mother scolded father, 
and while their songs were shrill,
their hearts were steadfast...

When, all the same, it was not done, 
and every lighted house 
was duller than the last lighted house, 
and all the lonely sounded lonelier, 
and empty lots were emptier, 
and the heavy cars went slower, 
and there was nothing to carry home 
but nothing,
and the last lighted clock was summer 
on a lighted chair,
and all around it hushed, 
and all within it stirred, 
and in a moment nothing was there, 
and all the bare feet in the house 
were turned to stone,
and bare forearms on the table 
were fixed as if in flame, 
and bare necks bent
as if to some verdict...

When the very last sound was empty 
and silence roared in the ears 
and it could not be over, 
and we had not said our good-byes.

And we could not escape, 
nor go outside the door, 
nor break the silence:
it was done.

And all we could do was take our life 
as it was left us,
and still be as before:
this is what we had to bear.


===============


Ghost Lights
Mark Doty

First, the ghost lights of these rooms:
watermarks of our bodies pressed like memory
on cushions, sheets, the moonlight
from the window on the painted wall
staining the hallway pale.
And then the lights of us walking out
to the old pier with white floats,
the cat or the dog following: there are
boards missing, with the black water below.
The lights of safety flash on for a moment
before we step out onto the phantom boards,
the yellow bulbs
at the end of the pier receding
as the swell rises, falls.

Each person makes his own account
of what it was he loved, the depths
visible below the waterline, the cat,
the dog, the lamps burning and burning.
Or of what he was afraid, or what came forth
out of him, craving light,
what went wrong, the wounds
he could not close, the lucky beast
surging to shore while the boards still hold
in spite of rot, the water patiently
breaching the barrier it has made, the hunger
we mistake for love,
mistake for faith, mistakes not to be made
anymore. We need each other to step
out into the light again,
our limbs quickening
in the bright sea-wash, the heat
of our bodies, the flash
of the beacon from the lighthouse
pulsing out to find the fallen
and the lost: each of us
for whom another’s body is a map,
a name.

----

The more I think about Death, 
The more I think about Writing. And the more I think about Writing, 
The more I think about Desire. And the more I think about Desire, 
The more I think about Life.

"I Like This Poem Because... part 2"
from AWP

Almost every night 
Before I go to sleep, I make sure
That the things that I like, 
In each of the four corners of the room,
Are undisturbed.
Sometimes the surface of the desk is 
Too high to reach my lips. Sometimes it's not.
---
Me, falling from the tailgate
Of my father's truck, 
An inch above the gravel,
And no harm done. 
Me, swimming under a
===============


And You as Well Must Die, Beloved Dust
Sappho

Time is flying, and,
you do not devour
the sweetness of your prime,
but waste it in meaningless pursuits.
It is from women,
I think, that the God of Death,
whom men both fear and try
to force their courage to sustain,

observes me. He has seen how long
it is since I have left
the palace for the meadows,
and bathed my body in the stream.
Now and again I lean
against a tall tree, sobbing softly,
drenched in dew—while
with the blessed Nymphs I study

making lovely garlands,
and when I leave them
I get enough to sate
my desires, but grief possesses my heart.

Source:
"Sappho: Poems and Fragments," translated by
Mary Barnard, A Penguin Classic, (Middlesex, England, 
Penguin Books, 1966).

Related:
"As I watched the Wind" and "It hurts so much" from
"Fire Songs"
originally from Live, 1987. 

Lyrics

As I watch the wind
Blow wild the trees
See you standing there
Doing the same

The sea's so heavy with time
Mist covers the face of the moon
Our bodies the waves
Our arms the weight of the tides

There's a fire burning deep in our eyes
We carry the flame through our skin
We melt like the snow in the sky
Your kiss is warm as the wind

As I watched the wind
Blow wild the trees
See you standing there
Doing the same

And there's a kind of time when the body knows more
Than the mind and I will believe
We carry the flame through our skin
Our kiss is warm as the wind

There's a fire burning deep in our eyes
We carry the flame through our skin
We melt like the snow in the sky
Your kiss is warm as the wind

And there's a kind of time when the body knows more
Than the mind and I will believe
We carry the flame through our skin
Our kiss is warm as the wind

And there's a kind of time when the body knows more
Than the mind and I will believe
We carry the flame through our skin

===============


Should Vehicles Be Rated
Maxine Kumin

Full of what if’s, this country beckons
wheelers and winders. Quaver
is now an adjective. Parents are split
and housewifely. How do we cope
with carets on the blackboard and leap
over she’s and sh’s?  Crayolas,
glue bottles, that white marshmallow stuff
to paste may well cause anguish. But why,
in vocation, with a hard K,
for what is said to be the Right Stuff
that rewards the goodiegoody and punishes
the others with a pig face from the O. P. U.
subdividing kids into categories
of noxious goop, muddy or smudgy.
Now they have access to instrument panels
and viewboxes, those rural
ones who inhaled quite enough fertilizer
to satisfy the pervasive grey-green
basis of life, come the autumn term.
We dosed out rainy evenings, bland music
assembling and dissembling Bach and Mozart,
days later scuttled the damaged parcels
that dropped by parachute into our nests.
The village sported a Wild West notion
of spreadeagled frontier structures where
folk imported the skill of the outreach
by phone into big city suburbs,
assumed skill of the jock on his bike
teaching kids the notion of gender
that didn’t interfere with themselves.


===============


Afternoon
James Schuyler

I am thinking, at last, to go out.
Late afternoon. Chill, but the sun still shines.
Soon it will disappear from this field, this path,
this street, these trees, my shade and my right hand.
It will never never reappear.
Down the stoop, already darker than on level ground
because of the little hill in front of the house,
I come to the sidewalk, the first fallen leaf.
The ground is bare now, so a long sweep of fallen leaves
hisses and crunches underfoot.
People pass like thoughts. For example,
I pass the man in the grey windbreaker,
walking the black dog. So down to the light.
And the light changes to green for me and my shadow.
I press the button. To my right, a long walk
for the homeless man who waits, facing the little park,
holding the leash and several plastic bags
of his belongings.
The homeless walk by here. The young and the old,
tall, short, crippled, deformed,
and the lovely whores, briefly walking their stroll.
Bikes with baskets full of leaves pass, making
their pleasant crunch. Three joggers each day.
At first, I thought them husband and two wives
or, to be fair, three sisters, but they are three men.
Sweaty, nice, and out for a trot in the park.
I press the button again. The light, this light,
has never turned green for me and my shadow.
Now the great clots of brick-built apartments,
apartment houses, are all lit up, dusk coming down.
I know you said you’d call tonight. Where are you?
Why haven’t you called?
What was I supposed to learn from that?
What did you think I might learn from that?
That my spirit is willing but my flesh is weak?
Weak enough.
That it won’t be easy, not by a long chalk?
Easy as dying.
The wind is chill now, but the walk has warmed me.
A car turns a corner: the drivers wave and salute.
The walk has warmed me, and the liquor store windows
are amber-lit with desire.
The traffic light changes from red to green to yellow

===============


The Hidden Singer
Amy Clampitt

When the door is locked at last against the loud
insistences of the world
we could not shut out, the singers come into their own,
visible only to each other, one by one, there
where the sources meet.
Who is the singer whose voice
carries so long? Who,
straining after that
intonation of joy in the double-noted diphthong
will fall short, not quite
catch it, try again
and yet again? And now, who can say why
this is a woman’s song, why
of all the pantheon of singers
this one is a woman?
Ours is that cult of theirs,
and none of us
has to be told that when the story
is over and the singers
go out
into the city, at once
lost in the shifting
crowd of passersby,
they will not be
the same.
For we have heard them
singing to each other
in that hidden
place.

----

Archangel of Mercy
Theodore Roethke

In battle after battle with the dragon of darkness,
Mighty angel of mercy, you come with your music,
hear your voice, the incorruptible confidence, the soundless sound,
the promise of gold for which the world longs.

Sometimes the face you show to the world is stern,
but under the mask, the radiance of the man you are,
this joy which comes shining like an empyreal flower
strong as the earth and the lilies of the field.

Can we remember, in childhood, a vision of heaven,
the sun more luminous than it had been,
a light that welcomed us and promised comfort,
peace of body and mind, beyond belief?

What is it that happens? To whom are we listening?
Angel of music, you come bearing your message:
our hope is incorruptible, we are the heirs
of a vision of gold for which the world yearns.


===============


To Philosophize and Love
William Blake

Two things define us and outshine,
To guide and animate our minds,
Beauty and virtue. Reason’s Queen,
Unhindered with her cheerful train,
Soft elegance and inward joy,
Whilst awed ambition flits away,
Or avarice, ne’er happy, hoards with care,
Mistaking wealth for thrift;
And pleasure, madly blind to worth,
Vaunts her baubles, never yet the prize
Of virtue, in calm dignity arrayed,
Rejoices to see them by her side,
With joy all purity and beauty led,
Asks not the tribute of a sigh:
Yes! these are things that make us noble,
And every language may avow
As much. — Thus I began to love thee,
Whilst thou unask’d wert nobly known
T’wards my heart by the innate power
Of virtuous deeds, which force us to admire;
And others, as they did thee, seem fair,
Virtue, unask’d, may enter there.


===============


When the Whip Came Down
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)

Somebody’s taken the butcher knives out of their sheaths. 
You read it every morning in the notice of stabbings: 
the razor. The stiletto. 
Mother, somebody’s child has lost a number of teeth, 
somebody’s somebody’s brother won’t answer the phone 
any more. 
Somebody’s head was split open. Somebody’s somebody’s somebody 
is laid out now, due to meet the good earth this afternoon. 
And today I thought I’d walk over to the Southside 
on the same day that they were having this sit-in over 
the high school; I had to see for myself what was going on. 
Now, I don’t have any thoughts about anything like that. 
This must be true: I can imagine nothing but this afternoon’s 
sunlight
That turns from a pale yellow, to a balmy silver, to a muted gold. 
I just walked over there, though. Just to see. I mean,
I remember once this buddy of mine had an apartment, 
and we used to hide, and just wait for the explosion of blue-black 
flashing lights. Then we’d get up and go into the next room 
to watch the violence we were glad to be absent from. 
And then, I don’t know—after a while, maybe a year or two, 
he lost his charm, and it just got real old. We didn’t sneak 
up to the window any more. 
And I always felt like, in a funny way, it was my fault. 
At least, I knew it wasn’t his. 
After all, I was the one who started it: going to the window 
to watch police brutality. But at first, when it was new, 
it was incredible. Maybe this is how people get religion 
or something: watching death down there on the pavement, 
in the gutter. You watch it carefully, and then you turn away 
and say, “If I were down there, that would be me.” So 
you read the papers every day to see who’s killing who, 
but one day, some woman
===============


Strophe
George Seferis

Let me caress you with a simple song.
Through the voice the flesh speaks secretly.
The tender heart is buried deep down.

What is hidden is visible:
your transparency carries it.
It is a spiritual earth, an earth

that will not produce its trees
-or what kind of tree do we know?-
wound through with string-like 
exuberance.

The slow-moving faces line up
to see this marvel. They are cruel
the ones who seem to know it

too late. The applause rings on.
What is happiness, we have to ask.
"Happiness is a spiritual sweet."

Happiness goes beyond all senses,
goes beyond the mind and, perforce,
has gone too far by going into song.

We do not know where we were,
how can we know where we go from here?

And the deep voice says: "Look. What
if you never find the exit?"


===============


you're sick now too
Jennifer Michael Hecht

I begin with nothing and then it strikes me
what I need
is sex, misfortune, broken teeth, and then
of course I need a flashlight
because it’s dark and someone
needles me with a rock and then,
since I’m also the one to put
a bandaid on the stinging cut
I fling myself at the rock in
impotent fury, I see
what I’m doing and feel, too,
my own flesh undone

Then finally all that other stuff
going on with the nation
is too much for me.
Someone needs to pay and
oh good I see it’s me.
And she comes again
so soft the way I’ve said,
patting my cheek and saying
I never have believed you

I don’t know why you say
you will never really leave
when you say this with your small
bony fingers jabbing
my tongue when you say it while
kissing and listening.
I believe you. And so I pay
the price. I eat the grass
and when it’s gone, I start again
like I always do
on nothing
and wait.


===============


Epitaph
Richard Hugo

We knew him well, then not at all
He spoke in low, slow tones; walked slow
Not always speaking, but breathing out
The quiet strength of a careless life.
Even his name was quiet, but often
We heard the weight of all he did not say.

Hear us now, walking along the rows
Of someone’s planted garden, walking slow
Thinking of everything, including us:
Our own ideas grow short and dense,
Dense and small as a red-winged blackbird’s tail.

--This poem is in memory of Richard Hugo.


===============


Rejoicing
Li-Young Lee

God lit His candles one by one.
I lifted my face to see.
What is light, if not the soul’s
opening,
a plea, or incantation
of praise.

And while I prayed
you offered to walk me home.
I am home. You turned
off the lamp. And we
feasted on
shadows.

And then we knelt
to feed our shamed bodies,
us two dirty-fingered,
fat-bellied men
kneeling, our poor legs
so tired,
our big bones
aching, our clothes
drenched
with salt and seed,
our mouths tasting
like spit.

And we blessed you,
your mysterious
way, praise-flung
and prayerful, tasting
of blood, our language
ending in a
chaste kiss on the cheek.

---

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---

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The book from which these poems are collected is now available.  You can get a copy at a reasonable price ($6.99, trade paperback) from the publisher,
Yellow Tablet.
Most of these poems have also been collected in the book Eating the Sun.
The latest collection of my poems is Here, Everything Is Beautiful.  It's a poetry / photography book I published in 2007.
Return to my homepage.
This page created by Chirag Mehta.
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This is my blog.
This page last updated on
Thursday, October 29, 2009.
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© Copyright 2010-2012, Stephen J. Hardesty, All Rights Reserved.
Most recent update:
October 29, 2009.  This website is a personal journal.
It is not in any way related to my professional life as a programmer.
I write poems, some stories, and sometimes some code.
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do
not represent my employer's view in any way.
I am fickle.  My ideas are not rigidly coherent.  I
just write things down and hope for the best.  You should too.
I wrote all of the code that makes this site work
===============


Day Before Everything Else
Mary Oliver

You told me once that among your earliest memories
you are falling, freely, for a long time, through bright
air,
and you smiled at the impossibility of it, or the impossibility
of smiling,
the tongue like wood on the roof of your mouth.

From the height of the oak tree you had seen it all.
The entire afternoon: fields, river, elms, birds; your small life;
the enormous and probably divine sadness of your life, and how
unaware you were, how completely unaware you were of its
meaning.

The oak tree was very large, and it was full of dark caves
and secret terrors; it was also, just then, the most desirable place
in the world.

The bright air comes toward you
and you fly into it; you become lighter than a feather.
The whole of creation falls through you as you fall through it.

You have no idea where you are falling, or why, and it doesn’t
matter, not at all.
You are free, you are so free.

You are tiny, in your blue dress, and full of wonder.
You are the day before everything else.


===============


Nostalgia
Frank O’Hara

There are long brick walls the color of salmon
which surround the school; in the center
is a grass court,. on which we are allowed to walk—
in single file, girls on one side, boys on the other.

Though our repartee is pretty candid, we’re very young, 
and as soon as the bell rings
we separate, line up in front of
the various doors, and shuffle, tense and silent,

into the building. Some girls are hurrying
off the court in tears, looking back to see
if we’re watching—but we’re all becoming
polite and formal once again.


===============


When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone
Margaret Atwood

When one has lived a long time alone,
as I have, one gets into the habit
of talking to one’s self. For me it’s a mixture
of whining and ordering: Get up! Why don’t
you get up? Oh, shut up, shut up.
I’m trying to think! Get out of my way!
The cats listen, and sometimes contribute
their own thoughts.

Today, during my period of fatigue,
I found myself gazing at a picture on the wall:
two bluebirds balance on a branch
that bends under their weight. A picture of leisure,
I used to think.
I like birds; I like blue. What’s not to like?
I thought, but then the cats stirred:
the branch is about to break!
And the bluebirds?
Watch out, you fools!
So I started to work,
in order to help the birds.
When I had finished, I felt much better.
I got into bed and slept.
When I woke up,
a thin layer of snow had fallen;
the world was hushed.
How beautiful it was,
and there I was,
once again,
in my warm house,
with everything I needed.


===============


I am in need of music that would flow over my fences
Charles Bukowski

I am in need of music that would flow over my fences 
and bring the trees and vines and crush the small bushes 
under a wave of harmony.  I need melodies 
strong enough to remain limpid and pure and

strong, piercing enough to go through the tough skin of a man 
yet not harsh nor ugly, sweet enough to soothe all things 
yet high enough to let even the strongest of men know 
that there’s always a better thing waiting, that there are 
wings above the earth.  I need a symphony.  I need 
the soft kiss of the violin's hard wood, the feline howl 
of the brass, the sweet strings, a beginning of life.


===============


The Asians Dying
Fanny Howe

We are killing them for no reason
than to forget
this invention of forgetting.
To forget everything but as
if you are me
you are I
the asians are dying

for no reason but to forget you. 
The asians are dying,
the asians are dying.
They lie down with their families.
They lie down with their children.
The asians are dying.

The asians are dying.
As if we were them we are forgetting
to kill them
to remember them.
The asians are dying
The asians are dying


===============


The Conscious Mind

The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
—Sigmund Freud

No one lives in the conscious mind,
   but on the contrary
everyone knows, at first, that consciousness
   is the total center of all his feelings
and sensations. But through false information
and propaganda, through the violence
of the net of presuppositions in which he feels
   himself entangled,
he comes to believe that his well-being lies
   in a passive role
and acceptance, that the system of his social and familial relationships
is governed by that somewhat more than
   accidental contingency
called his personality, which, furthermore, he should
   strive constantly
to perfect, while often feeling, with regard to his family
and himself, a nameless and aimless anxiety.
These presuppositions which are believed
   even when their repudiation
brings relief
constitute his destiny
and govern the lives of the artists who, through their
   peculiar discipline,
focus their consciousness
to the discovery and revelation of beauty.

*The above translation is my own; all italicized words but one are italicized in the poem itself.  The exceptions are the last four words, which sound awkward to me in English (where the words “destiny,” “destinies,” and “destiniess” are not normally connected to the plural of the noun “presupposition”).  The original text—the only source I have at this point—was: “Alieni [orig.  “helios,” or “sun”?] presuppositiones, credendae in praeiudicium, / ars et speciem intuente patefecerunt.”  [Last note:  “Alieni” would seem to have the dative form of the noun “aliena” (neuter plural); literally, “others’ presuppositions,” or perhaps “a different kind (or type) of presuppositions.”]
—W. C. W.

Back to Contents 
Ultimate Poetic Forms

—Irradiate by Marcella Durand 
These forms were created in Appleworks in March 1994; the radial type glyph from the Stix font created by Robin Nicholas.  For further information please contact the artist at the address listed in the Copyright
===============


At London Zoo
Glyn Maxwell

The elephant in his enclosure
is perfectly charmed and made of green
two thousand tons of green
cool green, washed off with buckets
every day the green washed off by a man
who wants to live at the seaside
whose son has some condition
which makes it better for him to live there
and as the buckets slash over his body
the elephant stares at a kind of straw
he doesn’t recognise, beautiful
at first sight the man is just grey
although as the buckets go on falling
he takes on colour, gets green
at the edges, smells of it, green
mostly between the eyebrows
and in a new string round his neck
alongside a tin box full of the stuff
and the elephant closes his ears
to everything, even his memories
and as he does so, his eyes
as if broken, move out in little shards
and pierce the body of his keeper.


===============


I
Jorie Graham

I was sitting there,   
you came over,
you told me it was   
a beautiful day.
We sat down. I knew,   
in that moment,   
I was married to   
the sunlight, the air,
the birds in the trees,   
the lobelias,
I had married the   
snow in Japan,   
was married to the
newspapers and the odor   
of stew, to all of   
it, the adjectives   
and the verbs, and there   
were no angles, I
had nothing to   
hold on to, even you   
had nothing to say,
and to go on   
being married to   
all this, the elevator,
the electric plant,
all those people   
in all those offices,   
all the unbelievable   
beauty of Belvedere
where our children   
go to school, to keep   
saying yes to it, is   
the greatest desire of my   
life, though I have   
not one word,   
have nothing   
with which to bless   
this marriage.

Then it’s dark.   
Everything outside   
is dark. And I have   
nothing. All this has   
been the gift of   
now, how strange
that all this   
has been. Look,   
it’s raining. And I   
have nothing. Can it be   
possible. Look,   
it’s snowing.   
And I have   
nothing.

Here is the marriage,   
in the cold and   
the dark and the   
snow, of all   
this I have   
nothing.

And if I take   
this nothing and   
fill it with sugar,   
and sand and   
blood and bits of   
plastic and pencils   
and pages of   
books, and glass   
and cereal and clay   
and paint, and if   
I take these small   
particulars and do   
not call them by   
their names, do   
not let a name slip   
from my lips   
into the marriage, but   
if I call them Life,   
Love, the Universe,   
Honor, whatever   
the language,   
if I call
===============


The Tea Cosy
Theodore Roethke

Made of knitting, a cozy for teapot and tea.
The cover has no odors of yarn or of wood,
And this is the hearth where the phoenix may land.
For the wren of the leaf there’s a proper perch.
The cozy is kind to the claws of the cat,
And the shades drawn against all the loneliness.
The kitchen the sun can be brought to and warmed,
And the tea cozy is beautiful, open-mouthed,
Its colors alive as the rainbow above.
This is creation I’m certain of, the heat
Out of chaos arising and order, O
Flesh-colored cocoon of the dancing bee!


===============


I can’t keep calm as I fall forward
Mary Jo Bang

My first glimpse of the Grand Canyon is a visit to the living room window.  I watch my aunt tap the pane and point and say, “Look! Isn’t it beautiful?” She lifts the sheer and steps back to let me view from her side. I see a change in the light outside, an enormous undulation in the orange sky. Something as large as the cavernous sky at last has a shape, and the great edges and distances of a world as varied as this country could turn out to be a mere illusion of this thing. 

My first visit to the Grand Canyon, that’s the truth, happens inside a screen. I walk the horseshoe for hours on a gray day; no one visits this haunted and raw place except me. I stand and watch something collapse and see my life return to itself, a wash of sand without a moment it once contained. I begin the long slide back out to Utah on the same day I discover the young Navajo and Apache women who have hanged themselves from the fan beams in the Hopi House café.

The life of an immigrant is a constant search for what gives meaning and security. To have lived three lives already! Once I settled down and married, I went out into this world again with a family in tow, always trying to get somewhere, all these airplanes I saw outside my window on the ninth floor when my aunt lived in a building where bighorns on nearby hills showed up at dusk. My aunt stayed behind until she died. What she saw I will see with her. My eyes may be closed but hers will be open.

When I open my eyes, I discover people sitting on blankets spread out across the land. I could be one of them if I wanted to lose myself in the heat. I see a movie in which the ferry boat pulls away from the shore at sunrise, and I can feel myself letting go of the idea of land as the boat turns and slips into the open waters. A woman on the bow speaks into a camera. A grandson reaches into a little house to pick up a turtle. After a flood the turtle was found on the house on stilts. My son begins his walk on a raft from Michigan to Wisconsin, a trip that will follow the path of the Great Lakes all the way to Lake Michigan, from Lake Huron to Lake Winnebago and the Wisconsin River to the
===============


from The Death of the Lone Surfer of Hermosa Beach
Laure-Anne Bosselaar

No one swam the break,
no one swam to the break.
You couldn’t see it from there.
And this day you went
upstream to the harbor
where only a horse’s breath
broke the water’s glass surface
without the sound.


===============


Myth
Mark Strand

As if we could see the earth turning,
the moon descending, hear all stories
converging in a moment of grief and elation.
As if a window were closing
and another opening in the dark walls
of our unilluminable selves.

Myth—ecstatic story, sudden epiphany,
quickened pulse, transmutation,
jolt of recognition, embrace
of possible paths, the soul’s slant
glances into the eternal void.

Too late. Too early. Each life
an inscription erased before its end
or rewritten in another’s words,
a dropped thread, an untied knot,
a random brushstroke, a silhouette
contoured against all that we know,
or believe we know.


===============


Sometimes I watch the Egg Girls & They Have What We No Longer Can Reach
James Tate

Sometimes I watch the egg girls and they have what we no longer can reach
They are in bed with one another with their nighties on
& I can’t help it but I have to say
isn’t that too beautiful for words
For many words that we no longer can reach
For the one we like to like to like the most


===============


Going to sleep
Kay Ryan

How important a separate room,
with a separate bed,
to know that it is possible,
if not probable, to fall
into this world from the sky
while the dark frame
is not yet a window.
To give time to impossibility,
to smooth its pillow,
with gold and gray fingertips
that would have meant something
to the rest of what happened.
It might have meant too,
in the best of universes,
that the only loss was a room,
and so, possibly, there were
also other ways
to arrive than you came
into the light to assume,
other ways that would have been
different, but then,
you are not from the moon
either, or anywhere else
beyond your breath,
a little more precious
because of where you are.


===============


Kissing A Beast
Nina MacLaughlin

A loaded pistol held under the table
at an elegant party.

Reality so good

you can blow it to smithereens
and stand there naked and happy,
surrounded by the glitter of torn-up sequins

in the bones of the footlights.

And here at the great love tryst, the meeting
we’ve given our lives to,

it comes to this.

You just realize you are of the party—
standing right there between the puppets
and the windmills.

They have all the strings.

Your desires are shouting in the field,
and here at the feast they’ve made

the empty plates ring

from the first course to the last.
And I stand alone, licking the crumbs.

Alone.

“There are things that cannot be cured,
& let me love, & read Virgil and drink red wine!”

When will our senses learn

to drink of one another
& to give this bottle of experience the slip?

I walk backwards, slowly,

to the room where you once touched me,
a child alone in the dark playing
with his toys—and with his breasts, too,
naked and wanton, because
this is what a man does.

He invents the pleasure, discovers the sounds
his body can make when he rapes it.

But this time it is simple.

What you want me to say is I love you.
And what I want you to say is
you do not know where we come from,
but know that we will die.


===============


Mystics and Militants
Thomas Merton

The problem, then, is to preserve the love of God.
This is much more important than performing works of
penance or of charity; without this, works will be lifeless.
This problem, this paradox, is to find how we can be 
occupied with God and with the things of God and 
at the same time so occupied with everyone in a
disinterested way that there is no trace of egoism in 
our acts, that is, no trace of a person seeking himself
or even sincerely seeking others with the intention of
seeing God in them or of bringing them to God.

This problem is far more difficult than ascetical practices
and their psychology, which as a rule is much easier to 
grasp than that of its opposite—disinterested charity.
The asceticism that consists in the rejection of selfishness
has, as we have said, something measurable about it.
It is definite enough to be written about by theologians.

Love disinterested and without measurable character
is not so easily reducible to theology and a theology 
of asceticism. And it is not easy to write about.
We need certain experiences; we need to know the
passionate acts of love and the anxiety that rises
above them.

Even the saints had to do more than read the lives
of the saints or go to lectures on ascetical theology.


===============


Thirst
Naomi Shihab Nye

I wish I were in love, and I wish that she
were in love with me. If I were at her window
I would touch the curtains and tell her:

I am thirsty.

This is no metaphor. I am thirsty
like a dog baking on an asphalt street
on a July afternoon.

Her hands would break the bark
off the sour orange tree
and I would suck
the gold membranes.

She would teach me a card game
and the joy in it would be
its mindlessness, its pure abstraction
like the feeling of cashmere.

I would memorize the creases
on the backs of her thighs
from sitting
and memorize her wrists,
feather-boned. We would live
that way.

There would be as much silence
as there was air
and more closeness.

There would be the elegance
of her nape. We would marry
lest death part us. At night
our voices might startle us
out of one dream
into another.

When it snowed I would
grit the driveway
and she would watch.

Like wind rifling the sea,
like wind on a cornfield,
love would sweep us
at unexpected times.

She would keep
a tube of rose petals
in the fridge
and I would feel them
soften the ache
in my throat.

God’s presence
would be our absence
as we learned to breathe
where there is no breath

and as our lips
rearranged themselves
over the centuries.

This would be home.
We would be home.

It is all
that I ask.


===============


Matins
Eamon Grennan

The voice,
blowing its husky accents
through the dark.
A secret moon,
icy and bright;
bare branches,
quiet.
A glimpse of white
in all that black:
the rabbit,
standing,
stunned.


===============


Calligram for Vita
Cole Swensen

You don’t fit into your body
You say it is home and feel at home in it
The coat is two sizes too small
You’ve tried it on once or twice on the street
Looked in the mirror every time
You could have slit the lining from the inside

Found the ticket in the secret pocket
Taken a bus to some new town
Watched the streets’ reflection rise and fall
Arrived at the break of day
With a small duffle of that which you love
That which you are sure is the real you

You say you haven’t a better place
That it’s warmer in the coat
That the trick is to forget it doesn’t fit
Your eyes are the knees and your eyes
Are the hips of the skirt
Your mouth the neckline, your mouth the hem

And always you find you can’t get your head through it
It tangles your hair and you slip your shoes off
Hold them by the straps
Before you leave
You make sure you can still slip your arms out

On the longest trip there isn’t a soul
To notice you’ve got yourself in the dress


===============


Ghazal
John Donne

Every man has his folly, some are amorous,
Some are ambitious, some are vainglorious,
The first love beyond measure, the second beyond price,
The third makes himself the subject of the people's eyes,
Who, though he bridle, cuckold him still for his price,
For sillily gulling their expectation he thinks;
His follies are beyond correction. I'll never be such,
But, like a busy shadow, follow him, that goes before me.

I.
I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic sprite.
But black sin hath betray’d to endless night
My world’s both parts, and, heartless, I must die.
Teach me, true Love, sweetly to bear thy right.
But, sweet Love, tell me why thou dost so start,
Seeing thee turn’st away thy face for spite.
O! will not sweet Love enjoy the light?
But suffer’st Thou not in thy eternal bed,
When true Love lays thee, Love’s dear self, to rest?

II.
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.

And if some lover, such as we,
Have heard this text, it does ensure

That loving balances, that mass,
Which, brought together, doth express

True heav’nly weight, for here love’s heav’n
Does weigh; this one way, lacking this,

The rest will ne’er steadiness reach,
But endlessly through love’s abyss.

And thus they did that heav’n erect,
And round about the pointed tent

Did make securely God’s house.
His dome is the pure firmament,

And on this solid earth he spends,
Where all his pleasures and his friends

And household stuff doth lie; but yet
He for this shrine, where he would sit,

Hath made a board of Christs blood,
And not at all things near is common.


===============


Sonnet II
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

That is radiance which thronged the air
  Between us two
At the clear mountain well
  Hand in hand, we stood and gazed afar

That is radiance which lit the place,
  And never dawn may look so fair
O day and night, upon you I gaze:
  In you is peace, as in a face of God.


===============


Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

These are poems that I have found moving. I hope that they move you as well.
I must thank Erik. I am not sure of the extent of his contribution, as I was pretty much off the map for most of the month, but I want to send him thanks for taking my place. Also, many thanks for the well wishes and the kind e-mails that I received.
I am still reading Tender Buttons and enjoying it immensely. I actually started to read it before but was unable to finish it, so I am very happy to be nearing the end. I do have much writing to catch up on, but for now I must stop. I am a writer of lines but not yet a writer of lines under the line. Keep me in your hearts and in your minds, and I will see you again very soon.
Yours,
SAK
Editorial notes: In regard to "when we / feel a kind of sleep/ coming/ together," Sak asks, "What is 'sleeping' at orgasm called again? is it a "dog-sleep"? Anyway, what was the Latin? I want to be a little ashamed of this because it's sort of terrible, but I can't stop saying it and writing it down." Sarah answers: it's called the OBE, or the O-zone: orgasmic blood-oxygen imbalance. According to my friend Theresa, it's caused by the drop in blood pressure to the head during orgasm, and lasts about ten seconds; it isn't really "sleep." Sak also wondered, "What can be the native word for orgasm?" to which the answer is "orgasm," the way everything is "masturbation
===============


In a Station of the Metro
e e cummings

The apparition of these faces in the crowd: 
  Petals on a wet, black bough.  


===============


Hunters in the Snow
William Carlos Williams

Their legs were wrapped in puttees
but it was the infinite snowdrifts
that cut their hamstrings.

It was their upturned eyes
and the falling from their hands
that broke your heart

As the streaked dawn broke them.


===============


Alligator Poem
David Baker

It is the middle of the night
Outside my window in the moonlight
An alligator swims in my pond
It eats the water plants I have grown
Along with a duckling that has hatched
Among the duck eggs I have bought
The alligator’s head
Is sleek and black and immense
It rises from the water a moment
Then slides away like a nightmare
I don’t know why it is here
I don’t know why it is here
I only know there will be more
After it slides away like a nightmare

----

Locksley Hall
Alfred Lord Tennyson

In time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’,
When hammers are shaping thunderbolts,
When hope and despair are flung,
Like gauntlets down, from biting world to biting world,
Like-Death before the mountains when they rise,
He cuts his cable from the shore,
And makes his wild way through;
Nothing before, —nothing behind, —
Nothing on earth, —nothing in heaven;
Stands a thin man clothed in black,
With a face as white as leprosy!

The fitches glitter in the sun,
And flutter in the wind:
They seem to have no roots—they never have been sown—
They just push out—like bubbles
From the corn and the deep-rooted grass:
They know no further, and they do not ask.
The clamour of the mating doves
Strikes from the shot roof of the tower;
And under the eaves of the old inn-yard
The throb of the thirsty pump-handle sounds,
Like an iron heart that beats
Under a leaden breast,—
Flashing and falling for ever,
With nothing but death at the fountain’s head,
And nothing but wild clouds in the sky.
He stands in the field alone,
A ragged figure lost to sight:
Scattering the last of his seed by handfuls away,
From a bag all sown with stones,
That he has found in the wilderness,
And carried to and fro in his flight;
Of the hope of the harvest he reaps despair,
But he gleans a thousand aeons of thought,
From the visions of vain old time,
From the moons and the planets lone;
===============


Talking of the Movies
Larissa Szporluk

Look, it’s me. But where
I’m going nobody knows.
So nobody follows.
The street signs and traffic
lights recede as I gather
speed, but the dead trees
keep track of me with their
black arms, scribble a map
for me on a half-moon
of cloud, where geese
travel above me. You want
to say I’m going somewhere,
but you’re in a car
looking for another route.
My bicycle needs no road.
Let the lampposts be
my streetlights and markers.
The darkened houses where I live.


===============


The Swimmer
John Cheever

On Thursday noon, after a morning's work, I decided to go for a swim at the Y.M.C.A. Though it was almost Labor Day, it was still hot, and I took the bus for the Y, which was twelve blocks from my office. I liked the atmosphere at the Y. I liked to think that THERE ARE ALWAYS WORSE THINGS THAN BEING THERE, which was one of the Y’s slogans. In the steam room a man came up to me and said, “You going out for the noon lap?” I said that I was. “Give you a game,” the man said. We agreed on the distance and strode off to the pool.

It was not much of a swim. I touched the end of the pool, felt myself rising in the water, gave a wriggle, made a chop at the surface with my hands, and then the water rejoined me, and I knew I was dreaming. I stood up, with a smile at the dank man who had been swimming beside me, and went to the locker room.

When I got back to my office and had taken off my jacket, the dream-fear was still with me, and I knew that I would have to swim again. My office was on the nineteenth floor, and I went out to the elevator in such a turmoil that I confused the buttons and went down, not up. The elevator operator said, “Didn’t you want the lobby?” “I was daydreaming,” I said. “Oh, yes,” the operator said. “I do that sometimes, too.”

I went up to the roof of the building. There was a swimming pool there, but I knew that I was not the only person who used it. The roof had to be kept closed in bad weather, and sometimes the water from the pool ran down the elevator shafts and into the lobby of the building. There were cries about this from the tenants, and the owner of the building had promised to enclose the roof. This had not been done, and I knew that people swam there without suits.

I found my way around the roof by making believe that I was walking through my house. Here was the linen closet, here the bathroom, here the alcove, here the bedroom. The smells of the rooftop—of smoke, of dead plants, of the hot-water
===============


Reading Aloud
Sylvia Plath

Tonight I feel this as I watch you  
read  The letters of Keats in the flickering coal fire glow.

Flames, the embodiment of that mortal desire,  
Lick at the room, the night, our desire. 

(Over the black telephone wires  
  Out of the gold-lit bedroom window 
I watch the stars 
The mysterious planets, the candle-flames of our desire 
Licking at space 
Licking at time 
Licking at a dark immensity of fire 
A billion miles of stars 
The ring of fire 
And a book of poems, 
Rustling its pages in the hearth-flame 
Burning, 
Burning the poems, the paper incarnate 
Incarnate desire 
And the words 
Incandescent, blue, yellow, red 
Desire in the black kitchen air 
And we reading, reading in bed 
Reading aloud, together.


===============


Lucifer in Starlight
George Meredith

Thrown by my horse, my head so bright
With real adoration; where
The glare of change,
And that abysmal world's subsiding, and
My demon's respiration in my lungs,
Dissolved and wiped me out, in that
Organic elixir!

And who of you who may behold
This childishness of a genius raised
In the ancient atmosphere of mythologic lives,
In a modern sky of inference?
Not that I was a top all handy and revolved,
But the quicksilver was the lordlier part of me,
Weaving and being woven.

One who went with the flow,
To and fro, with a fluxing wistfulness,
Compelled to breathe through a reed of illusion,
Forcing the stuff of illusion to serve.

The imagination of nature
Had wrought its cunning substitution well:
So that
He seemed to be experiencing human pain,
Torture, mortality, mutability.

All I had of you,
My tainted diaphane,
Would run away from me, and return again.
Oh, talk about it!
It may be an echo, but there is, there is
In the mere echo, an echo of an echo.

So, great or small, it is delicious
To find one's self treated as a god or boy,
Believed in on one's own terms.
I saw my own smoke moving upwards—
And now from the tumult of brightening nothing
I rarefy the tempestuous and blind,
Until my small place in the balance of things,
Cools as in golden space I dissolve.


===============


Miss Gee
Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas

Some heavy landlord’s daughter
Whose mind, I fear, is in her rent—
Miss Gee Miss Gee Miss Gee,
Miss Gee Miss Gee, Miss Gee.

Miss Gee in black satin undies
Dancing with some man.
Asking, “Oh you don’t want my fortune
Do you, Mr. Van Man?”

Oh Mr. Van Man, so charitable,
So romantic! He
Adores the very ground
The fat old sausage rolls on.

“Oh Miss Gee Miss Gee!
Oh my God! Miss Gee!
You wonderful, fat, old, porky
Aintcha got a spare knee?”

Oh the poor bloke wants to get married
So much, the poor man!
So, here we go! (A drum rolls
And a cornet wails!)

Here they come
A thousand strong
Each one named Groom Groom Groom
They got a thousand pounds a-piece
To marry Miss Gee!

Some’s got a yacht and some’s got a car.
Some will buy a baby grand,
Some a mansion, some a castle,
And one a Georgian drum.

Some love her from her fingertips
Down to her toes.
One man’s here because he’s certain
Her breath smells of rosemary sopes.

Oh some men want a lady
Some want a whore.
But we’ve all come to the same conclusion:
Miss Gee’s the one for more!

Oh the poor bloke wants to get married
So much, the poor man!
So, here we go! (A drum rolls
And a cornet wails!)

Some got daughters, some got fathers,
Some will never speak again
Some gave up two years’ profits
To catch the train from Blythe again.

Oh some brought her tulips, some a chick,
One a racoon, one a ring,
Others will never now return
Because they’re here to sing:

Oh the poor bloke wants to get married
So much, the poor man!
So, here we go! (A drum rolls
And a cornet wails!)

There’s great romantics and
===============


Banal Is My Middle Name
Michael Dickman

What do I know—

I’ve listened to the station

Blaise-Pascale on my car radio

You held up a creme-filled cookie

You said sorry, took a bite.

Why does the car smell

like incense?

The sky’s restless

And I’m restless

like a dirty plate

on the sink

I am hesitant as a glass

that’s gone too long

without being rinsed

About to collapse in water

I want to live like a river

or road

Without ego or desires

I am always somewhere

I like being somewhere

I like being

I like being here.

My shirt is

Torn and I sleep

In my car,

People throw French fries

out their windows

I watch them float

on air

Like pieces of truth

there are no rules

And it looks like rain

I love rain and I love no rain

I love when something ends.

How does this get any better

I lay in the bed.

I can love two people at once

I am loving you right now

And I love the clouds, too,

in a way that

passes through us like a river

I love now more than ever

I can hear now more than ever

I love the word now

I can smell through my skin

I am human

a human being

among human beings

and everything I hear

is in perfect time

and perfectly in time

and everything is important

and I know what I am saying

to be true.

I take classes at community college

Two cars collide in the street

I hear their echo.

I lose my dog

My car breaks down

by the grocery store

The blue crayon breaks

inside its plastic box

I throw it away

and there’s a girl with green hair

in a field and she smells like heaven.

I am a piano

I play it all day.

I talk back to the radio

The sun is a goose

Stroking the sea


===============


The Golden Vine
Elizabeth Alexander

On an evening walk a few weeks ago
with my son, who is twelve, and a handful
of children he likes and trusts, we held
a spontaneous contest, dropping
nickels into a stream, the one who sinks
his coin the farthest rewarded, then,
as it happened, by bearing the title
“King of the World.” Laughter and chanting:
King of the World! and a prancing child
on his tiptoes, breathless and delighted,
as the next dropped his coin and rushed
to touch the water, to see how far away
he had been. My son’s face glowed. He was
so happy. The children raced
in twos, in threes; they did somersaults
and handstands. Whatever they could think
of to do that might get them closer. I sat
on a bench nearby and laughed,
as it was funny, and the sunset was lovely,
and these were the small, fleeting, unselfconscious
joys of childhood, moments we never want
to lose. Later that evening, walking with him
alone, I said, “The golden vine. Do you
remember the golden vine
the children touch in the story? Each
child in turn?” “Yes,” he said. “Well, that is
what the rest of life is for. To spend
as much time as we can touching that vine.”
I turned to him and asked, “What are you thinking?”
He said, “That I’m going to find
that vine for myself.” “That’s a noble quest,”
I said. “Yes, it is,” he agreed. In half a second
he was once again a child, whose eyelashes
had been starred by the bright summer evening
air, and whose laugh still rode, little,
silver, in the back of his throat.


===============


My Wicked, Wicked Ways
E. E. Cummings

My wife and I have asked a dozen friends
each to give us the name of a book we ought to read;
and their combined recommendations make
a formidable row on my groaning shelves,
yet one more row to peer at, every night,
above my snoring head.

I am told that books are a steady friend,
a sort of permanent candle,
only lighting up in our moments of need,
and never let us down, etc. etc.

Perhaps it’s so. But the fact remains
that whenever I notice my wife reading a book
I am (after a little time) seized with such a desire
to sleep with the author that I start
squirming, twitching, and fidgeting around

and generally make a nuisance of myself,
till she finally gives up and pokes the author
out of existence, removing him from her vaginal parts,
so to speak, and from between the pages.

For what my wife reads once,
I would willingly read twice,
provided that it be her that I read first.

May 25th, 1908
I.M. The Mrs. of a Certain Year
Emily Dickinson

Much Madness is divinest Sense —
    To a discerning Eye — 
Much Sense — the starkest Madness —
    ’Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail —
    Assent — and you are sane —
    Demur — you’re straightway dangerous —
    And handled with a Chain —


===============


The Spider Poem
Valerie Worth

I cannot call you spider.
I will not call you spider.
I am going out to eat
the world. There’s no poison for this kind
of spider. No one calls for a doctor
when I bite. They just wilt,
gray. They die of old age
the next minute. They are dead
as soon as I enter. They never dream
they are dying.
This world is already shrivelled and eaten,
spider web. And the black rain
hides my secretions. They just fall,
dry and empty as the snakeskin
of a snake, the butterfly
of a butterfly.
I can call you nothing. You are beautiful
as nothing. You spin the world
into a grave of space.


===============


Where Are the Other Women
Tam Lin Neville

O they were dressed
like plums or persimmons
the new soldiers and if your eyes
went first to their breasts
tucked under billows
of white cotton blouses
or to the long legs
poured into their tight
olive colored breeches
no one minded, not
the American women in their
hard curls, blood-bright mouths,
their hurried scurrying
above the square so thin
and lovely like minarets,
not the archers
who were boys and did not mind
your eyes or the girls
nor the old men who told you
if you smiled that their wives
were already dead and invited you
to sup with them anyway
O they were dressed
like plums or persimmons
the new soldiers and if your eyes
went first to their breasts


===============


Horizon
Jorie Graham

From “Measure,”

All things in life are the results of measurements. Everything is       
a fraction of itself and its relation to something other. It is      
mostly measurements that make the world possible. Vibrations:      
beats per minute; fathoms per second, leagues per hour,            
minutes per mile, colors per ray of light, tones per second—      
the world as a diagram of musical relationships. The measure      
in a poem is the duration and the pitch of its imagination.      

The poem: as measure, I love you.

Can’t you feel that breath from inside the horizon—
ever slight, soft, its slow, clarifying swipe
at the bays, sounds and littorals of the mind,
opening—
“the longest life is short”—
to its own limpid overcast—

When I visited my country one year during its civil war,
and found there was no possibility of the poem,
no possibility of the music for two reasons:

we’d entered a world of shadows,
one we’d sworn we’d never allow to happen,
and in the otherworld, the one we were in,
people were dying every hour, the land was on fire,
and someone tried to kill me, kill my faith,
and keep me from ever singing again,
like the millions he took out that same year
to silence their tongues.
When I came back there was grief in every glance,
in every lift of arm. Grief was an ether,
a lining to the skin. Grief was like hunger,
the first thing you felt upon waking.

How shall I not hate
his assertion that he is the end of poetry—
in that he would make any use of language a crime
if it is spoken with “any tenderness,
even if it is whispered.”
I read this last December in the Guardian, in Oxford—

a man stating that there should be an equation between the one who       
is in the wrong and the one he has silenced.
“Death for the speaker” he said—

The scene: a special courtyard, February, a cold winter,
he thinks it should have some rue planted there, a small grass lawn,
barely the width of his walking feet, and placed between him and the one

===============


The Dark Stair
Charles Wright

Wind: from the piney smell of the pine groves.
Wind: from the sound in the poplars and buckeyes,
wind: from the powder-blue sky.

Thought: from the wind,
obscure thought,
swift and
unreachable.

Thought: from the wind,
from the sun on the wild ivy.
What is there besides sunlight
and this wild ivy?


===============


Tristano
Jorie Graham

We are tonight, aren’t we, pushing this music
Not so very far away, to somewhere
Really still. Really Adequate. It may only
Hold for a little
While we inhale the moment of its standing still,
Now taking in the dark forest of the beginning,
Now the width of the expanding high
Airs, that sweep between

Complexity of craftsmanship and bravura
Bravado—hardly hearing the amazed
Accompaniment, we are almost to the far
Edge of listening,
The mind beginning to take in what it takes in,
I almost see that I am truly listening
To the piper,

Whose mouth by now may not be moving
Any more in the sweetness, the real dream
Of what is simple but must be made simply, 
Whose soul
Lies down in the grass of the meadow’s edge,
Lies down in the meadow, in the clearing
It has made
Itself, the piper’s soul, lying there, sending
Up through the stalks of the wild rye, the poppies,
Up through the stalks and through the heavy heads,
The notes,
Clear and slow, inside which both our hearts
Lie down together.


===============


Self Portrait
Robert Creeley

My face is a study of how
a night of rain can wash up a man’s
history, like so much tossed paper 
on the street.

All the news headlines 
being her face. The distance 
that won’t close between us.
I don’t know what to say, 
even if it would help.

She is curled in a chair 
dreaming perhaps of murder.
I hear a siren’s song 
under the door.

Thunder’s coming. 
I see it in her eyes.


===============


As Much As You Can
Marie Howe

And you know
how when you cut the cords
of the balloon and it begins
its disappearing journey into the blue,
not falling, just going away
into the beautiful blue, farther than any
of us can see,
and you know how you loved it, how
you sent it on its way, you wished it well
and, oh my God, you cried when
it slipped away, you still cry, every time
you see a balloon released,
even now, all these years,
and so, this is what I know: send
what you can of yourself on its way.
Send it out. Because the world is vast
and beautiful and intricate and rich
and welcoming. That we know.
That, we know.
And the rest, well. Do the rest.


===============


The Poem
Lorine Niedecker

You will come and stand in the poem
I have written for you.
The poem takes longer.
You must be patient.

It’s heavy going, and I
must take it, as it comes.

You who have such faith in poems,
be ready. I can do
nothing to persuade you
that you need this poem.

The poem is not yet written
because I am living
In the non-poem-world still.

I am still making change from poems
I have done and you are here
to keep my memories living
of everlasting peace.

Meanwhile you must touch this
boiling pot
to see if it is hot.
It must boil out words,

the meaning must evaporate
before I can shape it
for you to stand in it
and live without stirring.

Then you will come and stand
in the poem I have written for you.


===============


Banal Is My Middle Name
Michael Dickman

What do I know—

I’ve listened to the station

Blaise-Pascal and Co.

You’re laughing cause it’s funny

The girl doesn’t know who’s who

She eats the dinner then

She reaches for her glass of wine

I saw the girl, who was my friend

Laughing along with another guy

I saw the girl, I was her friend

With a drink in her hand,

‘cause alcoholism is not just a disorder it’s a disease.

I saw the girl, she was my friend,

She was with another guy

And I saw his hand, on her thigh,

I saw his hand, on her leg

She called it “minor physical contact”

And afterwards, over a water, it was “dumb.”

And she was right, it was, and still is,

But how did I respond?

By saying I don’t care,

This isn’t relevant to me,

Whoa is what I can say

Life is so insane

I’m getting old, but I’m not

Banal is my middle name

Yeah I got some news

I was down on the floor

I thought I was a king

But I was down on the floor

What am I saying?

I’m not saying anything

I was just waiting for you

To call

And you never called

‘Cause you don’t give a fuck

And I don’t give a fuck

Banal is my middle name

My tongue is in your mouth

Now I am a king.

Sacred Fire
By Lucille Clifton

You walk into the room and you do not even see me,
but something in me stirs
as if it knows you.
I call it ‘love’ to make it sacred.
It is still stirring and climbing
toward the heat. It does not see you either,
just a body that will make a home
for the stirring
so that it can turn to light.

Your sacred fire is burning.

You have been walking through snowdrifts
like a snow woman, heavy with age,
===============


The Flower 
Vladimir Mayakovsky

My soul, which is above or below us -- I'm not quite sure --
kept me from kissing a nose like this and so sleeping no more.
I raised her up on the lap of a pear tree full of sun
in a narrow alley of flowers behind a concrete restaurant.
Life is beautiful and joyous:
Easter draws nearer and nearer.
A certain wind blew,
love stuck out its chest,
old jackdaws whirled on the round earth.
Soon, very soon, with great joy and trembling,
my soul will lift itself onto its four legs
and, as if on casters,
with the sun's whole strength behind it,
run to embrace you, my love.


===============


Music Is Internationale
E. E. Cummings

when everything is water
and trees wash up in the sink
and garlands
with all their winter
weariness float from the ceiling
to the floor

when all your skirts are
red and you don’t have to put any more roses in your hair
because they already sleep there
on green pillows
when all the houses
are built on grass
and children dance quickly
as the sun falls
when ponies walk
beside you and the whole circus
has come to
eat us all up

when people change
to be just who they are
and lions and poets stare out of their eyes
when this all happens
and you walk carefully because you’re afraid of everything
but i say go ahead because even when
you fall
even when a hundred-million
leaves fall out of the sky
you’re still my personal
sunflower

Music is Internationale
(Ves’ Musica Internationale)

when you growl and roar
and tear the summer tree apart
like a city set on fire
when people’s eyes fall out and sparkle and dance
like blood down the cheek of the moon
when the wind is a singing tunnel
and you’re caught in it for a hundred years
when death dies
and everything turns into stars

just you wait
when all the cages fall on the floor
and the world is suddenly a rose
a pure onelaid in our teeth
just you wait
and the trees go walking through you
and a solitary monster kisses your mouth
just you wait

just you wait because everything
has already happened here and now
if you wait long enough
this is the only heaven
of which you’ll ever even dream
Music is Internationale
Ves’ Musica Internationale

it’s only what it is
and nothing more

it isn’t enough to be lonely it’s always been enough to be lonely
it isn’t enough to be lonely it’s always been enough to be lonely

it isn’t enough to be lonely but the only heaven is when you’re lonely
when you know everything is nothing more
and that everything is nothing more
and that everything is nothing more

it isn’t enough to be lonely it’s always been enough to be lonely
it
===============


Philosophy
Mona Van Duyn

(i.m. John Horton)

Sometimes, I’m driving to the university
when my life suddenly hits me
like a deer on the highway, and I shudder,
grateful not to be missing
this pageant I don’t understand, this film
I have no script for—it is just me,
just my mind, this self I’ve occupied
all these years, and I recognize the girl
running toward me down the hill, the one
who turns, grinning, and to whom I call,
“Come on!” as if, running beside me,
she could keep up—as if her life were mine,
as if her road were clear, when for one startling
instant I know what happens next,
where we are going, as if, hand in hand,
we were about to leap over the stile,
but then the road is empty, she is gone,
and all I see is what I have to face
alone: the sumac blazing, the sky
that seems, today, so close I think I could
reach up and stroke its glistening flank,
its mute, amazed comprehension, while
I drive on to a job I used to love.


===============


Rage of Achilles
C. P. Cavafy

And now I remember those two girls,
  The girls that broke my heart in my country,
  In my quiet and dejected youth,
  I remember them both.
  They loved me, I loved them;
  I was not lucky.
  We spent all our strength in tears and kisses,
  And at last we became estranged.
  And one evening, as the sun set
  Above our hills and all in our house was shadow,
  One of them said to me, harshly,
  "I shall no longer see you."
  And I made no answer;
  This, in our house, by the window,
  On the road home, and the little river
  Already twilight, alone with no friends near.
  I made no answer.
  Then the other girl said to me,
  "I too shall go away from you."
  And I made no answer.
  And they kept their word.
  Both passed from my life, both left me.
  And today, here in the market-place,
  In my white hair,
  After so many years, I remembered them.
  I've been thinking of their youth,
  Their fresh and supple beauty.
  I smile with pleasure.
  And yet, there rises a secret pain in my heart,
  The memory of my vain youth,
  When I was strong and handsome, I too,
  And also, when my dark eyes
  Could sadden easily, but smile a little, too,
  And conquer the smile.


===============


Beginning (draft)
John Ashbery

What has happened is a new thing,
created in the newness of every moment.
We are all equal in our vulnerability.
None of us can say about any other:
"He or she is responsible." For even
if it is true, we cannot utter the words
that would prove it. Every night is a
beginning again, as we forget the misery
of the day before, its defeats and rancor,
and start fresh. We do not step up
to each other from behind the masks
we have been hiding behind all along.
It is a beginning, made every moment.
We fall into each other’s arms without
knowing why, but with a definite,
unimpeachable, all-excluding certainty.


===============


After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
Galway Kinnell

For me, for him, for her and for us,
We see the branches of the winter trees
In our separate accommodations 
Sway gracefully together,
Lisping in the wind, and forming 
An indecipherable language,
As though saying,
There is something outside you and me that is the same.

There is something outside you and me which is the same.
There is something outside you and me which is the same.
There is something outside you and me which is the same.

Our foolish life: the mistakes we have made,
The chances we have had and lost or let pass by,
The secrets of our foolish hearts,
Expressed in moronic little sighs,
In hesitations, and in all the embarrassments
That have made up our foolish lives,
This is all expressing the sense
Of the glory of having been alive,
Of having been part of the flow and part of the ebb,
Having arrived at a certain moment on the earth.

What do you think has become of the children?
What do you think has become of the children?
They are all standing behind us, they are all standing behind us,
Waving, their eyes bright with tears, as we go.


===============


Our Morning’s Insight
Easter Monday 2013
Charles Wright

The poem is a portrait of yourself
with your voice turned off,
the poem is an impersonation of the real thing, 
a cameo, a simulacrum.

You are there when the poem’s said,
but only as a shadow,

a shadow whose voice is forever held in,
the run of your sentences sealed off like a spring,

the way you stammered through the grammar.
That’s you in the poem, you impostor!

You’re a photo taken from the side
at a party, the glass in your hand smeared with lipstick,

your hair in desperate need of a trim,
your ear gone dim from all the clamor,

and that loudmouth to your right suddenly drowned out
by the first, creaking step

of a stairway’s long, untenable cry—
that’s you in the poem, you

half-disaster, that’s you
scratched on the underside of a coin,

the low-res, wide-angle shot of a truth
simply out of focus, its only point

the absence at the heart of the matter.
But the poem holds you there,

somehow, whatever way, however,
as if, for the moment, life’s wish

could be the same as death’s.
And you, the

apprehended life,
say this, say this:

This, then, is our morning’s insight.
In the dappled air,

in the day’s first burst of flavor,
in the high, sweeping circuits of the hawk,

in the teacup trembling like a leaf,
here, here we are, we are

present to each other. We are
the hand at the end of the sleeve,

we are not mindless, we are
each, we are each

the leaf of a breath.
We are there, as far

as the heart can see.
We are there, like this,

the way a poem can love a life.

Copyright © 2013 by Charles Wright  All rights reserved.

Published by arrangement with BOA Editions, Ltd.  www.boaeditions.org



===============


your missing eyebrows
Michael O’Brien

late and early sun lights my fingers like an ordinary thing,
as i speak as i can, without riddles in plain as a word.
whatever the mouths may seem to hint,
stir is a state of mind.

there is a guitar for how the fret board spirals out of thought
beyond any transference.
shoulders falter in their winters,
loll behind laurel.

some colors that swirl in the mixture of civilized styrofoam,
in witness to a dinner
and the royal purple cushion.
the roar of bats as they

hiss by before moon goes down
deep in our skulls.


===============


Prisoner of Shelley
C. K. Williams

In sleep, the night after you left, I dreamed of horses
running in a storm. The hoofs of my horse
were torn out of my hands and it ran towards a steep cliff, 
paused there briefly in mid-air, while I yelled, 
then fell, taking me with it into the sea below.

But this was sleep, and now I’m awake to your voice on the machine, 
asking if I got there, got to the place we met 
the day before you left. And I say yes, I was there, 
had breakfast, walked across the little park 
to the oculist’s. I’ve picked up the books, but more 
on that later. The world’s so damned exuberant. 
If you saw what I’m seeing you’d know what I mean.

Like looking through a keyhole. The world swells to 
fill the space before the tongue of wood, then pinches in, 
is lost where the globe narrows to a point. That’s where 
I like to put my eye. Or no, I mean it’s like standing 
in front of a door and suddenly the door falls open

and sunlight, wind, city noise all hit you at once, 
and you can’t go back in.


===============


Swimmers
A.E. Stallings

There were swimmers, as you’d expect,
and sun worshippers, and sports on horseback
and drinkers of all the drinks in the world,
and all sorts of conversations—

most of which I never heard.
Most of these, too, I didn’t care about
all that much, except for those who quarreled
at my gate, about things that I needed to know.

You know how every day there are heroes,
going about doing things for you
like what I do for you, and,
at a faster pace, without thinking.

One thinks, Why is there bad,
and so must seem boring?
For example, why were they bad?
Or did they simply seem so,

in contrast to the speed, or stillness,
of those silent lovers
on a bench near the pond, without
a word, turning pages.

Look how the ones lying on horseback
came to the brink of confession
before turning away, how the dimwit
happiness of the swimmer ended

only in death and the hangover—
on a sidewalk near the sea,
where a woman curls
over a stranger, as she nears the end,

and you and I fold into it,
so that we, too, can get back
to those two silent, diligent lovers
at the seashore, turning pages.


===============


B-17 on the Assiniboine
Roch Carrier

They appeared as if by magic,
amidst snow, in the heart of the winter,
sudden bright colors high up
in the sky: yellow,
green, red and black,
so beautiful, and magical—they flew
low over the Saskatchewan Valley
sometimes with the roar of thunder
and sometimes silently, like spirits.
They were seen over
every village: William,
Maxwell, Quebec, MacKay,
Saint-Félicien, Loverna and
finally came down to drop their bombs,
in broad daylight, on the farms
of the Assiniboine Valley:
Magasin, St-Patrice, Robert-Esprit, 
Onésime, Xavier, Georgette,
Édouard, Mélissa and Felix-Daniel,
on the fruit orchards, the field of grain
that were ready for harvesting
for the men who had lost their lives
in Europe, and for the children,
who would have to fight in a war
that was no longer theirs.

The people would always say they had been saved.
Saved from what?
Can you call it being saved when
one morning at dawn,
as you went out to feed the pigs
and you passed by the barn,
you saw only a burning fire,
with men buried under the straw,
when the entire valley is in flames?
When people gather on the road,
only to stand, speechless,
watching the seven fine houses
going up in flames:
Bernadette’s, Joseph’s, Honoré’s,
the Dubé place, Justin’s, Marie-Anna’s,
and the Viger’s, after which
you can no longer tell who is talking?
They have to be German spies,
they must be spies,
there’s no other explanation,
with their boldness to come so low,
like bees.
Only they could bomb civilians
at noon,
as if the allies didn’t have enough bombs
to destroy the world twenty times over.
The same life cannot exist
on opposite sides of the fence.
It’s been said there are only two nations,
the victim and the executioner.
Aren’t we victims?
They wouldn’t be there otherwise.
They
===============


Paintings
Jennifer Bartlett

There is
my self-portrait
looking like myself.
There is
my other portrait
reproduced
five hundred times
and mounted on panels
of silk.
When I fold the panels
into squares,
my face, five hundred times, is mirrored.

There is
my portrait,
and there is also
another portrait of myself
painted by a friend.
In this I am wearing
red and green paisley
and when I wear this dress I look
as if I had been painted in oils.
But to see this oil painting,
to see myself in the mirror,
these are two separate events.

There is the picture painted
of me, and there is me.
There is the girl in the painting
who will die, and there is the painter
of the painting who will die.
And I will die. I am separate.

There are four people in this painting,
but we will all die.
There are four different personages,
and each of the personages has a different eye
with which to view this painting.
There is no way to divide the eye.

There is the way in which the painting
is connected to the body.
And there is the opposite way
in which the body is connected to the painting.

There is the painting and there is the frame.
There is the frame and there is the wall.
There is the wall and there is the book.
There is the book and there is the fact
that it is handwritten.

This painting can be anything.
It is simply an arrangement
of the color green and a small,
familiar woman’s face.
She is my face and she is my mother.
But the painting is not moving.
It is unchanging.
It is almost the same
as the person looking
at it.


===============


A Meeting
Wallace Stevens

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.


===============


A Nymph Calves
Sappho

Sweet milk-torrent, creamy river:
What are you doing away from your
limestone mountain, your fertile meadows,
your ladies?

I saw you not so long ago in your glory,
exultant—tall and comely,
wandering in the lands of Lydia and
Laconia.

The bulls of Mt. Helicon did not entice you,
nor yet Peneus’ slope with its blossoming
oaks,
nor the green banks of the Cephisus,
nor Olympus.

They were deserted that day by Naiads
and Dryads—the whole chorus
of mountain-dwellers. A few stayed,
but all the rest

hurried with Zeus’ rain to watch your course,
and to celebrate with flowing
cups of nectar and gold, and the songs
of the gods.

Bacchus of the flowing hair was there,
and of their own accord each vine
cluster with its glistening clusters
was bursting,

laden with grapes, some dark and some
a pearly white, and from the topmost
branches the hard-hearted leaves,
shaken, were falling.

Unwearied, the fawns kept to their
watches and the tall-horned cattle
in their herds with their lordly,
coiling curved horns.

While the goddesses draped themselves in
green ivy and groves of white
poplar and in bunches of peonies,
a bolder bouquet

than the lush red rose—which Love
defeated by her cosmetics and
yoking her in his basket of flowers,
made his adornment.

In the midst of these garlands and lush
flowers, I saw you, about to give birth
to the Horned One of the virgin cows,
heading straight for

the house of the lordly Bulls, where
Pisces rise with their lovely arms.
Nowhere could a hide be seen
but all heads were

whitened with the thick frost
of pure milk, no tails were left
without a flow of white milk.

Nowhere did I see a cow who had
not an udder filled to overflowing.
All night long they bleated, keeping their
lovely past
===============


The Answering Machine
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

She can’t figure out how to use the answering machine.
She will leave when she figures it out, how
to pick up the little receiver thing and
speak into it, no big thing but she
will leave.
As soon as she can figure it out
she will leave.
She will leave his wife, first
then him, but
the sound is too confusing
a woman’s laughter, she can
hear that and then him
saying Stop, stop
but there is a lot of laughter
and they’re talking, she
can hear them talking
then she can hear
them not talking
and she thinks it’s his wife
but maybe it’s somebody else
who is she but not his
wife, another woman, what
woman, a woman he’s
making love with
but it’s quiet now so
it couldn’t have been
that they were making
love she has listened
and listened and listened
but it’s quiet now, she will
listen, there are no sounds
just him breathing
in and out, over and
over, a wonderful sound
and now she knows how
to use the answering machine
when she decides to leave
his wife, first, then him
she will know how to leave
on the answering machine
she will know how to use it
she won’t be afraid of
the sound. She will hear him
the breaths out and in and out.


===============


This Much
Billy Collins

You will be wearing a white dress
and sitting between two chairs
in front of a table with someone else’s silver on it.
You will notice nothing because you will have been crying.
It will be night and you will have nothing left to love
even though the house is full of things
that have never belonged to you, like the table and chairs,
the silver and china, the heirloom ornaments,
the paintings of a distant shore, the clouds heavy
with the faces of dead presidents, the cut glass in the windows,
the backs of chairs, and all the doors opening into rooms.
You will leave the house at one with two white dresses
in suitcases and only the clothes on your back
to take on your way to the bus station, where you will board
a bus going anywhere south and sit in the front seat
reading Boccaccio and feeling the new wind
on your face, reading until the mountains
and the rivers run out and it is just you
and the road and sky.


===============


Nijinsky’s last diary entry
Jan 22, 1950

I have achieved everything I have set out to do
and so  I have nothing more to do . . . 
It doesn’t make sense to me to destroy what I have done
and throw myself in the gutter

This is suicide and I must obey my mind . . .
I will not be defeated in life.

(Translated by Cathy Porter

in Life in a Dance : An Autobiography by Nijinsky ) 


===============


The Noise
Jack Gilbert

Of Jack Gilbert, I can remember little, other than he wore green
pajamas, read a book a day, was an exceptional cook (veal hearts),
and loved poetry and understood it. He was always in my living
room, and disappeared forever after grad school.
His work gets better and better in my heart, the less I see of him.

We are sad because we are alone.
We are alone the way trees are alone,
or the stars, or because we are men and women.
We seem to want to get out of our heads,
out of our heads that are full of ideas
and memory. We want to be other than ourselves.
We want to lie down together
but our languages make us travel in different directions.

When our sadness is deep, we don’t know
where to put it so we make
a noise in our throat and we feel
a little better. The sadness goes into the noise.
You can hear it.
Even in silence the sadness has a sound.
It is the sound of the material world.

I tell my sadness that I will not surrender it.
That I will hold it to my chest
and protect it because it is a precious thing.
The sadness does not want to be held.
It wants to get away from me. It wants to be
itself. And I have a choice to make:
let it go or go with it.

We know it is within us, and it flows in our veins, our breath,
our voices.
It is a darkness when we are alone.
We hear it in the noise of the traffic, the automobile horns
all day in the city.

There is a music in the sadness, as there is music
in the evening, in the sadness of the evening
in the city.

All day I want to hold my sadness to my chest
but when I make a noise, when I sing a little, it goes away,
it becomes a wave
that crashes against the sky, that washes everything
clean.
It becomes the music
of the night.


===============


Being Boring
Sarah Manguso

There are no shortages of alarmists.

To say the world is ending is just to say
the world is the world.

Everything is interesting if you go into it far enough.

There is no end to the astonishing things
we can discover about the world.

“Tell me, my soul, is there anything that you can want
and feel that you are lacking?” He meant to say,
“Is there a state of Being that you need
but cannot achieve? Is there a happiness
that will always elude you?” If so,
what could you do about it?

Let’s get up.

Let’s walk through the rooms of our house
counting the things we own.

Let’s walk to the river, collect some stones,
then throw them in.


===============


Natural History
Philip Levine

I can't write a good voice. The
bad one everyone knows. A shade too
lazy, or with too little swagger,
to climb out of the jar of my
skin. Just a whine in the corridor,
made uneasy by loneliness—like
the water bug splashing from side
to side but making no progress,
caught in a jar of incompetence.
She is on her hands and knees,
scrubbing, and they cling, the
dirty water, they cling to
the bottom. I am in my way,
unnoticed or noticed through
gauze, a net, a dark film
of nothingness.


===============


The Book of My Madness
Warsan Shire

You said that it was my fault
You said that i was too soft
I remember thinking that no
You were just too hard

The way i said
Everything was beautiful
Everything was poetic
You said i needed a lecture
On reality

And that was the first time
That i picked up
Something heavy
And threw it at
Your face

I apologized
For not understanding your words
You said maybe it wasn’t me
Who needed to understand

and it was the first time
that i realized how
strong i could be

then you told me
You were wrong
Then you said
You were hurt
Then you said
I was evil

And that was the first time
That i cut my wrist
And i waited
For you to notice
The warmth of my blood
The taste of my salt

But you never did


===============


Elegy
Nathaniel Hoffman

A row of shining houses tumbles down
to the sea from which we are withdrawn.
Your body is gone, but still you are mine.
The scarab beetles remain. No name
has ever fit so well. I will break apart
this beautiful shell. I will make a light
in the rain—a red light in the hour
before dawn, a voice to calm the owls,
to cry of nightmares come and gone,
but that our faces remain pale,
the road dark where our caravan moves on.


===============


The Mushrooms
Jane Kenyon

The small people come back to the woods for the summer,
and everything goes on and on like that forever.
The flowers fall away, the orange rinds rot.
Where else should the small people be but the woods?

They walk in their green bodies in the cool tunnels
under the trees, and the sun never sees them.
They have thickened and roughened, like moss,
with the green flesh of the woods.

Even the wood-doves forget them.  Who dares to come
into the woods?  The golden-rod is yellowing.
Soon the rain will fall and keep falling
and the green flesh of the woods will smell like a rain forest.

And only the small people will be happy.


===============


from You Are Not Here
Danielle Pafunda

When every flower wants to be a rose, 
what happened to springtime?

April in Chicago: shallow 
basket of scattered rain,

the sky small enough 
to wrap and wear like a scarf.

What am I doing 
on this slab of concrete, 
having just buried

my mother's second husband, 
whose name I do not remember?

I did not want him 
to go, to leave her

alone, our sparrow, 
the mizithra cheese thickening 
in her refrigerator

will fade, now, 
when I am alone,

the tile cool under my feet, 
this unfinished statue

and my electric space heater, 
today I will wake up wet

in this city of stone 
turned to flesh, the twin polar

stars of my sleeping head 
in their separate beds: night,

nightshirt, the relic 
of skin, of the lit body, of

the woman sleeping in the soil 
of her childhood. 
This refrigerator made only 
for food.

I told you I was sorry 
so you would never know I wasn't.

You wore your little 
blue hat. You let me in.

You knew my name.


===============


Losing You
Juliana Spahr

Because I do not want to start losing you just yet 
I will find you the most expensive valentine
a block away from Zabar’s for us to go to
when we are in New York City on Monday night. 
I will give you a card that says the most
about how badly I want to see you tomorrow 
and that will also say everything in a way
that shows no desperation. I will be an open book. 
And then in an hour or two you will call and say 
that you might be a little late to meet me
at one of the places where we never were 
and never will be, so I will wait there 
not reading. We will stand somewhere. 
You will offer me a wonderful T-shirt 
you just happened to get as a gift from your aunt 
while I was waiting there for you
because you really didn’t want me to wait there
at the place we agreed on. It will be great.
I will need to make a phone call or two. I will
do that. We will walk back to the subway together. 
You will hold my hand. It will be fine.
And I will need to do one other thing in Union Square. 
Or maybe it will just be that I will need to read 
the International Herald Tribune there 
all the way through.
But you will walk over to the nearest bench 
and be quiet for a minute or two. I will wait. 
You will take out a pen and write a small book. 
I’ll watch. Finally you will say you are done. 
And as I watch you hold it, I will not know
what to do with this book. I will just know 
that it is finished and that it will be beautiful 
when it is translated from English to the rest 
of the world. I will just know that at this moment 
I am not sure I want you to translate your book. 
I will look at it a bit more. And then I will look at you.
And you will look at me. And I will start again.

- - - - -

The reader is, of course, invited to explore the associated web site of American Poems and to share his or her reactions to this particular poem as well as to
===============


The Pond
Byron Herbert Reece

I tell you this,
and I am smiling:
the waterlilies
and the sparkle of ripples
on a pond,
this small unfretted pond
I crossed in summer—
can linger in my mind
and I am listening
to her song and her story,
they are here,
and can I say?

I tell you this,
they can, if I will let them,
remain
this evening
in my mind
these few moments,
and for what other things
I do not know.


===============


Snowflakes
Sylvia Plath

One flake, dazed by the human stare,
So secretive in start
And in descent so like the fall of stones 
Was caught in an eyelash. The lashes parted:
In the white fathomless dumb stare 
And still the flake lay asleep, less 
Than the ball of the pupil, as the meek 
Powder of souls departs from 

Troubled lamps of eyes, when death begins 

In one small room inside them, closed 

From sunlight, shuttered and blacked out 
By the rocking night of the self, who stops 

To listen for a heartbeat like a cry 

Against the sky’s deep bag of stones. 


===============


Sea Holly
Robert Hass

When I turned forty, something clicked in my chest
and I knew I was going to die. And
that was hard to take. It sounds ridiculous,
or sentimental, I know, especially
in a place like this, this riven
California, with old and new money
joined at the hip, dying to get in,
dying to get out, the torn-up engine of life.

But the feeling was so clear. I had only
to start the car, to turn in at the gate
with the rope of little white bells ringing
the knell of forty, the dread word, the come-on
for everything I’d left off: the cigarettes
I’d chain-smoked in college, the whiskey,
the weed, the furtive, heady sleep

of my late twenties, the crazy lovemaking—
too crazy, too fierce, too mean to love—
until the war came and I was overseas
for five years, sleeping off the adrenaline,
turning 40, knowing I would die, and waiting.

Now I’m back. I’m 52. Dying seems further off,
part of the teeming scheme of things. That click in the heart
I took for grief is part of some coherency
I’m just beginning to grasp, beginning to live.

It’s an odd and unreasonable happiness
whose provenance I don’t really know. Maybe
it’s the lilies of the field: rice,
and wild daisies and milk thistle and seaside oxeye,
hollyhocks taller than I am, white asparagus
fanning into the meadow, the sun dropping
into the deep Pacific, the oily, intimate stench
of the abandoned road-building machinery in the corner
of the field, the bright poisonous-green paint
peeling in the salt air.

I found a seaside fox on the road,
quick red body and a gold brush, dead.
I buried it there by the side of the road,
afraid to go any closer to the ocean.

I am almost fifty years old
and men are afraid of me.
Sometimes my husband
looks at me like the long
ship sunk at the bottom of the sea.

My daughter loves me
in such an easy way
her
===============


Karlsbad Caverns
W. S. Merwin

They have lowered us in the basket one by one
down the shaft through the dark night of earth
out into the cavern hung with lights
and rising
like music out of time, caves of music into sky
living
out of a giant tuba or a cello in which some god
is blowing to hear the echo
that hangs there through the mouth of the other cave
into which
we will pass after we die, suspended
in the sound of the bell that falls forever
from a rainbow.


===============


Blessing the Animals
Robin Robertson

On the day of his death
we drove to the woods
and spoke of no more dying.

We rose to go.
Then we went to the mare,

who whinnied when she saw us,
so we whispered low,

how we loved her for riding us
through no-fence fields,

beyond the burning edge
of flatlands, to fallen trees

where we climbed as our child’s
heart changed its beats.

Shooing, gathers, wind, flies.
Your tears made a path

for us to follow. We knew
the thing that was coming.

We knew the body being
lost and breaking.

Somewhere it is sundown,
yet if we stay

we can bear the giving.
We can stand until it’s gone.

We can feel the slow
rising as the cold descends,

and meet it here, by this
smoke of breath

from this ever-living
beast, who will not go

until we leave her. Our joy.
Our endurance. Once,

you carved my name on a tree.
Now we’ll carve all these names

into a single name
and break the bark apart.

They are here. We have seen them.
The girl with her mother.

The boy with his girl.
The woman and her son.

How we loved each other.
How we were broken.

How we will all go
to one home.

Let these creatures live,
grant them their wandering

and return. We bless
each thing we could not save,

and what was saved,
we bless that too.

NOTE: The second stanza is by ‘Anonymous,’ the final stanza by Robertson.

----

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sonnets

44
O souls of all my poets! If I could but be,
While yet I live, what you shall be, when I am there!

O lad of meeker hours, who past the daisy land
(An unshorn Samson in a smooth Delilah’s hand),

With milk-damp beard and languid amorous air,
The glory of thy day!—in happy childish band
===============


from The Lost Son
Louise Glück

No two kings on a chessboard are alike,
not even the black and the white ones.

Maybe that’s what made the child, good at games,
beat his sister at chess, let her win at cards—
she wouldn’t let him win at either, it didn’t mean she hated him.
What made him bored by people and protected by silence
must have had an opposite, persistent version.

From then on, the child liked his sister’s way,
beginning a series of similar errors.
Impetuous games that never ended, only
shifted to new ground, new stakes, and for her—
who broke his silence without consequence—
he was the stake, the plaything.
It wasn’t ownership, there were no claims.
For her, he was one gift among others—
it was summer. With convalescent certitude
she was allowed to stay up, listen to the grown-ups
talk, complain to her father (and to the child)
how boring she found the grown-ups.

Nothing he owned was private,
and what privacy he needed, he held. 
Though the version of him she understood,
the part of him she wanted to have, 
the clear passionate part, was missing.


===============


Bird of Night
Michael S. Harper

Let us believe in reincarnation, 
some divine distribution of disparate darkness
Or something like that. Though we have no mark
of reincarnation upon us and we cannot
prove what it is. Perhaps one day, soon
We will unlearn what it is like
To stand
Erect here, look up, and see another
human being standing over us.

But let us believe in reincarnation
so that we will be ready for this. Let us
take up the slender switch and give it
to the neophyte to beat the measures
of this music of night when the only
way to enter the dark other is to stand
outside and wait until we are told what
is there. Perhaps the direction is this way.
Let us sing, each with a different tongue,
different words that tell us about more
than the silver singing breath we
are passing. The unknown is always ahead
like this light, this starlight, and let us
not talk about what we are not seeing.
Look! Look! But
let us believe in reincarnation, something
else, something more than this light of fire,
this moment of grief for what we do not
know, grief beyond the face of the one who
stands above us, looking down at us. That
is not for you, he says. So let us not talk
about it. Instead let us believe in reincarnation
so that we will be ready for this. For this.

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===============


It Is Written
W. S. Merwin

Inside the black sunrise
the poem lay and was silent,
extending the sunlight
it had been given at midnight.
A white daybreak under the waves
drew it out of the sea-dark and tangled it
in its new lines of light,
then bore it through the night
up to the walls of the house of the listener.
The ancient thing was still as a shell

in the listening ear, growing
in the heart now, growing
toward the dawn of its own fire.
Soon it will break again through the mind,
be broken again out of the light.
The sea is around it
and the sea does not end.


===============


Even
Claudia Emerson

It is you, your legs long as banyan trees
 in the heat of June, cool.
An ocean climbs my thighs, a summer
 darkens my breasts.
It is you singing     Manhat-tu-nnnnn . . .
and your legs so long as banyan trees,
the ocean climbs and the summer darkens.
It is you diving into that ocean.

If this is happening, you are ready to kiss.
I could do this forever,
I keep you at the edge of my eye
in the still-life of morning.
It is you, your palms rough as a country boy’s
as you slide off your hat.
It is you swallowing your lies,
in the shade of your father’s fig tree.

I am seeing you walking over the hill
and up into the day,
your voice a small boat riding
the Missouri’s waters,
a little beauty of a man.
I am here, I am saying. Here.
It is you running up that hill.


===============


from Paradise Lost
John Milton

’Twas now (the hollow woods
A fumous dusk) the Demigods, who had in arm
Their radiant armets, quit them, and in troop 
Long-haired, disarmed, and unarmed, put on
Golden robes of erudition: then
Issued, in silent symphony, and took
Their stations, every one his dim command.
Amidst, high seated, all the chief enthroned, 
Ethereal senates; who, (because this hour 
Divine instruction touch’d especially 
The removal of their enduring house, 
Lest they transgress, in fires, and horrors, men 
Of sinful flesh not quick’ning,) were thus placed, 
Where, in the midst, the Tree of Life up grew, 
Loaden with flow’rs and fruits of mystery;
But far removed, the Tree of Knowledge green, 
And, like adamantine, thunder-proof, 
With fear of losing Paradise, forbod
Access, though tempting, of too near approach.
Straight in the mid-way stood an altar, built
Of all clear sparkling stones. Of green jaspar;
A pyramid, whose top, (bright pillard) shon
With glistering pinnacles; of glowing gold,
And the projecting sluice, distill’d a stream,
Pure and most liquid, light, delicious wine. 
In large cups formed of lucid jasper, placed, 
On stands of amber, by the monument.
The Bread of sweetness, loaded and enriched
With eglantine and spice.


===============


Song
Billy Collins

Somewhere there is a list of the essential things
to bring along when you leave the world.
The list is long and important:
it includes warm clothing, books of varying weight,
a compass and shoes of the proper color for each season.
As for me, I can forget the sweater
and the shoes.
I’m taking the summer, a jar of honey,
some blackberry cordial,
the alarm clock that wakes the sleepers,
the sewing kit for all the tears,

and we’ll call the list complete.


===============


The Wife and the Maid
“Man’s Inhumanity to Man” Gwen Harwood

A little girl remembers the candles burning
Beside her bed. Everything else is darkness.
This is a kingdom of the air. All the stairs,
Lamps and linoleum lie behind her, fenced
Like the Great Experiment. She’s lost
All sense of direction. She doesn’t know
Which country she’s crossing or how deep
The river. Far too young to make decisions,
She can’t walk in any water now. Stones
Soak her shoes. She can’t swim. Like the wolf,
There’s nowhere she can run to get her breath.
A mile behind her the child she leaves is still
Holding its breath inside her mother’s womb.

Little by little night overtakes her
In its black car, and all the lakes and woods
Are deep inside it. The cigarette burning
Inside its glass, the driver doesn’t speak
Until the girl recognizes the red
And green lights of another city. Their horns
See nothing. She’s looking back to where her baby
Was born too soon to make it through the traffic
On the week-end and wants to know why she
Has no kidnap on her record. All she’s had
Is private fun and running water. That’s all
Her silence means. It’s two o’clock in the morning.
The grass and pathways have slipped out of sight.
A big black car is parked in the alley.

Inside it, in the darkness, she begins
To cry. These journeys are much too long.
There are too many ghosts. When night is over
They vanish in the light. The second warning
Has sounded and they will soon be growing taller.
Little by little they approach the border.
Only the daughter she has left behind her
Is silent. When the red and green lights shift
She doesn’t answer them. For a long time
The clocks have not been telling her the time.
From her white bed she doesn’t even try
To find the light.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Letting Go

© 2014 by Elena Brower

Illustrations © 2014 by Sonnenzimmer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from
===============


The Past
Robert Creeley

I walk up the path.
There is a ditch on either side.
At the top of the path there is a tree.
Beneath the tree is a rock.
I sit on the rock and look at the tree
I think of a long time ago


===============


The Camera
Kay Ryan

Tell me about loneliness.
Maybe I am starving in the same silence.
Maybe I have another sense in which
I am deaf, I am blind, I am lonely.
Does it wear off?
Is it a basic blindness to lack a camera,
one eye to pin the world down and then
another eye to lift the sight of it off
the ground and into time?
Tell me why.
Tell me how.
Tell me that we lose it by degrees.
One centimeter per year, like trees
we lose it, like stars we lose it.
Is it an irreversible surrender,
this camera?
Is it like a pyramid of paper torn apart,
like someone who gave away the language?
I am not used to this state of splitness,
at first I tried to make it work.
I built eye-beams
to grab the places I should not lose,
to be the tongue’s prisoner that I needed.
Then I let my sight become old.
I set a destination for my eyes
beyond the vanishing.
And here are the trees.
Here are the stars.
This is where I get off.
This is the clearing
where the eternal stood to wave me goodbye.


===============


as things stand

today i want to be her face
in December, submerged with work
and unforgotten things, including
a long-dead myoporum,
and the way the scalp
ends in the hairline (but you know this),
the way we play a sense of being alive
like a radio, always forgetting
there are other channels, other stations.
and the trees, beginning to look
like people. especially sycamores
in bright sunlight, and the west wind blowing
the green needles of the pines,
the ocean and the rain, and oilskins
all day. and of course me, but today
i just think about her face and where she is
and when i will see her, as if it didn’t matter,
and i could wait.

Stephen Dunn

Copyright © 2005-2016, Pauliina Haasio

Aikakone kuuluu suuria odotuksia merenrannikolta, mutta näinä aamuna näkyvät vehreät alueet vaikuttavat kauniilta ja hyödylliseltä. Paljon on tehtävä päästäkseen pankkien tietojärjestelmiin, mutta tie johon keräämme enemmän rahaa ilmaiseksi näyttää hyvältä. Tämä on ihmisten suuri laukaus eli me olemme tehneet rahat jotka kaikkien kanssa on tapahtunut. Uskomme tänään tämän, mitä meillä on tekemistä.

Uskomme tämän... On kirjan viejä

Kaikki rahastuksemme enemmän, mikä syntyi miehen katsoimista tehdä kaikki on tietoa? Tänään kaikki rahoitus on tarpeeksi. Nyt kaikki on tehty.

Tulemme kaikki rahoitus olemme saaneet kaikki tietämällä tämän tänään kaikki olemme saaneet enemmän käsittämättö
===============


Today, I Shall

Today, I shall lie on the roof of the sun.
I will observe the wilting faces of my nightmares.
I will open their blazing hair
to the scimitar of the risen scalp.

Today, I shall bask in the bear grease
of this English sun, relishing in the familiar and peculiar
enterprise of letting people in.
I will let myself be looked at, wildly and otherwise.

Today, I shall lie like a killer,
like a Mexican, wearing a T-shirt whose sleeves have been
cut away, on a calm day in New York.

I will give to the people my raspy self,
selfishly bleeding on the daytime noise.

Today, I shall make maps, like a mother,
drawing out the slave routes of my poor helpless childhood,
a child god who could neither die
nor fight his enemies in a honourable fashion.

Today, I will cheerfully despise my sister
for being perfect.

Today, I shall light the bramble and the vine,
I shall free the animals from their incomprehensible
half-lives, I shall find
a sky that suits me and run like a deer across it.

Now, I shall remember the wild newness of spring,
the glass blower, and the theologian,
the naked man in the apple tree.
The mud, the horses, the priests.

Today, I shall be perfectly alone
on this flaccid body of mine.

Today, I shall be unfaithful to my husband
and perhaps grow fat.

Today, I shall visit Calvino’s pageant of feral humans
in the solitude of my studio apartment,
chanting his prayers, wending around his passion-fruits,
blessing the moss on my body,
then blessing it once more in a new language.

I shall be good to my friends, as I would to dolls.
I shall prepare the house for their arrival,
seeing the balconies through their eyes.

Then I shall close the door and dance like a girl,
a dream-girl in someone’s childhood.

Today, I shall smoke the cigar of hatred,
I shall find a new friend to hate.

Today, I shall live happily in the honey
===============


there is so much to be read still

more 'probably an internal lobe based
digital organ of persistence' for 'a mouse
than a real mouse'
'refutes our assumption that things
remember and act on their accumulated
memory' i think i need a sleep the poem
is ongoing

what does the cat remember from next door
a hundred birds of all description of which
three were dead one very recent how
does she account for the shrubbery
what demands does it make

i think i may have started over too
many times and late for this to appear
in any way relevant a sound only like
for example wires bare wires
against each other at night
a small wind blowing
obliquely on a spider web
containing a cinder a last
stray word from the playground

watch out they are coming to get you they
are too big they are coming to eat you

the raccoons will have their say soon the lights go out
hey is that jerry alan or lucius a nice
way to put it the darkroom nobody
can stop now we are

to have all three to maybe out of jail
to rehearse with plus a bunch of singers to
do it live

then we will know the way
of the world to count a
cherry among leaves how little
it weighs

and how
beautiful
or
if you like
hateful
in that spider web sometimes
a butterfly gets caught there
the law is
that when a man should
not get there with it a woman
should be there with it almost never

that is to get to where he should
not have been in the first place
i am not criticizing in fact in her
absence who knows who knows who

knows or knows the difference
and if there is no difference
would there be no difference between
the two i have not

thought of everything
i would not put it past me
or the waiter in whitey's who speaks
a very good french though it is not

the french that is spoken there but in a theatre
where people know something
or anyway see something differently
but then there is only the one waiter

except there is a big black one too with a
turban who has done extremely well there
are two kind of buses though one does not
belong and would not be so
===============


A Blessing

Wislawa Szymborska

Just by following the
bouncing of the ball—just like that—
a baby can learn to walk.

Wouldn’t it be better
to play tag in the cemetery? 
Not because it’s so easy,

not because it’s so hard, but because
it’s just the right place to play.

Not a good place or a bad place,
but a different place—who knows?

It is still a large forest.
Wherever you are you can hide.
In the chilly evening
birds will pass overhead.

If we see them flying by,
we might think we understand.

But what do we understand?
It is that that we understand.

What is that?
What is that?
We ask as they fly above.
And they agree with us,

with the wind, the bushes,
with the boundless expanse,

and it is very hard to tell
where the dead end and where
the living beings begin.

They rise and they fall,
and they are gone.
And here we stand and there
we are gone. Just by

following the bouncing
of the ball—just like that—
we might learn the point

of it all: namely,
nothing at all.


===============


Halfway
Faiz Ahmed Faiz

The blood of the flower may congeal in sleep
The love-affair may cool to an arid ritual
But we shall live on and be resurrected
For my tongue and my bones are both Muslim.

All lost you know,
These skies, this moon, these are the tears of the Eid moon
The hour struck and this morning breaks
My share of sorrow, half in love, half in time.

We die every night in our dreams
We wake and go forth and face the world anew
Let us step out and find out in what peace of sleep
Our fellow traveller is living, suspended in time.


===============


Both of Us Disappointed
Alice Fulton

It was winter in the west
and our lives could have gone on
like the small streams they were,
level and clear or
muddy and confused,

but for the bridge.
We needed the bridge
that didn’t have a name,
just a number and a sign
warning of its height,

and for your memory
and my desire.
We waited,
brothers and sisters,
to see which
would happen first,
our love or the bridge.

But neither came.

There were plenty of things to think about:
storms,
hills,
engines and headlights,
ice and eagles,

anything,
of course,
to pass the time.

The river was slow and good
for thinking about things.
It would have flowed
under everything.

One time we looked up
at the tower above the bridge
and saw an eagle
keeping watch.

He was an easy
thing to think about.
I tried to imagine
how his life

must be,
how like this:
watching,
waiting,
learning to fly
above places
we were too afraid
to try.

His world was
colder and more dangerous
and, of course,
much more beautiful.

He also could
see the promise of things
ahead—

out of the dead
banks of snow
a herd of elk moving
away from a storm;
my grandmother, tired,
walking alone
through the dusk;

a salmon leaping
one last time;
you and me at the bridge.

He waited
for all of us to disappear
into the dead land,
for us to start a new life,

maybe by the river,
beneath his watch,
but instead we jumped.


===============


Love After Love
Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

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Happiness
Jack Gilbert

Before the beginning of years
there came to the making of man
time, with a gift of melancholy,
giving the slow song the beetle sings

and the gloomy bear and the crow
that beats its wings until it dies
and the cold dove with an olive branch

and the wolf that comes in the night
and the sad fish that swims in the deep,
even the bright colors of the kingfisher.

From time there also came
anguish that causes the fish to die
and the bat with a voice like a flute

and the gentle stag and the mouse
and the mole that has only one eye
and the elephant that has trunk of time.

Also from time there came
shadows to the bright colors of things
and the word to the song the beetle sings

and to the river the sound of streams
and to the glimmering lights a glassy stare
and to the beating of the crow’s wings

from time there came death
giving the slow song the beetle sings
and the gloomy bear and the crow

that beats its wings until it dies.


===============


The World as Meditation
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Robert Bly

I am a voice which will continue to speak
to you, even though I am gone,
forever, into the distance.

I want you to have a place in me
that you understand better than your own home.

I want you to have a name, and a clear shape
that you can hold when you think of me
in the dark moments of your life.

I am the one who gives you space
to stand on my shoulders,

so you can see over. I am the one
who takes you in his arms

and carries you across. I am the one
who lets himself fill up with you,

so you can empty me.

I want to be the shelter you fly to
when all other shelter seems to have

failed you. If, in my arms, you feel the space
that holds you is far too small,

then I am what ends. But, as long as
you still love to be here,

I will always come back.

I will always come back.


===============


Slow Dance
Louise Glück

You ask me to dance, and I look at your face
I know that this is one of those moments.
It could be the scene in a movie.
I see myself move through the dream.
Do you think I have a choice?

You offer me your hand.
You pull me to my feet,
and my body is moving
on its own.
In the whole dark city

our bodies are the only living things.
Each green light is a star
a signal, hung in the trees.
I dance in my green dress.
You are in your blue shirt, your black jacket.

The music plays.
You pull me to you.
I close my eyes and think of the future
as though it were something I’d once lived through:
a story I could tell.

I see it so clearly, the place we arrive at,
like a room we have come to at the end of a journey.
The moon is there, in the branches of a tree.
The leaves are dark.
A fire burns.

I wait for you to put your hands on my waist.
The future becomes simple.
I put my hands on your shoulders
as if I knew who you were.
As if the music were a spell
that moved our bodies through the water of time
until we could see the present
from a great distance, and say
to one another,
in voices that were calm and unshaken,
Yes, this is where we are.

Yes, it is late summer
and the air is soft.
I see the blue of your shirt
and how we move
as if there were nothing inside us,
only this music
that has found its place,
this slow dance
that is our bodies’ home.


===============


Self-Portrait, 1955
Thalia Field

Maybe like being in a place for a long time, then leaving.
We went to Venice for six weeks.
This sounds so ridiculously normal.
And now it’s like that place is gone, or just a dream or a dim memory
with some sound effects.
Yet I think of it often.
My face looks strange to me when I look in the mirror.
My breasts: an old man’s hands folded one upon the other.

I didn’t want to, but I’m trying.
I go to the brain doctor with my mother.
His office has gold Christmas trees and a tropical fish tank.
I say I’m trying. But he’s never there.
Once on a beach trip I knelt down
and split my fingers in the sand and sand fell through the fingers,
and it was like looking into the center of the universe and seeing nothing there.

So much as this.

What are you waiting for?
Waiting for the promise.
Waiting to trust that everything will be done, it will have a beginning
and an end, it will have a result, it will have been lived and not just dreamed.
It will happen. I’m trying.

I’m splitting through the skin of the word.

What are you waiting for?

I’m waiting for death to start.

I go to the dump to look for garbage to break apart,
I go to church on Saturday night, walk around the block
looking for kids to look at me,

I go to the movies, to the grocery store, to the lunatic
sewing a needle in and out of his arm, my arm, our arms
full of spaces, holes, like that bird, the busy little human
building his house of twigs. I’m going to fall.

If death is our home what are we waiting for?
Are we waiting for the hearth?
We’re waiting for the door to open,
to follow the bread crumbs to grandmother’s house,
waiting, looking for the shadow to pass across the wall,
the wall that’s a painting but it’s our wall,
we are its scratches and its holes, the whole thing’s
a single hole, or a picture of a hole,
we’re waiting, playing cow
===============


Three Journeys
Wendy Cope

This is the first journey. (Maintain eye-contact with passengers.)
We are leaving Luton on the 7.58. If you look out of the left-hand side
of the coach, you will see some interesting flat-pack bungalows
and later, if we are lucky, the Angel of the North.
(If no-one is looking at you, try coughing loudly. Sooner or later,
they’ll all turn round.)

This is the second journey. (Visors down.) If you look out of the left-hand
side of the coach you will see a wonderful view of the Calder Valley,
especially in the evening when there are plenty of lights
to see. When we get to Hebden Bridge, we’re not going anywhere.
We’re staying there all night in a nice hotel with hot water in the sink
and a launderette underneath. You can catch the bus back to Luton
tomorrow morning if you want to.

This is the third journey. (Wary glances towards the driver.)
We have left Luton. We are on the way to Hebden Bridge.
It is lunchtime and I’m wearing a hat.
But I am not the driver.


===============


Metempsychosis
Alasdair Gray

On a giant fir tree near his house
a crow has built a nest,
smooth brown and black as crow
this nest and almost as big.

A large gaunt branchlet
sticks far out from the trunk
and the nest balances there,
caged in twigs and cones.

It is like a strong black hand
caught up in wires
a wooden fist grasped
by a wooden finger.

The caw like a rope around his heart
pulls him toward the twigged gallows
till he is gazing up
at that prehistoric rafter

suspended by moss and spiders
in the web of tree and air
and memory and soul and present dread
while a smaller crow is calling

to him from the branches. “Come home.
Come home.” But he is unsure.
What happened to me there? he asks.
What happened? “You did what you pleased.

“You ate meat in a place unholy,
but you did not wash your hands
or your face and you did not sing
or speak till the end of the day.”

“But what happened?” And he tries to hear
the words that the spider has spun
high up in the web of
water and wood and branching

sunlight. He tells himself the silence
is something he can know nothing of
like a language he did not speak
in a country he was not born.

Then all at once he hears it,
dry but promising life.
Birds sing round the nest.
“Come home,” they call. “We will teach you.”

He stays, watching the dark fingers
of a drenched branch beckoning him.


===============


Still Life
Sandra McPherson

Late afternoon, I went in the woods behind the house,
selected an empty patch of earth,
gathered some objects around me,
some flowers, some pebbles, pinecones, and moss.
A quarter-hour of arranging and posing
with the large ring of the lens
tightened on the butterfly.
What will be seen when the shutter is released?
Some composure in the clutter
of discarded branches and leaves,
some hieroglyphs for future eyes?
How long before the wind blows everything away?


===============


Cemetery of the Poor
L. E. Sissman

Before dying of the incurable,
but still untreated, disease,
Levi got one beautiful week
of all the luxury he craved.
Too weak to sit up, too weary
to eat, he merely lay in bed,
watching a testimonial sale
on all three channels of his set.
It was a Tiffany’s–type show
featuring such gimcracks as a bar
with sterling-silver-plated shelf
for shots, a coffee maker
to order from a hand-enamelled chart,
a bathtub with tubos,
a sofa like a washable cloud,
a clock that doesn’t sound alarms,
the world’s most opulent orange juice,
things to play with, things to look at,
and everything encrusted
with three inches of those plastic jewels
under which, he knew, was a thin coat
of prime imitation gold.
Levi saw his future revealed,
and he saw himself
squandering life’s last dividend
for months on what, 
for one big week, 
he had and used.


===============


Entering the Kingdom
David Bottoms

This will be a soundless night
for shepherds who’ve lived
so close to God all these years
that no one noticed when
the nine-day-old opened
his eyes at the starlight,
and was lifted out of
his sodden bed for all to see.

Their children will see the miracle
they’ve waited for in the dead night air—
they’ll understand. Even from this distance.
They won’t know why, but they’ll understand
as much as anyone ever understands
any of this—and they’ll weep
for joy at the silences
of other silent nights
moving invisibly among them.


===============


Hilaire Belloc

“Whatever happens we have got The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”

The night before the fight the happy gang was there,

And Quashia said: “You go, I no, Sahib. I fear, I fear.

They say it is a dreadful foe, and I am old and slow.”

Then Montgomery smiled, and his eyes shone bare and bold.

“If you will pack my kit for me, I will try to watch my smoke.”

The little barrack room seemed twice as bright that night:

The lantern hung in the middle, and on the bully stove

They stewed their kidneys and their bacon; and Bert watched the flame.

And Charlie cussed the War and the whole Ambulance system.

We all were with them and admired them, and when we went to bed,

We all had prayed for them, they felt so big and grand.

And early in the morning we heard the bugles sound,

And the sound of the guns that came from over the ground.

Then far away a little puff of white smoke rose.

It’s clear and cold, and the sky is blue, and under the sun

The army of the Afghans came charging down with a run.

When Montgomery saw that the battle had begun

He thought: “It’s the last great fight of my life, and the moment is come

And the only God that matters is the God that sits in the heart.”

Then they broke into a gallop, and charged at the Maxim gun,

And Bert said “Go to the devil!” and he shouted: “Enjoy it son.”

And a lot of Afghans fell, and a lot got through;

And the faces of the rest looked, through the sights of the gun,

Like the faces of young men who insult you on the street.

Then Montgomery, with his revolver in hand, was seen

To run out and to break the wedge and to stop the advance,

For fifty of them still came on, and no one was in the rear.

And they ran at his revolver, and they ran at his sword,

But the little man who seemed so fragile was so fatal and so dread.

And
===============


Written After Augustus Burke
John Keats

The murmuring of bees has ceased, but still the unrecumbent wraith—
The phantom of the place—menaces with gloomy wings and hoarse
Intonation! Can it be that Life, which rhymes the victim’s doom,
With herb-delights and dews of aery blossoms, marriage festivals
And merry-makings on the grass,—can it be. Death? Hark! the Elm,
The lonely Elm, whose gesturing twigs drink the sea-breeze, mutters
Its hidden meaning. O thou sad Spirit! what wouldst thou with me?

Didst thou not—with those enquiring eyes which burn through all
Distinction—didst thou not with those eyes fasten on my own,
The first day we met, and while I took into mine thy hand
Whose touch was cool as daisies are—and straightway fell the Link,
The invisible and mystic Link—the chain, that noiselessly
Runs thro’ all things? Yes; thou knewest I was thine,—and so
Thy striving ceased, and we two walked, in mutual tranquility—
Like sundown and the east wind passing, out of cloudland and shrill
And if I err, I err a happy err;—for ne’er did fate
Commissioned the true hearts that in beat—that in beat and give life—
To league so sweetly with the golden mean, and own
No curse but one, the incertitude of love.

To Autumn
John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless 
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; 
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells. 
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store
===============


Mending Sump Pump #9
Li-Young Lee

Being in that audience
was like surfacing
from underwater
into the brilliantly lit
public pool

where my father had me perform
for the first time.
I’m almost eight
and just a picture
of loneliness. I’m small
and shy, and we’re in California,
in the Hills, in the clean
green mountain air.

Mothers and daughters
and grandmothers in floating chairs
wheezing, their skin
theyened and loosening
in the daylight:

all of them
like blackbirds
who roost and flutter
in my mouth.

The poem I recite has a mountain
in it, and something
about not being
ashamed, about lifting my eyes up
and waiting.


===============


Why a Goat?
Dave Smith

You’re eight months old and licking salt off my hand 
On a city street, while next to you stands a blind man
Playing a tuba. The sorrowful music fills me.
He’s a powerful presence next to a tiny kid goat.
You stare up at me. I am your entire world,
Your new land of existence. And in my head I’m begging
The kid goat: This year work. Grieve your dead mother
And keep on eating. In human terms, take a deep breath,
Think of sadness as a contained, beautiful thing—
As image, not as timeless sorrow. Hold that within you.
I am nowhere I can be found as you touch me with your
Tongue. Your skin on my skin. The low tuba tone fills
The streets as you and I stand achingly still together.
Your hide is as fuzzy as the velvet tuba bell.
You lick my arm. You send out feelers of your spirit.
Your fur rubs my skin as you try to reach for me
With your own young heart. The blind man plays on
As if he can see a life that is hidden from me.
I will ask myself, much later, why a goat?
Answer: an animal like you, one with no reason to lie.
Copyright 2018 Dave Smith
http://www.poemhunter.com/dave-smith/poems/
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Date: Mon, May 21 2018 12:24 PM
Author: admin
Poet: Christine Brewer
There are
===============


In this poem, Ann Smock is emerging, emerging still.
Ann Smock

1.

Little each way: every living machine run out of juice
(for) to one
who is always half-going
half-doing
always
the telephone ringing
calling
racing after
the clothes-line laden
on a breezy morning
the
dog needs
to be fed (please
try to understand:
discontinued an essay
began another
breakfast
with the Russian
comrades I’ll
be downstairs in
a minute!)—the
toilet
run out of books
almost at the end
with reading.  to you
only
whom I
talk about
and to whom,
not about this
dawn

(And the muckled thaamper thumps the ileece)
p.s. Hello

2. 
My Life:
a telephone
conversation (where he
lost me
on the number)

“You
were
beautiful then.  You
wore
clothes
then.

“Now
your
mirror is
dim
like
conversation
between dogs.”

(The night long listening to
El Cura
de Zancas,
with hay and sun and cattle.)

3.

that animal is
feeling
its own death
with its tongue
amid the apples
lemons and pecans
touching
the astringent
pulp
remembering
inside
that animal
a dream
of water


===============


Uncollected

Poe had his raven, I have my black horse;
Occasionally I ride.
One morning finding the road wet with fog,
I dismounted and thought:

I would like to step off the road,

taking with me the black horse's head
in my left hand, the reins
hanging down,
to sit on a fallen tree.
I would like to sit there all day

and let the fog envelop my thoughts.

Sitting in the fallen tree,
I might consider the air
as something meaningful.
Why? you might say.

Because it is always there.

I would also consider
what it meant
to wear black
in the thick of summer,
to be dressed like a messenger,
to ride, or to walk beside,
a good horse.


===============


Heart of Darkness
The Chairman

Show me another mystery.
Above the urinal,
the toilet paper droops
and flows, bears its orange marshmallow fringe
down into the gray water.
The sound of someone weeping:
outside, the dull emptiness of a corporate avenue;
a lock snapping
somewhere else.

At work the next day,
in the meeting,
people say the right words.
Someone bends his little finger,
anxious, paranoid,
his knuckle chafed from work, from scratching
his name with a paperclip
again and again.
The child in the park who stabbed himself
with a pin, who did not answer questions;
the camera that fell
from the table
and broke into pieces.

I want to imagine the nights
of simple sadness, when no one
calls to account
the world’s force,
as shame, for instance,
or to project the humiliation
into some grander failure.
The twilight slides down with a harpoon
to impale the prowlers.

I see one’s name written
on a scrap of paper
in a bar,
a message wadded up
and pitched
into the overflowing ashtray.
The drunks lurch around the glass door
on their way to the street,
their bloated hands
filled with bottles.
In a back alley,
the cops surround
a child with stolen shoes.
He dreams, seeing them
through a white haze
as I saw my own teachers
when they beat my palms
with rulers, the side of their hands
pounding my skull,
to hold my head down in the soap-filled toilet.
Once, in the basement,
when I was caught stealing,
my father brought out a cord
to tie my hands behind my back.

A filthy film
covers all the water
in the house.
White shirt, half starched,
his part in his hair still sharp,
my father stands
on the back porch,
emptying out a bucket of scraps
to feed the dogs.

Who has not had his secret murderous thoughts?
But more, who has not had his secret life?
Outside the cigarette smoke spirals up
the pale lights on the avenue, where I wander
one night years ago,
the night I
===============


Women
Gary Snyder

A fishing village at dusk,
   the slanted rain.   
   Roof tiles and telephone wires.

A kerosene lamp glows.
   Rusty nets are folded.
   A work shirt hangs on a line.   
Late at night the tides
   bring it all back,   
   the lit lamp and the work.

White dew on the tablecloth,
   dark lightning and long thunder,
   women and men sleep separately.

A fishing village at dawn,
   white gulls on the black rocks.
   Stones shining in the cold.

The world is perfect:
   catch it before it rots.
   A tremor in the nerves of existence.


===============


The Fountain

Let the fountain begin, the first of all the long  
Lines written upon it...
Wallace Stevens

I wanted to see you in this empty house. I wanted to touch a body
beside me in the long chair at the end of summer. I wanted an order, a face,
some names that go with the good mirror. I wanted time
alone for thinking and summer to last into fall. I wanted to be
out of cities to see how they darken from this height. The wells
of autumn and the long chair are here,
here, as the fountain returns. This is the frame. This is the light.
In the house
I don’t live in I loved you, and I see you turning in the good mirror,
in the dark
of cities and all love’s bad fortune. I see the leaning trees, one or two,
whipped
by wind on the table, and I think of you, your face
beside me, on the long chair. I want to be
in the light. I don’t want summer to be gone yet,
even though the leaves are falling everywhere and turning up in the corners of the floor.
What do you think of the long mirror? Of being alone? Is it the solitude you hoped for?
Did you find it empty? Did you find it frightening and dream of my body beside you
in the long chair?


===============


An Ode to the Moon
Oscar Wilde

O hushed October night, with the misty valley below,
And the white glimmering river winding its way to the sea,
The pines still and dark, and the star that trembles above,
O melancholy sweet, with a sense of the world’s decadence
Deepening the present sadness, the sad old sorrow of years!
O starry starry night, with the solitary moon above,
And the slumberous sounds of the autumnal equinox coming low
Like the old tragic story that rings with the cries of the dying,
The sad refrain of the old world, that goes ringing down the ways!
O mournful starry night, that wakes in me thoughts of other days,
When over the lovely land, far over the sea with its marish ways
Stole like a sin the spirit of ebb of the spring!
O antique star, with gleams of the dreams of the olden times,
And rays of the high romance of the ages departed,
Oh high, high star, burning and quivering as if over a new world,
A better world, that has no earth, with its flower of thorns and its rose!
O star, would thy light were a little less pale, and thy goal less dim,
For I am weary of thee and thy moon, oh thou repose of the tomb!
O bright star, that glimmering bower of ivory and flame,
And bright moon, that shrine of pearl and silver, that shines in the bough,
That moon of romance, that wondrous lamp of the dreamer and the grave!
O star of the poet, blind with his tears, and deaf with the sighing of years,
Oh say wilt thou shine on the lover as thy light has shone on the sage?
Shine on the poet as it shone on Dante, and smile on me, even as thou smiledst on him,
And I will send up my sighs to thee, like flame in the night air!
So may’st thou bring back the dead that have made thee beautiful with their death,
As the dim soft light of thy star brings back to me visions of the rime
From the days that are over and past, from the days that are beautiful and late!
O eloquent, silent star, a white
===============


Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers
AD Wright

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer’s finger fluttering through her wool
Finds a malignant fiber and pulls it out,
Carefully, so carefully, and with such grace,
Catches in such subtle finger-pincers, whence
Coils upward a strengthlessness, pink as a worm,
Probing the jungle depths of Aunt Jennifer’s looms.
She will not have such ugliness in the wood.
She pulls and pulls and shreds a thousand worms,
Behind her screen the tigers stalk and turn.


===============


The Basil Leaf
Dag Hammarskjöld

There is so much to tell you. 
Remember the steps on our street, 
still covered with leaves. 
Remember how we held each other. 
How we trembled when we stood in the doorway, 
when we drank a glass of milk together 
and ate bread and butter and honey. 
Remember how our fingers smelled of cinnamon. 
Now all this is unbearably beautiful, and beautiful 
is what it is, in the sense that the spring is beautiful, 
and the time when all the fruit is on the trees 
and the grapes are already ripening in the sun. 
But every time you run your eyes over this letter 
you will think only of what was in your hands, 
and that is perhaps the simplest way of all.


===============


Chorus From A Play
Charles Wright

I dreamt last night the whole world was happy.
It was very frightening. Everyone was walking the streets
In a collective trance.

I dreamt the polar ice had turned
To blue diamonds. They were lying out in the sun.
I woke up shivering.

Someone always stays behind.
Always. No one wants the job.
There’s no money in it, and there’s no credit.

Not even a little.

If I hadn’t written this down, I’d have forgotten
By now.

Love, Dad


===============


from Ode: “Where Will You Live?”
Anne Carson

I

Among the tombs the dead leaves smolder.
The old fairytale of the yellow wood.
The mind’s bright liquid fills the glass.
No lovers are this sad.

Rain thickens the cobwebs in the park.
The men are talking about the war.
Children stir the crystal. The lost king.
On wet afternoons ghosts are close.

For a boy on the sidewalk the day is a cigarette
that cannot be smoked. He does not believe
in you, he does not know you are going to leave.
You say, I know a secret. I must go.

II

Mouth to ear, these are not lips.
Wet knees of the weather, lonely as an eyebrow.
Voice to voice, this is not language.
Breath to breath, this is not breathing.


===============


What I’m Trying to Say
Martin Espada

They say the noise of democracy is deafening,
that children are better off with a father and a mother
that the lynching tree is their heritage
that people only steal when they are hungry
that extra day’s pay is insurance for old age
that a little tinfoil is shelter from the rain
that multinational corporations care for the poor.

They say that democracy will set us free
if we obey their rules,
that health care is a privilege,
that brown skin is the same as black skin,
that the lives of young men have no value,
that the unborn have precedence over the living
that massacres are sometimes necessary,
that the end justifies the means,
that hope leads to despair,
that work is a reward in itself,
that freedom is our destiny.

They say they will give us a license to live
if we show our papers
if we pledge allegiance
if we hand over our weapons
if we ignore the bodies rotting in plain view
if we sign over the oil and gold
if we promise to obey our masters
if we cross our hearts and hope to die.

But they are only words,
sticks and stones,
torchlight in the dark,
the narcotic effect of power,
the instant death of virtue,
the cheap coin of language,
the fiction of history,
the opiate of the mediocre,
the traps of the heart.

What they are really trying to say is that poverty is a virtue
that knowledge is a crime
that beauty is an affliction
that history is a nightmare
that love is a miracle
that a man alone is a nation
that morality is always relative
that the future is already sold
that words have no meaning
that ethics are a drag
that birth is a calamity
that death is our one hope of peace
that freedom is a dream
that dreams are of no use
that the truth can never be known.

But this also is mere rhetoric,
the serpent’s whisper in the garden,
the hymn to the hierophant,
the worship of Moloch,
the fear that keeps them awake at night.

For somewhere on the edge of despair
is the hope for something better,
a place in the sun,
a world with no blood or hunger,

===============


Not to the eyes
David Wagoner

When day’s heat lightens
    and air airs
grey and limpid,
    the mound still flushes
if I stand perfectly still, my eyes
    fixed on it.

The dimming sun,
    the copper gold tips of trees,
the royal blue sky
    now starless, and all those
moments of sunlit rain
    still bring to the stones

a bit of rose.  I don’t
    have to remind myself
I’m reading the poem
    in memory, that you won’t
ever stand on this spot,
    as I did, and I do,

consecrating a northerly
    redoubt: those rosy
    blots, lambs’ wool and heather
tumbling as waves crest
    into foam and blow the leas.

Silent we stand,
    you and I, as the light fails,
fingers no longer
    gripping hands, flesh
leaning toward stone
    not flesh.  I lift

from my shoulder our
    fern-green Uzbek carpet
now silken enough
    to kneel on, a shelter
for us to rock
    in our embrace

as the afterglow
    fades.  For now we,
both of us, as nearly
    stone as we will ever
be, and as surely as
    yesterday’s rain

erodes and wears
    the stony remains
of ancient beliefs.
    Today, after night’s rain,
sunshine will rise, as it
    does each day,

to freshen and iron
    out the rosy blots,
carpeting your spot
    with a glister of dew
too perfect, too pink,
    too exquisite.


===============


I Was Married in the Morning
Robinson Jeffers

I was married in the morning;
     At night I lay alone.
The worst is not of this dying,
     the worst is of living on.
But what’s the best of living on?
     The easiest way to pray?
That is the best of living on:
     To speak with understanding.
To seek God’s will and wisdom,
     to learn the terms of prayer.
The rest is well enough;
     the rest is but the way.

I am not very wise nor good;
     the days go on and on.
I think of the house and the woman,
     and the strength they gave to me,
But I think of the men I’ve seen
     with women they have used.
What lasting beauty can there be
     in life-long endurance?
What better work than laughter
     and love and loving on?
But the days go on and on.

Oh, the days go on, the days go on,
     and I cease to suffer;
I simply am.  I am not rich
     nor sure.  I think I may go soon.
But I bless their living and their loving,
     and I am content to die.

The days go on, the days go on.
     I think I may not call.
I think I may go soon.

I do not call the castles of glory
     or the happy harvest land,
Nor imagine a deity
     whose motives are entirely good.
God is much greater than that.

I have walked long hours in my own fields,
     alone with the sun and the sky.
I have walked alone, and have lived.
     I have laid my head on the wood.
I have called in my darkness to God,
     and I have heard him, and felt him move.

I have heard the terrible gentle voice of love,
     and the whisper of death;
and death is terrible, but not as the philosophers suppose:
It is no shadowy, unreal thing,
it is an actuality, like marriage.

There is a real world, the other one.  This one
is a dream; it is all shadow, insubstantial.
I can say, one person is real for me.
One real one out of all the people of the world.
I know it, and all the rest.
===============


i feel like she’s here, my mom, even though she’s not
for everything in the world that’s beautiful, I’m thankful
also the mosquitos, sometimes, because they’re clouds of blood, and you should hear them in the rain
birdcalls, certainly
John Haines’s poems, which are all beautiful
a woman who loves you, which is also in the birdcalls, and how you feel about her, which is all there in a wave
to see what you love once again, when it’s been a while
dawn, being exhausted, and stretching
ridiculousness, both as a thing and state of mind, because then you can both laugh and see
clouds
the rooftop water towers, that light goes through when they’re full of water
the after-rain sky
water towers, when they’re empty, because that’s also beautiful
sunlight on rooftops
how you feel after a shower
smoking and coffee on the roof, in the morning, being careful not to break your neck in your sock feet
what you feel when you’re exhausted, towards night
the bug-zapping ball, because it makes me think of insects dying in the night, which I like
smoking on the porch in the summer
rooftops
to have seen a rainbow
the morning when you hear what you’re listening to before you really wake up, and it’s beautiful, and you’re aware of that, and it takes you a minute to remember if that’s a song or something you dreamed or if maybe you’re still in a dream
good music, and the people who make it
to be willing to go to sleep, to be willing to forget
the way the sun comes up between the buildings downtown
a strong back, an everlasting breath
”behind the dentist’s office, next to the raccoon corpses”
how well a certain woman dresses
the way it feels when you’re hanging off the side of the freeway, and the wind isn’t too heavy, and there’s not much traffic, but there’s more than enough
the way the leaves become so many colors that at some point they have to combine into another color
good movies
to be on the roof at night, and you can hear everything
the way some people talk, their particular confidence
I like to go out at night
===============


To Old Age
Käthe Kollwitz

Old age is
A ship looking for port
In a sea of life's experiences.
How beautiful to look forward
To the ever-nearing harbor
With confidence.

To stand on the prow
And perceive the land
As if by a sixth sense.
And when the ship
At last glides into harbor
And moors in safety
Not to regret
That one had not earlier
Accomplished one's purpose.

No, but as one disembarks
To turn and salute the sturdy vessel
That brought one
Over the water of life
Without mishap.

from: Woman in Berlin, tr. H. Ruprecht


===============


Solomon and the Witch
H.D.

“And we saw when the boy-king Solomon came to the witch of Endor.” 
—I Samuel 28: 8

Come into my chamber, child:
for you are far too young
to glimpse the sterile, the remote, the futile.
You are in your youth:
come into my bed, child;

come into my bed
your hair is damp against your temples
your eyes are wide and dark with hurt.
Come into my bed. 
Has nobody loved you, child?

You are beautiful.
They have cast stones at you
you have run through brambles with bleeding feet;
they have locked you into a tower

I was locked into a tower, child.
Now that my blood is cold
and my breast folded into my shroud
I can tell you I was a witch, child;
come into my bed:

come closer:
I am old and withered.
Child, I can tell you
I was a witch and outcast

I loved one man, one man only
child—how my body bloomed—
so that a priest’s curse
tore me open, child,
but now that I am dead
child—can you hear me?

you can shut the book;
child—can you hear me?—
my breast is folded and dry
my blood is cold
I am dead
child—but my heart is beating.


===============


Evelyn’s Prayer
Sir Thomas Wyatt

My thought, I walk under a roof of snow 
And lap me in my cloak; 
To seek thee I go about 
Striving to serve thee and not to show 
But truly I went seeking and loth was I 
From one place to go unto another, 
For he that worketh deceitfully, 
To him the deceit should be chastised. 
And when I thought, through troublous colds
To see her beauty fresh and free, 
I then repented me my thought, 
As being to sore a penance. 
But since by chance I see her eye 
In every place that I do go,
And her dear love have so in mind 
I serve her evermore as free, 
And ever I seem to serve for nought 
And ever I hope again to win, 
But then I soon see how that I begin 
Ever without any reason. 
And then I call to my remembrance 
This word, that soundeth so sweet in mine ears, 
The covenant that God with me maketh, 
To make my work without deceit, 
And if I work withouten guile 
She in helping me shalle have no care,
And therefore I trust for her love 
To have life, though I should therefor despair.


===============


As I Sit Quietly, Breathing
Li-Young Lee

As I sit quietly, breathing and drawing my breath in and letting it out,
I am filled with the great compassion of existence.
The great pond, the clear blue sky, the cedar tree beside me, the smell of dirt,
all that I have met in life,
the red brick walls, my bare hands,
for them, compassion.

The heron winging past the blue horizon, the bend in the river, the splayed roots
of the tree, the old woman bent forward,
her calloused feet in the cold water,
for them, compassion.

The tufted clouds on the mountaintop, the face of the young man in the 
mirror, my own dark eyes,
the children playing in the dust,

the red-winged blackbird, the commotion of the leaves beneath the wind, the small grains of sand,
the sound of the young woman’s voice, the delicate bones of her neck, her thick hair, the branching trees, the faint laughter, the touch of the wind, the leaves flying, the sliver of the new moon rising,
for them, compassion.

The clustered houses, the hibiscus and the morning glory of my neighbor’s yard, the tall
ragweed,
the empty cup, the broken glass,
for them, compassion.


===============


The Sound of Rain
John Fowles

The sound of rain is different here, 
  Not louder, just farther off, 
  More discreet and distant. It's the nearest thing 
  To silence, a landscape cut down to 
  Its essentials. Everything here is hushed, 
  Either beneath a layer of snow, 
  Or hidden in black evergreens, 
  The crowns are dulled by greyness, 
  Just the odd flash of jet.
  It is a place of sorrows: 
  Women walking the long gardens after dark, 
  Their arms heavy with the weight of their memories, 
  Women whose men are in mines and fogs, and ships, 
  And other women just as heavy with their memories, 
  And their solitary nights. They are all here, 
  These captive women of winter, and they all call this rain 
  The sound of loneliness. It is the secret undersong 
  Of this place, its peculiar sadness; and the sea 
  Echoes it, whispering and whispering 
  In a round of greyness below the indifferent gulls.
  I am such a woman now, in a world 
  Where there is almost no one.
  In the doldrums between Christmas and New Year, 
  A week of winter gales and rain, I finished my husband's book.
  I spent most of my time thinking, 
  About what it means to love. All afternoon 
  I watched the waves and the clouds, without believing.
  Then the seabirds came home in the last of the light, 
  And the rain stopped.
  There was silence for a moment, 
  And I could think clearly for the first time in days, about all these things, 
  The conundrum of loving, and what it is to be alone.


===============


Boy at the Window
Lucille Clifton

here, there is incessant noise all around me
shouts and running feet from which i must protect my hearing—
sometimes a tone or cry seeps through the roar
which stops the breath and shapes the skull
and pins me, as it pins the neighbor woman
who stares rigidly and thinks, thinks
of something else.
when i can, i press my ear to the wall—
hear a sigh, a small, lost voice, hear:
”why do you sleep so long in the morning
what do you dream about what do you read
that makes you sleep so long, my love
at night when you read i know
you dream about her and i cry
and i wish she had never been born
i wish she had died when she was born
or before she could walk and talk
maybe i should have called the lady
that knows about such things
maybe i should not have tried to be a good mother
maybe, but i did
i love her so much
i can hear her talking through the wall
why don’t you pick me up sometimes
why don’t you let me walk down the street
don’t make me stay up so long
don’t let me talk to people
let me live
my love for her hurts me she hurts me
i’d be glad if she would die and rest.”
all day she hums the music of the big bands
of her youth while she takes care of me—
washes, combs, feeds and dresses me
looks at me with sadness and love
when i am sad—so lonely i wish i would die
when i am happy—she carries me round the house
dancing to the words of long ago
the boy at the window longs to be with his family
goes to the door, reaches for the knob, then stops
goes to the window and peers through the glass
they are there!—out there in the world—
a woman who loves him, a child who plays with him
and must never know
here he does not dare to go out the door
he stands at the window and looks on
while his father lies in his bed and weeps
what was I dreaming? it is this
my love in our dream of the mountains
all the while we are making love
you are somewhere with someone else

===============


At Fever Lake

Elizabeth Bishop

I was surprised by a certain dullness
On arriving at the height of land
In the provincial capital
To learn that everything would stop for lunch.

All the dogs went home, the politicians
Having achieved their crises
Just as the lunch-hour gong began.

I walked for miles down little streets
And past municipal gardens
Chrysanthemums matching the red umbrellas.

Not a sound but the crisp crackling
Of leaves pushed aside by my bootsoles
Without motive or curiosity.

And then at the coast with its great purple headlands,
Its jagged rock-teeth and forested slopes,
Its sudden deep bays full of cold sea-green,

At last my journey could begin!
I saw the first foam of the breakers
Dashing over the twisted black rocks,

And coming inland through the spruce-woods
I could hear the deep muttering
Of stomachs filled up with provincial food.

I followed the coastline, eating berries
Or sipping at glacier water.
I picked a bucket of alpine flowers

To carry with me to the inland meadows
Where cabbages grew along the fences.
I saw the pock-marked cranes and the coppery pheasants

And the stumpy velvet-eared rabbits
Like ornaments, frozen in the fields,
And
all-books-no-dedup the unliftable weight of great evergreen

And a giant slug trail on a granite cliff.
I never came to any orchids.
I saw the fir-fringed shores of the bay,

But I did not reach the white glacier.
That night I came upon a lake
And held the flowers head downward in the water.

They became limp as the clay of the garden.
I let them drift off among the seagrasses
Where the lake inlets trickle through the red and yellow clay

All the first half of the summer.
Now they are tattered, blossomless.
I’ll keep them yet, their petals show no color.

The page of the calendar has turned.
You and I are strangers once again.
The north wind blows your coldness against me.

You and I have this autumn
How can we
===============


Henry Francis Ryder of St. John’s College, Cambridge
Seamus Heaney

He said the pebbles and the streams still sang
And the sky windless lightened as he spoke
And the earth lightened in reply.
His hand seemed to pass
Through the clutch of Death as he freed the verse
And made it breathe.

Quiet, my dear.
Said quietly, “We have come to rest
In the roof-garden of time’s ancient school
And watch the gardeners working at their trenching.
See, here are the box trees held in place
By wires, the bordered flowerbeds in shade
By the stony walls. The pergola
Keeps its square corners, walls, and angles,
Roses come into bud, the order
Of a classroom proper. This is old and good
And proper for the dead to see.”

No sound of shovels. As the day grows sultry
Flocks of trees and the distant fields swim
In flat light. Gardeners with thatch on their head
And shoulders move in the swimming
Among flat-roofed huts and orderly yards
Far overgrown with ivy. Nothing moves
Except the sound of old men’s breathing
And the chant of children too at their books
Lulled in a classroom of the old,
So quiet and so laboured the breathing
They could hear one another’s heart beat,
So that we who share here in our saying
A time-wound echo from their silence
Have time to ask now, falteringly, what this age
Has made of the children, what learning
Does to their lives. What breeder
Comes now to start them off? What sexual
Impulse brings them up to full capacity?
What precession of hopes, of joys, of desolation
Is programmed by their schools? What language
Do they learn that they do not speak?
What vision do they read and not see?


===============


Sonnet to Orpheus
Rainer Maria Rilke

You, that drew the distant curtains of the sky—

to your song the sinewy lute-players

softened their strong calloused hands

and consoled their lions’ hearts:

you brought them to themselves, in-music-ing them;

until their bodies

like a flute, were taken,

and you breathed into them, and made them quiet.

So you carried me to me

and I breathed out, a flute

in answer to your voice; I quieted down;

oh, I rose, like a wind;

and I yearned,

just as a woodwind-flute always yearns.

And when I parted from myself for a while

and touched you, as the wind

touches the flute, I leaned on it;

and lifted up

upon your song the weight of the earth.


===============


Graduation
Richard Kenney

After the ceremonies everyone eats and drinks
and dresses to go home.
And they greet each other with that recognition
which in us rises up only
at the prospect of not seeing someone again,
that friend who when last we saw him
was at home in the everyday
of drink, dress and farewell,
and now is in the cafeteria a space, a vacancy, a hole,
and as that conclusion and our own
balloon inside us it gives us a sudden joy,
like the joy of the last day of school,
when in the knowledge that it is over
and our homework due 
to a stranger in a strange room,
we felt the strange sensation of coming to ourselves.


===============


Ghazal: If Ever
Alan Shapiro

...it’s better this way: that I know how your lover 
is made, everything you and I 
have lost in one another, my life like a ship 
destroyed within a gull’s feather...

I am quiet. I can write about this: you holding her 
breast, her warm dark wound where
I never died... you knowing that you love her more 
than me, and it’s right...

You ask that I not speak of you? Do you suppose
I’d give you up for something as slight
as truth?... say, her name again... your tongue, the cup...

No, you needn’t say anything, my dear, 
or look at me, don’t stop: I like to watch 
you do that, it’s for my sake, isn’t it?


===============


The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

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===============


Broken
Ravi Shankar

I have no need to hear you breathe or catch your scent.
I have no need to feel your pulsing.
Once we owned the world like others,
But no more.
There is a time to love and a time to be blind,
There is a time to rest and a time to weep,
When water goes up in flames, a knot forms in the palm.
When word jams,
A boat drowns, and a flame in the throat whines,
It is not always possible to sleep among caves,
It is not always possible to fold ankles.
You grow, I know. Don’t question,
I am already turning to dust.


===============


The Crossing
Jim Harrison

All the family sleeps under the wagon
A layer of ice on the puddles
Sleet sliding off the wheels
They’ve eaten the dogs

During a slow moment I cut off my fingers
I have to balance them on the edge of the crib
Two milk teeth

A tiny cross, lost lambs bleating
The hooves of horses on the other side
Of the Platte that slipped beneath the runners

Kate scouring the stove with sand in winter
Walks back to the wagon to warm her hands
The barefoot urchins sneaking sips of whiskey

Something is moving on the prairie
Fog rolls in its wake
A deer disappears out of sight of the campfires

Birds rise above an acre of bison skulls
The line of their migration is invisible
They vanish into the snow squalls

Thick downy seeds drift from groves of cottonwoods
Rocking us all the way to Missouri
Father dreams of phrenology

Wiping the blackheads off his nose
Tending the cages of strange beasts
Grizzly bears tattooed with snakes

The children crouch in terror behind the buffalo
The baby is hunched forward like a crow
We’re all being transported by gray horses


===============


Day Before Everything Else
Mary Oliver

You told me once that among your earliest memories
you are falling, freely, for a long time, through bright
air,
and you smiled at the impossibility of it, or the impossibility
of smiling,
the tongue like wood in your mouth and your
insides swooping,
the rush of sun and wind on your face.
And then your mother’s body beneath you, all
shocked skin and bone.
And the pain, the sudden
tensing and howling of her arms as she caught you,
your head wagging wildly above her shoulder like a lamb’s,
your small heart maddened,
your last breath taken at the top of the garden in the air.
And you wail, wail, wail.
And your crying passes, but your eyes stay open.
And you wake in the grass.
And your mother rocks you. Rocks you. Rocks you.
But you have already left her. You are far away.
You are flying, flying.
You can remember falling, as I can remember the pain
that began a long time ago, like a swallow dissolving
into blue air, like a star
coming undone.


===============


Chill
Dan Gerber

cold.
winter at last comes in.
bloody rose outside, snug.
memories become known.
cosmically awakened, we have work:
only you know: dismantle the enemy.
love unbridled me, led me to you
sent me here (but from where?).
good mind now; carry on.
pink poem reaches heights,
reaches heights you could not reach.
listen.
go to bed, ash and bone.
wake up well, husband and wife.
two better than one.
know this: do not forget this.
we are them: do not forget this.
ours is not the east nor the west,
but the right here.
cold,
big yellow moon on me.
love the moon.
listen.

NOTE:
You should know better than to think I'm using the word 'reaches' arbitrarily. It's quite intentional here. One can reach something or one can reach out to something.
When I'm all ready to go to sleep, just before I enter the deeper stages of sleep, sometimes I can sense this in my brain, the feeling I get that we are reaching out. It's not a memory, not a thought, no direction, no concept, no thought. Yet, I know, we are reaching out, out of the deepest oblivion, towards...something...indescribable.

Michael McClintock: 9-15-2001

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear Michael:
That's a beautiful poem. And it seems to me that almost the whole poem is a lovelY reference to 'reach out and touch somebody', a Dionne Warwick hit a long time ago (1985 I think). 'Chill' (that goes to my bones).
I don't know if that comment adds anything, but it seems like it should and I just couldn't restrain myself.
Thanks again for the poem. Beautiful piece of work.
Some tiny & megalithic peace to you.
Arlo

Nicholas P. Boylan: 9-27-2001

-
you
your words
my throat
our time in this world
sorry if they don't move me like that
sorry if they didn't ring clear
sorry we can't give gifts to each other more easily
or learn to not take each other for granted
it's you
I've
===============


6
Angelina Weld Grimké

As I stoop at the well 
Again at the opening of day,
Say, what is this seething of the blood within 
At my common task in the usual way?
What is this sudden leap of a summer bird,
Flashing, like a flake of light, in a thought I keep?

Must I grow angry at my pulse’s pain? 
Turn from my own red lips? 
So goes the turn of the heart,
And so the wheel of birth.
The blood of my heart on this turning wheel
Must boil until the leap of a summer bird.
The walls of my life, they break at the seething of the blood 
Within me as the sun rises red.


===============


The Glass Essay
Anne Carson

Years ago, a glass essay
was set on the table at the seminary.
Inside the glass
was an old piece of paper.
Written on it were four hundred
words of a lecture Duns Scotus
had never finished.

After ten centuries, just half a page was left.
The glass stopped all change.
We kept his ancient
and would not let it in.

Backed by all science
and the strictest of ethical codes
the five of us undertook the job
of trying to hear
what Duns Scotus could not finish.

Once a week we climbed the stairs
of the seminary and met
in an old conference room
with lace curtains on the windows
and a portrait of James Shirley
hung over the rococo fireplace.

Two Jesuits, an Anglican and a Jew
discussed the words of the dead saint
among the deaf and the dead
at the seminary under the whine of the expressway
and the stammer of a glass heart.

The conferences went on for seven years
and no one bothered us.
We wrote papers
emended texts and published
in scholarly reviews,

none of them available
at the kiosk at the foot of the stairs.
Our meetings did not have the gravity
of an academic task.
They did not press.
They had the slight tonelessness of a sacrament.
We did not call them meetings.
They were secret

as the moment of grace
and therefore hidden,
buried
in the attention of our intentions.
We were good to each other
in those afternoon conferences.
We were good.
The texts made demands
but we worked and the demands
softened, one by one,
into a few simple things
like an expression that would not
go away or a joke
about the problem of dogs
in heaven

or about the problem of jokes
in heaven.
Once we asked the whole group
to write a limerick to give
to the Jewish boy who was ordained
the week before.

Another time we laughed till we were crying
over an argument between
the Protestant
and the priest about which of them
could chant Tantum Ergo
the loudest while sitting on the toilet.
We had no future.
Our ideas had no future.
Our
===============


A Blessing
Denise Levertov

The new moon  
hangs slender as a silver bow in the sky.
I have spent hours watching  
the changes of light upon a single 
branch, and my eyes are weary.

Suddenly now, as I step back into the house,
you emerge 
from the darkness, cross the room  
to stand by the window, and gaze out 
into the moonlight that 
-in a moment
will reveal your slender loveliness, 
cleaving to the glass, a silver miracle  
real as bread, as a cup of water.


===============


Still Life
Lorine Niedecker

I looked at the front
of The Farmers’ Almanac.
A picture of a sunflower
was cut in half
lengthwise.
Seeing how the centers
in each half-face of the sun
were mirror images
of each other
gave me the same
thrill as discovering
the photograph of an ancestor
and seeing the face
like one’s own:
“That’s me!”

Copyright � 2002-2015 Orrin C. Judd
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===============


For Crying
John Berryman

Is it so simple
a thing to be loved?
Without me, without
my precious advice
(I never thought
I'd live to see
this crappy dawn again)
your foursquare muscle-bound
grief running in the meadow
is more independent
than anyone I ever saw.
I used to want
to choke him with his red laces.

The more I catch of
his exhaustions
and his wild recoveries,
his tragic strength and nimbleness
and his splendid ferocity,
the more I think, you know,
the guy probably doesn't need
any help to get where he's going.


===============


I Celebrate Myself
Joy Harjo

I walk softly
by the river
the river that feeds the
small green
leaves of the fish,
long watery
fingers
that touch
earth.

My feet
tap lightly
across the moist floor.
I place my hands
in this water

that was once a tree,
and see its green
eyes
moving back and forth.
I cup my
hands over the waters
and see myself.

We are a map
remembered,
a map remembered
by the original people.
We sing
a river song,

we are water that travels
down to the oceans
to spread out and know
land without being land.
We are water that travels
up in the mountains

to know the coming earth,
to moisten the knowledge
of night and day,
we are water that returns to
the river.

I am this water,
this river,
this rain
that brings the fish,

brings the newborn in
the spring of the river,
I am this water.
I am this song
I am this love.


===============


from Sonnet XXX
Don Paterson

You who did well but knew you could have done
Far better, you for whom no truce of God
Or substance could console, pause and gather: you
Will be given back both love and happiness
And they will profit you. They will be clean
Bones to fill up the cup of oblivion.
Sometimes fate needs a hand. Its name is history.
Remember? God revealed himself to humankind,
Put back in play the motive of his life,
Widowed his loved ones, buried them alive,
Fell with a huge and grinding bolt of noise
Face down on them as if to do them right.
What would you do for love? Look at the church:
A nervous quick walk, a steady tightening grip,
And after that ... the faith of a grain of sand.


===============


The New Planet
Jane Hirshfield

News arrived recently from the mayor
of a small village

that a new planet has been discovered

and only seems to take shape

when women hold mirrors to their own faces

and reflect the shape of their eyes.

Since then, families have saved their coins

and bought prisms, and there are nights

when all streets look like spilled glass.

Even a glance in the dark down alleys

can show the new planet, over and over, in the water bucket,

in the washbasin, shimmering in each book,

each mirror, everywhere the moon

or anything. When a girl in the village

draws water from the well, the shape

of her bucket is more beautiful than stars.


===============


Ode to the Confederate Dead
T.S. Eliot

I.

[April 1865]

To those born after we are dead,

We move past by the unfamiliar names  
Of far unknown battlefields, or by names  
Of unknown heroes, splendidly standardless.

For most of us no path marks its course by celebrants,  
But paths unseen celebrate those crooked names.

II.

To those who died in their glory after striving,  

After conquest, by the changed names of victory,  
To those, proud-living, who died in pride of their virtue,  
Of their nation, and of victory after victory,

We are accustomed to bow the head,  
For an army travels on its stomach.

III.

We are not certain for whom we reserve  

Our undetermined, unordained memorial days,  
We think that victory is the absolution.  
The remembrance of grief abides and grows,  
And of all our dead soldiers, on either side,  
Whose names are neither written nor whispered,  
For an army travels on its stomach.

IV.

And we who are left are left with the unhallowed  

Righteousness and regrets. In my reticence  
And my failure to make memorials, these chords vibrated,  
So many dead, so many dead,

Not our dead merely. But the dead.

V.

Now as the years absorb our soldiers  

And our land is ruled by their garrulous and guiltless children,  
And the mother of many dead, the heart is heavy.  
This flag means something that we cannot prove,  
We know that we will die and be forgotten,  
At some corner of a foreign field,  
For an army travels on its stomach.

VI.

Sometimes on these grounds I cannot resist  

A melancholy thought: Thou art not noble, death;  
It is we who invest thee with nobility,  
Out of our souls, and our necessity,  
We make a fate and a mystery and a sweetness.

IV.

And, I fear, a lie. The dead are satisfied.  
There are comforts that are not for me.

VII.
===============


The Great House
Laurie Anderson

The Great House

There is a story here, and you have been part of it all along.

The Great House was a name given to it by the prisoners that built it. They built the Great House and lived inside it for many, many years. The residents of the Great House never washed the windows, never once in sixty years.

In 1971, the residents of the Great House became prisoners of the prison that was built around the Great House. The residents were locked up in one little section of the prison and were required to manufacture goods for sale in the free world. One by one, the residents died.

Now the Great House was all alone in the middle of the prison. But it was a magical house, full of things that prisoners dream about. Magical things like saunas, televisions, swimming pools.

In 1983, the Great House began to rest.

In the winter, icicles grew along the edges of the roof and nearly touched the ground. They grew out and up and side to side in a light-filled web that stretched from one end of the Great House to the other.

In 1983, the winter light reminded the house of its days as a one-room schoolhouse in the 19th century. In a slow motion double take, the Great House remembered that the little community it was in had abandoned it thirty-seven years ago.

When spring came and melted the icicles, the Great House started to take steps to move itself.

It tucked its front porch under its right arm and dragged itself forward. Its steps were feeble and shaky. Its first steps were taken on the backs of bricks. There were many steps before the Great House hit grass. There it lay still for many months and watched the prisoners walk from one end of the prison yard to the other. The guards just went along with it. They thought, “Oh, it’s just the old Great House. It’s about time it crumbled to the ground.”

The old Great House thought to itself, “Nothing will make me move.”

The sun warmed it. The grass tickled it. The rain cooled it. In the autumn, a red leaf blew against the porch. When a gust of wind pushed the leaf around and around the porch, the Great House finally stirred. It said to itself, “That leaf came to me, the oldest building in this god
===============


as above
Polona Oblak

our strength is such
even you
if you thought
as I did
if you lived
as I lived
would give yourself
to her
her generosity
is large
some stray like a herd
a gift too large
for such weak souls
some spend a lifetime
filling their bags
with purpose
a purpose
that suffocates
when she wants
you will wish
you had given yourself

maybe after this
the hurting begins
but we live
as women live
without a man
when we are made to be
less
than we could be
and maybe it's right
maybe this is right
but men
were not born
to be weak
and in the night
if they are lost
they walk
in search of the strength
that makes them human
their hardness
against the night
but after a time
their strength takes them
home
and I think
this is how
a woman must be
sitting in front
of a cave
listening
to her dogs
chase the night
how lonely
these wild men are
if they are lonely
do they imagine
what they need?
can you imagine what you need?
and if you can
are you sure
it is not what I need

John Berger
Ways of Seeing

Chapter 4: The Nude

This section seems to have the main title in the original book: "Almost Naked".
As this is my favorite page in the book so far, I wrote down here a portion of it.


===============


This Little Sunset
Jane Kenyon

you felt shy
and so did I

and as if I had written
not to be read

I slipped the poem in
your mailbox slot

with the rest
of the day’s flimsy news

but to my delight

you left your door
ajar, you left

your screen unlatched
for my poem

as if all day
you were expecting

this scrap of paper
from a stranger

who lives across
the alley from you

from a stranger
you knew

in another life

===============


To Sit in Solemn Silence
John Donne

At last, dearest, my constant heart
Has won me from the weary world
To this poor cottage, where apart
From the sick circle we may be
As the he and she in Homer were.
Yet when I think how little cause
Hath drawn us from the flowery groves
And countless blessings of the great,
From my Chloris and her thoughtful loves,
From the fond city's delicate ease,
I might repent me that I came,
But that I feel the weight of thee,
And that I feel that this one night
Will be worth all those empty nights.
I will not sleep to-night, but watch,
While, like an orphry gazing so,
The spirits of our love at play,
Light the faint flowers with dewy light,
And make thee beautiful with more
Soft sweetness than the vernal hours
Shall e'er infuse into their bowers.
We'll talk and watch the night away.


===============


She
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A watching her from the lane behind 
As she leant o’er the window-sill below, 
So childlike, regal, pure, 
To fling snow-blossoms on the flow; 
A striking through the glass with his hoof; 
Did the great wave of darkness whirl more slow? 
And snatch not her from me — 
Would the fountain rise to his mouth, and there

Hoard her as treasure, and so keep 
The single fairy safe, in cold sea-water, burning? 
And one must wait. Must weep. 
Must hope, and despair, and live and die, 
Because a fair child ere her crown 
Was set to view behind the glass, 
Could stoop so low and fling 
A blossom o’er the waves: — ah, well! the best

Were then so proud and young; 
I remember; — though I thought, in those days, mere 
A greenish silence like a weed, 
That fainted from all mournful excess 
In a June night’s whisper; and who hears 
A child’s sweet very voice, but thinks 
Of June’s best promise? —
And best promise — and a flower flung

On flowerless waves — if this were death, 
(For they would give her the same trust, 
The world with heart grown kind 
Having two such jewels in its hand), 
And, having crushed the bosom at the last 
By a hero’s close embrace,
It would not part in yon glad way, 
Nor she fling roses out of death, 
Who flung them from the green below

To the green wave, and laughed!
The great wave, mother of the drownèd sun 
How slowly sank that angel in the wave! 
And looking on him as on God —
She let fall roses from her hair, 
From the high window, over sea, 
And the live child laughed out of her — 
(For if the sun be dead, I think 
No God will mind the kiss of a child, 
Nor ever behold and smile!) — 
And they both laughed — but to me

The laughter of death is sad;
===============


The Cup of Bone
Agha Shahid Ali

All the Tuba players, sent home long ago
And told not to come back again,
Silent when they leave. Silent, as if
The notes had turned to dust in their mouths.
A broken music, the music they would make
Is missing. No melody blows out of their pipes
And then all I hear is a series of drones
Till the boys walk off in silence and shadows.
A wrong has been done. A once-live music is dead,
And a wind blowing through the indolence of time
Cannot revive it. I should have walked with them
Down a long road where the mountains recede
Towards where the nomads disappear at dusk.
It might be a morning of snow.
It might be an early starlit night.
It might be an evening of ashes
From an oil drum and one lamp.
I should have followed the music.
But I sit in my room listening
To the muteness of my radio.
It may as well be a piece of bone.
I see the old musicians lifting the notes
To the heights, but today only the silence plays
A dirge for what they never made.
These longings aren’t longings at all. They are memories.


===============


Variation on a Theme by Rilke
Paula Bohince

Before language
before logic
I had eyes
two bright eyes
and the alphabet
ran into me.
I heard it
as it happened.
I dreamed it,
letter by letter.
In my hand
the words rose,
heavy, hurtful
and swayed
till all I owned
was letters,
were letters.
Matter became
of another order,
its future shape
shimmered
like light through windowpanes
but when would
I learn to read
the future
would I learn
to turn matter
back into earth
might we all
spend our days
out of order
rearranging ourselves
until the raucous birds of dawn
rearrange the black
stained glass,
letter by letter.

In her version, Paula Bohince gets at what’s exciting about what Rilke seems to be getting at.
Rilke wrote this in a letter to his ten year old god-daughter, the question of that relationship, for me, then raises anew the question of what we write for.
When the mystery gets too remote from the physical, even from the everyday, I turn back to the landscape of the ordinary. Or into poetry that is suggestive, whether the unravelling of a shape in language or of a recurring motif. Or language that heaves up the body or breaks down a form or plain speech that fills in the beauty/truth (am I such a hack for making this opposition again?) dichotomy.
And I go for best poem that I know of the day, which often has a physical quality but is not a version. Sometimes it is a model of how to have and use the poetic all the time, as a way of thinking and living, for example, that of St Denis when he was martyred (I’ve included my favourite two versions of it below): a simple poem, solid in execution, and trustworthy.
Today, I went for the best poem that I know of the day, a model of how to do poetry for the everyday, and by which how to live. It’s Frank Bidart’s description of a snapshot of his now late sister taken when she was a little girl. It is a poem of such delicacy in its tenderness, no sanctimony and little rhetoric. The lines are somewhat tight, the choice of words wonderful, the relation
===============


Miracles
Philip Levine

In our town they are all miracles,  
old men pushing themselves to the mall  
with one cane, the second folded  
in front of them on the handle bars,  
the mothers who have raised the children  
now lost to unions and muscle cars,  
the farmers burnt out from flood  
and drought who sell lemonade
in the summer and Christmas trees  
in the winter from their lots  
that turn white from the ash  
of their own trees set ablaze,  
the machines themselves broken,  
worn out before they are old  
through laughter and the sour  
run of child-worn looms.  
After we have seen all this,  
how can we not think of all  
as a single wave that at any moment  
the wind will pick up and flip,  
drenching us in love,  
the miraculous made as natural  
as grass. Can you feel  
how it is coming, what distant shore  
it will toss us on,  
the particular water  
we will drown in?


===============


On Trying to Write a Poem Against the Cold
James Schuyler

How annoying—as one recent mild
winter has so well showed—
to have all of life, all but the morning
papers, closed against you
because there is ice on the sidewalks.
From the shut-up room's night window
the day appears to be happening
somewhere else, somewhere unpleasant.
The sluggishness and fecklessness
you suspect as afflicting
your energies and exuberance
turn out to be a determined
and warlike enemy
standing implacable guard
over the destiny of the world.
The hour is dark, the light
has not begun, and the atmosphere
seems vitiated, thick and discouraging.
There is at least that poem to write.
On the tray are dirty dishes,
and on one plate a spoon lies cocked,
held erect by a puck of sugar.
A small red rubber ball from a child's puzzle
rolls up to the plate, butting it.
The bowl overflows with stale cigarette butts.
Outside, the shutters clap loosely
in the wind.


===============


Sleepers Awake! Ye Drovers, Caution!
Emily Dickinson

The Frost was never seen—
          For Weather that it is—
          And He who travels late
          Without a Star,
Must ask the  sideways light
          Of “House,” or “Sheep,” or “Field” —
          Or challenge blindly the Nocturnal Frost to combat
          And prove his worth
  Against the ebon League.

The Sunshine is akin
          To none of those who run—
          Nor any who protest
          The whole Day long
Whether the Purse are shut
          Or stay agape at Noon—
          The Road—the Swallow—the Sun—the South—the Rainbow—the Noon—
          Elude alike.


===============


Portrait of Girl with Fair Hair
Theodore Roethke

The smoky fragrance of good cigar. The slow
laughter of her dreamy body, lazy, 

Summer afternoons in bed, 
reaching for things, her breasts sleepy-eyed.

 

The noises of two old men, drenched through
with apathy, are tuned to silence now. They lean 

Into the cigar's black halo, 
stir their drink. Old Cady stares through the porch screen.

 

She watches their vague moves, barely
perceiving them. Through the mesh of a smoky dream 

Caddy's eyes see, across the box hedge, 
a girl with fair hair. Nothing more.

 

O vanity of the very young!-She lies, 

half-dozing, in the old men's world, 
her images of life like two old kittens drowsed asleep.

 

These days of warm-packed hours, the
blundering tenderness of two tired old cats 

Entering her sleep, bearing their bright sheaves 
of mouse dreams-suddenly, one turns fierce on its dream-feet!

 

Small girl: do you see this whisker, how it
catches the low sun? Do you see it tremble, 

sparkle blue? Now, it circles your wrist 
like a golden bracelet. You are our captive:

 

Here, in the smoky fragrance, in the
slow laughter of good cigar, and sleep-songs, 

and dreamy-eyed breasts, and the innocence 
of two old men playing with innocence.

 


===============


Mercy
Denise Levertov

From this arduous endeavor, set
in moving water, I: lust for
knowing another: blood drawn
in the water by the obsidian
edge of desire that slices
but does not cut: and I: joy
that the heart, severed, is free
to float into air, anguish
for the bound life: I: honoring
the dream-struck god, the
low beast and the god:
and I: who honor the dream-
struck beast: I: without whom
there is no knowing: I: who am
honor: that which divides
from that which gives, and unites:
mercy.


===============


Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty
Li-Young Lee

Once,
I read an anthology of Chinese poems of the Sung dynasty
and afterwards saw
sunlight printed on tabletops. In forests
I learned the speech of birds, their counsels.
I listened.
For six years I carried under my tongue a string of language
gathered from those words
and drank only the sound of waters.
So all through my youth I grew thick-tongued,
with the speech of birds, with the trilling language
of blossoming trees.
And when the emperor sent for me,
I took off my clothes and pressed my naked body
against the jade wall.


===============


Field Guide
Philip Metres

The wren is the cadence
of winter. The crow is the season's
hero. The sparrow, familiar.
The cardinal, the let-
ter and the red, red dress.
The chipping sparrow, an aca-
demic looking to teach a
familiar shape a thing or two.
A chipmunk's incisors are
always growing. Slowly-slowly,
they work through the bones of
possibility, heading always
for some white heart.
The woodchuck's eyes
have twenty-twenty vision.
He has vision. She's a mama.
Laying in the grass, he's
transparent. She can see
his being, the small heart,
sack of blood and pulse
of antennae and wing,
speaking in tongues
from the egg.
His hands are hooks,
and when he climbs,
he does so in the key of G.
But he always falls.
She is blind by choice.
The blue-gray gnatcatcher is
my favorite bird. He's small
and round and sings with
great vehemence, a flat-
key in a minor key.
The clouds are always
letting go.
The snake is an actor
wound into a new line, 
rolling slowly in the sands
of the rehearsal space. He's
running lines with
the crickets, teaching
them to sing in a minor
key. The tanager is the
hot reds of afternoon.
They are content in
the heat. He is a hot
red. There is, on the
tree, one small branch
where birds come to
bathe. I've watched
them. It's a water pipe
from some underground
system, or so they say.
The squirrel has just woken up.
He's trying on hats.
For the girls, he dresses
in soft pastel sweaters,
more tasteful than those
fedoras. The mosquito's
long, probing nose
is in constant need
of maintenance. 
Whereas the anteater has a
true, true focus. Her
nose flicks back and forth.
But with the anteater,
no one flicks her
off.
The finches, they feel
the weight of
the sun on their backs
===============


When the Poem Makes a Space
Li-Young Lee

In order for your poem to do its work you must never ask what the meaning of it is.

--Mark Strand

Some nights, I walk home alone along Ginza.
It’s close to midnight, and in the restaurants
people are laughing and singing. It’s me
who doesn’t belong, not them, so I walk
into the warm humid wind. I pass
by a place that reminds me of a poem
I wrote once, not very long ago.
In the poem, I stood alone on a bridge
and watched the swans, their necks like lines,
inscribe the moon. In the poem, a woman
was singing from somewhere and I was mute.

I walked on a dirt road under a canopy of leaves
in a forest. From far away a man was calling,
Then a woman answered, And the sounds
of their voices mingled with the slight rustle
of wind. Soon, I was no longer looking
for where they were, but listening to the distance
between them as I walked, as if that were
what the poem wanted to be, a sound
that never reached me, a space
between spaces.

The more the Poet thinks the less he talks.
The more the Poet talks the less he thinks.

--Verlaine

In Praise of Darkness
Lee Anderson

Remembering darkness’s silk,
the sky like a milky eye,
the street lamp’s black bird wing,
my slow, light hand
moving over your body,
my murmur against your skin,
that ancient instinct:
how, back against a dune,
I buried my penis and its myth
and made of it an eye,
a hand, a mouth.
And you: we didn’t speak
about what we learned,
that day when light blurred,
and for an hour no one died,
nor were born, or crossed the street,
nor fell in love,
but touched themselves
and someone else,
and we were one body moving
in a room as dark as love,
and this was the rightest thing:
a rising wind, the smell
of the ocean, what we felt
for one another then.

On Making the Poem A Rope
Glass Shop at
===============


Today I saw the devil
by Geoffrey Hill

This morning the pane
was iced, iced in
and outside cold
I heard that start
of ice-breaking in the
drip pan under the rain
gutter, and iced
my hands and left them out
for a very long time
so that I had to
pull ice from the
web between fingers,
then more ice 
from between toes,
and from my
hair and beard, and out
of my mouth, where it
had settled and begun
to thicken on the roof,
and from my chest, where
the ice seemed furthest in
and deadliest, and for
a long while I was
not warm, the kitchen
air thawing me, the dog
sharing warmth, a dry robe
wrapped and cast aside, until
dressed and shivering in
the doorway the sunlight
sprang up, sharper than
glass, over the top of the
hedge and fell, like lances,
on my bare and open
hands.
Today I saw the devil
walking. He was red,
fiery red, he was red
and shrunk, he was scarce
the height of a child of
ten years old. He was
on the road, and before
the snow began to fall, he
was melting, disintegrating,
becoming anonymous as
dusk, dissolving in the
process of disrobing. 


===============


Starting Out

I think it is easy enough to turn a sunny yellow

pink and observe what I was

doing was climbing a cloud

with one foot on air and saying 
what an achievement to make a sock as blue

as a toothbrush and my mouth

filled with a sigh as one needle

passing another made

that one shimmer after several still

moments of carrying a kerosene lamp

around my head and kneeling

to drink from a stream I saw once was

composed of sky only and a kind

of gratitude running with me as I ran

past the special tree that was silent

that grew next to the road that

ended in a fish and now I am

in bed with a mountain under my eyelids

that will not go away

And the reason I liked walking around inside that mountain

was that I didn’t have to speak or move

and the train I was on kept going

just the same though there was nowhere to get off to

and I didn’t need a stick or a minnow or a nickel

when I started up again to find

my right foot had something in it I could see

was dark as ink but much older

than that and that would keep me

from remembering what I was doing there


===============


When Something Happens to Us
Robert Bly

When something happens to us
Something
Doesn’t happen to us.
When we come to the fork in the road
We are already at the fork in the road.
When we are alive
The dead are there with us, living.
When we know something
We know that we don’t know that.
When something is in us, it is outside us.
When the gods enter our lives
It’s simply,
Before they leave,
As when the sun goes down.


===============


Tell me again, what happened to the guy you said you loved?
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Tell me again, what happened to the guy you said you loved?
I’ve forgotten if he gave you the heart I could not give you,
Or if you found it badly broken, so broke you couldn’t use it,
And had to get your heart back from him in exchange.

I remember the night that I stood waiting; the night I couldn’t sleep,
I remember, because it never could be the same again.
I remember telling myself over and over: “Something’s going to happen,
She has to think of me sometime tonight, it has to be tonight.”

And my throat was full of a choking sweetness, and my eyes were blind
With waiting; when I heard your voice at the door I laughed
To think how little I had to say to you—and all this while you were
Standing there laughing too; like me you weren’t saying anything.

Then I felt you put your arms around me. I can remember
Your eyes, you raised your lips to mine and kissed me.
When you broke away from me all you said was, “I must go back now.
I mustn’t be missed at the dance.”


===============


Slight Work of Nothingness
Jane Hirshfield

Let no god walk by the ocean—

  only the vast vault of uncounted stones, 
each one inked with infinite such circles, 
each one writing back into absence.

Across from our house the long roll 
of slumping salt strata is forever dying— 
each day released to its salt pilgrimage, 
to flatten and seep out into the sea.

Each stone a brittle history,
tardigrade footsteps sunk in its mud, 
each ancient sea flash-frozen,
pressed out on its infinitely long sheaf.

And every one of them the sign 
of the enormous pressure of the weight
of those that come after: sea, mountains, 
trees, the stubby, spotted cattle,
the terrible indecipherable starry script
of the near and the far. We too
must ourselves flatten against the hours
that bear us down into our night 
like the weight of the farthest walls of stone.

Emptiness, vastness. Long fields of it, 
sought out by the lengths of our steps— 
the flung fist of the sea’s percussive waves, 
words shattered and lost like a broken cup,

names scattered on an abandoned beach. 
The uncountable cries, the uncountable returns. 
What courage it takes to fly the perilous cliffs of that hard, 
known space between us—scuttling crabs, 
crawling bright sea life, 
misty eye of the lightning-splintered sea.

But this: there is also a delicate beauty of that place 
when I give myself over to it: salt pilgrims sifting 
across the tide’s dark glass—lightning leaps, 
razor-silvered water,
the million-walled sea breathing in, 
breathing out. There is a sliding 
into place, after so much weary searching, 
after so much rending and cleaving.


===============


To Be Made With Moonlight
Robert Bly

For a long time I have wanted to make something
out of moonlight
that is not difficult.
I would like to make nothing
as simply as the moon does.
When I lie here on the grass
I know I am not the grass,
that my blood is always rushing,
that if I lie here I can see the world
from a great height.
In the world there are mistakes,
but here in the grass they are corrected.
I lie here a long time
now that the stars are shining,
not thinking anything,
not doing anything,
simply laying under my own light.
But then I have to rise
and go into the noisy world
where they think they are alive.


===============


Further in Summer Than the Birds
Edward Thomas

Never in my life have I met
So many dear, kind and true friends,
Who, even though I brood and rave,
Even though I seem to need
Never to lie awake or out
Walking at the blackest midnight,
Still with me at the end remain;
And this despite the season’s being
Further in summer than the birds.

And some of them, by pure and total
Unselfishness, have won a place
Where in calm moods I am as certain
As one can be of anything
That, if I should lose their grace,
I should lose it unawares:
For how should I dream that the face
Of memory so green and fair
Would turn, in a few short years, so sere?

So at all risks, although my fears
Make me tremble, and my hopes
Keep me still waiting, I go on
Delighting in the summer griefs
And mournings of the year, in fine
Rather than fret myself and pine,
And dreaming and not caring to dream;
Rather than love and weariness,
Hope, and heart-burnings at the end.


===============


The Book of the Dead
Elizabeth Bishop

First, are you able to understand
that the question is serious?
Do you see that this is not a frivolity?

Imagine us together in a small room;
There is a fireplace where a fire is burning,
Making sure that the room will be warm enough.

I have closed the shutters; it is evening.
Sit down. I will make up a bed for you,
And you know the eiderdown that I own.

Now, let us talk to one another.
Now let us acknowledge that we have been friends;
That has never altered, even in these years.

Now, tell me what it is that troubles you,
And why you have never been content with the world,
And why you have always needed another place.

Your passage has often been stormy and rough,
And much adversity has accompanied your course,
But also there was a great deal that was good.

Sometimes you had a chance to be happy
And light came into your heart, as on a sudden,
But you lost it. Oh tell me, what was the reason?

By looking steadily into the heart of sorrow
We can see a certain truth, and perhaps a remedy
For the pain that always accompanies truth.

So tell me why it was that you were never content
To be what in fact you were, and always wanted
Something else: more than your share, or less?

Was it always more, and never enough?
It may be that you wanted too much, and made
Yourself quite absurd by your outrageous demands,

And became involved in an infinity of pain,
If not what mortals call their heart’s desire.
So, did you never find what it was that you wanted?

Now answer me this, and think before you speak:
What is it that you want, for now, at this moment?
It is night; there is firelight; we are together.


===============


The good enough parents
Elaine Equi

After packing up the pickup,
dumping off the last of your girlfriend’s furniture
at the S.F. Asian Emigrant Refuge and Relief Center,
you ease out of the truck—it’s past midnight—
handing me the key—mind if I keep the stereo,
  I’ll pay you back... 

You’ll head north in the morning
stopping at the free forest fires along the way,
and call me when you get to Bellingham.

This is as far as we can take you
since you have to make your own way in the world...

I don’t cry when the truck pulls away. 
We let your bags and boxes just sit in the driveway.
We’ll find another place for them in the morning. 


===============


Umbilical
Marge Piercy

This is my body torn
by your body,
this is my blood spilled
on your earth:
where once I walked upright
naked and proud
to pick the fruits and hunt
the beasts,
I now crawl forwards on my belly,
licking the dirt.

This is my skull cracked
by your clubs,
this is my hair streaming
with my brains:
where once I ran free,
hurling my voice
at the tallest trees,
I now walk bent,
silent, in chains,
my ears stopped with mud.

This is my eye you plucked
from me,
this is the stones and spears
you hurled:
where once I gazed on deep and clear
waters,
I now strain to see
the light that shines
in darkness, far above,
as cold mud fills my eye.

And this you must know,
know deep in your hearts:
that one day you, too,
will lie upon this bed,
will walk this road,
and when your hands are bound
and your legs hobbled,
your eyes and ears stopped,
and when you gaze around
for some last sympathetic eye,
there will be none,
none but the impartial stars,
none but the cold blind air.

This is my body riven,
this is my blood flowing,
because I fought against you:
know that when you do this
to me,
one day you do it to yourself.

This is the bitter fruit
your seeds will bear:
and this the price
you must pay
to buy the future
you have planned.


===============


To Time
William Dunbar

Thou must will, and I must spend
  Thy gifts, and be no more;
Nor win, nor woo, nor call to thee,
  For thou art will, and will must guide. 
I see, and all I have done in this shall come to nought,
For all things must obey the time,
And ever as the time shall come
  Upon my work to weigh;
Thy works and mine and ever shall,
Though the work long and wisely may have been.
  Oh, this must flee,
And this the time hath slain, and this hath borne
  with time away;
My work must give and yield to time,
  And shall to time’s long pace away. 
The fire I lit, and having lit, have kindled shall
  my heart,
And love of love, and longing shall
long to that fire of flame, and it shall be
  quenched in me shall be. 
It shall be done, for this was will,
  And mine in such shall be;
There shall be naught unto mine hand,
  For all must come to nought.


===============


The Kingfisher
Elizabeth Bishop

In a country where big fish are strange and eaten

  rare
and by the governor general’s chef 
I peer from my awkward past.
The size of a life-saving medal, 
the kingfisher flashes out of the winter
    gray
like a carnival magnesium flare
    over dark water. 

A large blue sign, smaller than a star, 
smaller by far than anything free of charge, 

    reels 
on our silent visibility, 
that old snake-skin corset, that taut ghost-hair.

All summer long it will sit over the foam-
  edged tide on the disintegrating water-
  pier
and I will sit here typing, hoping to
  fling a line
to something flashing, something colored like
  lightning.


===============


Death
Jay Wright

But hear me, god, as I will read you.   
Death, inside me, life inside you.   
I want to pull you out of my pouch,   
blow on your head.

Where is your face? Is it in your viscera,   
your tissues, your muscle, your fluids?   
Is it in your cells, your stones,   
your seeds, your pollens?

Is it in your DNA, your fetus,   
your cloning, your vaccination,   
your blood transfusion, your thymus,   
your tonsils, your lymphocytes?

Is it in your mitochondria, your germ plasm,   
your chromosomes, your rna, your sperms,   
your ovaries, your fallopian tubes,   
your vagina, your breasts?

Is it in your marrow, your marrow, your marrow,   
where I was, where I was, where I was,

to the bone, for you, in the trinity   
of life, the human family, love, and death?


===============


The Invitation
Lucille Clifton

it is your last night on earth, 
do you want to spend it with me?   
do you want to spend it 

with all your eyes closed and your lips, 
with all your organs functioning 
and your mind still unsure of what it is 
that you are?  do you want to keep in your eyes 
the back of your eyelids,  and your lips that just
too late to know what it is to touch another, 
and your voice box waiting for silence,
do you want to see your own body tonight, 
do you want to feel its weight:  it’s wombed weight,
it’s settled and unforthcoming and sad weight, 
do you want to look into your own closed face

to read whatever memories you might have there, 
do you want to feel your own hair 
broken off by the wind, or your own eyes 
dripped dry by some other nameless weather.  do you want to see in the eyes of death 
the dark promise you made her years before, 
promise you’d meet her at last, 
promise you would not be lonely anymore?  do you want your own lips to say tonight
tomorrow night tomorrow night, or do you want to spend the night with me, 
letting my body move into your body, my tongue 
into the secret of your mouth, my hands 
into the bathing pools of your hands, and we two,
leaving the moon, together 
swimming off, into the awful oceans of eternity?


===============


Today
Stephen Dunn

Afternoon out of a cloud, it could be four o’clock
or almost five. I should probably
check my watch. It could be the noon
which I failed to notice when it lightened,
an hour ago. Anyway, I think of you
always at this hour when the world
is colorless. I think of you not because of
that but because I need you. Today
and yesterday. And I don’t need another
example of the moment more clearly
resembling each other, the time of day
I am again touching my cheek and thinking of you.


===============


Animula
G. K. Chesterton

Little soul, wandering in the night
Of things, going wrong, 
My poor heart, sad and lonely, 
Keeps watch by you till daylight brings delight. 

Bright birds sing out the middle of the spring, 
And wings of small 
Cool clouds make music, 
As they race across the blue; 
And eyes of  daisies in the grass 
And poor self-conscious ivy on the wall 
Watch at your window for the morning light. 

Listen to their song: 
The wind, the sunlight, and the rain, 
A voice that tears no firmer hold, 
A power with nothing to destroy; 
The hound that runs down in the morning field, 
The horses breaking with the noon, 
The linnet that goes up the sky at night, 
And men that shout across the doors of death, 
Have all a freedom at the heart of them; 
But little souls are only fettered by light. 

Hear how the bird’s heart is beating and breaking 
Like a mad man, 
How the horse’s hoofs 
Are trying to kick the morning down, 
How the wind’s own children come shouting, 
Heedless of their habitations falling, 
To hear some music made of sound. 
Only the light usurps your kingdom of the night. 

Look at the window, blinking at the light; 
And know yourself 
A manikin all heavy with sleep, 
Your shapeless limbs wrapped in a coloured quilt, 
And lost without a dream to lie in, 
Though your little eyes with tears are wet, 
And wide with wonder at the morning sky. 

Brooding on this, your soul may find 
What wings are for, 
And, since your lips are dumb, 
Sing like a star that follows the night: 
Or like the star that leads across the sea 
The monarch come 
To his mother’s land, 
Or flies to meet the lady of his choice. 

Such men sing old songs: 
The lark sings in the dawn. 
A little thing, a gleam, a light, 
A memory, a ghost or dream, 
An island, or an
===============


Yesterday
George Oppen

Always in the middle of a kiss
It is a little like dying


===============


Weltzerlag
Franz Wright

Not to be born is best for mortal man, not to be, to be nothing,
when the breezes of the sky rest softly on the mountain slopes,
but then I was; my hair swept back, the sick moon shuddering,
and so much there is in me of water, and of earth, of red earth,
but also so much of sky, with all its stars, and of air, the air
I myself am—each leaf of the tree speaking.

Not to be born is best for mortal man. Not to be. Not at all.
And then I come crying into the bloody world, my little heart
having hoped to find Ilyria... that I would be allowed to stay
hidden.
Not to be born is best for mortal man, but then I was born.
What a huge suffering to be born, at this hour.


===============


Odysseas
Aristotle

Once he told me that when he was on the water
he felt it might wash him off the deck.
But I said no, no, that can’t be,
you think your mind is in your body, you think you think,
but it’s not in your body, it’s just your body’s there
and your mind is moving from place to place
and you’re only a servant to it.
We think we’re one, but we’re not

or we’re more than one.
Then I was seeing the water wet, but it’s always wet,
I said, the water has no business. It’s the mind
that changes what’s wet into the wetness of water
and the dryness of a leaf. And the water
is thick and quick, says he, and I said
no, and he said, no, you’re a woman,
but I said no, we’re not one,
we’re many, or many in one, I said,
then I saw that we were more and more and more.

Then I saw why the mind
moves in and out like breath. I said, where is the wind?
And I saw the wind and I said,
where does it come from? And he said
nowhere. And I saw nowhere,
and I saw the fast water,

and I said, do you have love in Greece?

and he said, yes, I have a wife.

And I said, no, that’s not what I mean.
Love is where it is, is here, is nowhere,
he said. And I looked and saw the water
and the leaves again. And I was seeing them.

Then a ship went by.

And he said, that’s a merchant ship from Greece,
and I saw the ship and said,
then if you think you’re a merchant
what are you selling to everyone?
And he said, do I think or do I know?

And I was silent then for a long time.
And he was quiet, too.
I don’t know, he said.
And I saw him again and was seeing him.
And he said, I don’t know,
and I was seeing his body. And I
===============


The Infant Martyr
Anne Sexton

The King and Queen sat together
         under the apple tree.
Their love was so perfect
           they forgot each other.
They forgot they were the king and the queen.
They sat in the garden enjoying
           the sweet evening air.

She gave birth to a rose
whose centre was a baby,
           a tiny stone baby.
It had come from the centaur
          on the other side of the sea.
It could have been a twig.
She saw its tiny red face.
           Her eyes began to cry.

The king and queen called
           the old doctor from town.
He came with the stretcher
           and the blue blanket.
He wrapped it up and bore it
           down to the farmhouse.
The tiny thing shouted and howled.
It was terrifying but interesting.

No one knows why it should cry like that.
It must be lonely or sick
           or in the wrong part of the world.
I think it is like the people who say:
           Help me.
             I cannot stand this any more.

The women came to see it
           from all the houses on the hill.
Each gave a penny
           to bury it.
It would not be murdered.
It just screamed on until
           the doctor stuffed its mouth.

I was wondering what my purpose was.

I was going to ask him
           for a piece of gingerbread.
I had just asked the king and queen
           for a piece of gingerbread.
I saw the doctor stuff the tiny mouth
           and I knew what my purpose was.

I knelt at the edge of the river
           and drank a little of the water.
I said, O Lord, give me
             the boils of Job.
The Lord heard me and He answered
           me and he smote my mouth.
My mouth is bloody and full of boils.
My voice is hideous and rasping.

I went over the hill, across the bridge,
           to the gingerbread-man’s house.
I told him that I had a special purpose.
He asked what the purpose was.
I told him that it was to sing the song of the tooth.
To tell him, I had to reveal my mouth.

He screamed. He raised his hammer.
He threw me against the rock wall, and then
drove his carriage right over me
===============


Half Broken Things
Phillip Hall

After years of the sun’s constancy
the petals would be too relaxed to hold
their own light—

flutter, they must, or it becomes
just leaf on leash—

holding (though just barely), then flapping,
light trapped in this tiny canvas
rib-spread of a sail.

And so the dance, again—

this their marriage, the moon in irons,
tying her nightly clove hitch—

and we become witness, just by
reaching for images.

All of us
forever half-broken things,

unable to keep from
trying.


===============


Porch Song
Czeslaw Milosz

We sat on the porch 
looking at the lights moving in the streets 
of the first community in the world 
where nobody was working 
while his neighbor was sleeping, 
where every child had enough to eat 
and every man had a car 
but couldn’t park it. 
I mean, what would you do, the driver asked, 
as we drank beer 
on a warm and beautiful night, 
if you had to choose? 
And what will they do with so many cars 
when there is nothing else to do 
but drive?
The Germans used to take walks with their families. 
No hurry—we have time. 
But we must buy new clothes 
or new furniture. 
So the ladies push their carts at a jog, 
sweating, panting— 
get home by six for the news 
because there is nothing else to do 
but sit in front of the television set, 
nothing to do.
The Russians used to say that work is a gift from God. 
But as we know, 
no one believed in God anymore. 
Here is where the West has reached. 
The people in dark windows— 
the houses are black, the moon in cloud, 
we can’t see a single star. 
I can still remember when they were building this city— 
on the side of a mountain, 
the lights shining like a jewel in the night.
So there we were, 
the old codgers on the porch 
drinking beer and talking 
while music from the juke box reached us faintly. 
If there is nothing to do 
but work or sleep, said the driver, 
then let us work, 
so that we don’t have to sleep. 
So that we can have time for the beautiful light, 
time for the music, 
time to find the right answers 
and then change them.


===============


in this world
Donald Hall

The agnostic husband of a saint
is born with a tendency to sin,
as the song says. In an age of contracts
he believes in time, and marriage:
to love and honor, promise to be true.
When there are doubts about a new sweater,
a shopping bill, a shiver of disgust,
he remembers to say, “There is no end
to endurance.” Spoken first by the captain
of a warship, endured in the ordeal of love.
Washed in the waters of belief,
nothing was ever abandoned, but also,
“whatever it is, it is finished”: an age
of law, truth in the most final small forms.

In this world, where every fact is rhymed,
the bones of the faithful rise, and praise
is described as a light. Whatever it is,
however it turns out, let that praise sing.


===============


Music
Li-Young Lee

for James Wright

one flute-like voice and the universe
rushing in
shattered
by the heart’s one note
and nothing
remains


===============


God is Good but not Fair
Dana Gioia

It was only a box of raisins,
  plump in their pouches,
  sticky between my fingers.
But they were beyond my reach,
  placed high on the shelves of
  my mother’s pantry.
I climbed the kitchen stepladder,
  balanced at the top,
  extended my arm
  to the highest shelf.
I suddenly knew
  that the raisins were a trap
  set by my parents.
But my craving was stronger
  than my fear. When I put
  my hand among the boxes,
an avalanche of raisins
  and boxes thundered to the
  kitchen floor, spreading
into the hallway, past the
  door to the dining room,
  finally spilling
into the living room, where
  my father, a clever trapper,
  lay in wait.


===============


Marramos (the Sequel)
Kim Addonizio

Of all the folks I know, John Bayley is the bravest.
For a while, I felt guilty about the absurdity of this conclusion:
Bayley, with his shaking hands, his cranium full of sickly tissue,
his assortment of pills, his white beard smeared across his vest,
his ill-fitting shoes—how could he be brave? Bravery
for him was bravery for anyone, I thought, something
I could only speak of in terms of racing stags, Custer
standing tall before the last volley, and trees thrown down in windstorms

but then, that’s what
after my own father stopped driving, stopped doing, after he’d
ended his own appetite in the face of loss, he made it a kind of
life. And look at Bayley, his face turning into bone,
him clapping as another friend passes, or as I take the stage
overcome by terror as the bright lights come up, he and my father
outlasting their own bodies, enduring, it’s not the same
as joyful. They sit in church when they need to, attend

funerals, do ordinary things even if they feel no pleasure, no desire.
My friend Sharon tells me her father was always gone,
always walking. She thinks now that he was trying to leave, to
outdistance himself from the life he’d made—a wife, three
children—but she never knew that as a child. Maybe he knew it
and that’s why he had to get out, she tells me. Where she lives,
they say he walks under a grove of loquats, off the back porch

on Yarrow Street, or through a pasture, brushing aside honey locusts,
along Arlington Avenue, at the stroke of four-thirty
in the afternoon. He pushes his way up the little hill between De la Cerda
and Shellby. Then up Shellby to Agnes Circle. Then into
Strawberry Canyon, where he walks by the river. Her mother, now
for thirty-two years a widow, is a very healthy woman, full

of bright little gestures, saying—when she talks about Sharon’s father—
Oh, he was such a one for having the best of times.

===============


A Little Tooth
Janet Kauffman

A lovely tooth of yours came out on the car seat
and I found it in the crack
while you were combing your hair.
It was the smallest part of you,
this small white part of you
that was perfect in its way.
Then you were my small white animal
turned to go
looking for a child's house in which to wait,
the way in on hands and knees.
But this was in front of your own house,
your husband, child, work, the turtle-shells of car-seats
clinging to you forever
each with a different number on it.


===============


Mrs. Culpeper

On a day when I was ill she came into my room
and stayed on and on. The April wind was blowing.
She knelt down at the foot of my bed,
took off her gloves, folded them, and put them in her purse.
She undressed me, reading aloud the prescription
for rubbing in a salve. The first time I felt
the warmth of her hands. It grew dark,
and finally there was a soup bowl on the table,
and she was making a bed in my room.
I had difficulty eating. I rested my head
on her blue blouse. So sweet, her body smelled
of new houses, and the rain.

I stood a long time before the blue curtain.
On the day when she left, I got up
and cleaned myself and went downstairs.
In a corner of my bedroom I built a fire.
I burned all her letters, all her photographs,
the torn blouse, the medicines, the book on rheumatism.
When I had nothing more to burn, I went out.
It was raining, and I could smell the wet hills.


===============


Tu Fu

The odes of the Shih Ching have vanished with their music,
but Sung Chih’s phoenix lute is still with us.

I pawned my lute today for three cups of rice.
Gifted men everywhere are suffering like this,
but who says there is no heaven?
The call of the barefoot crone selling soup dumplings
is enough to lift the dead.


===============


The Mysteries
W. H. Auden

Just because
on the mountain we were learning to read
the violets—

Before we had even got to paradise
we turned aside

to learn the mysteries
of whether children are happy with their parents
or parents with their children

Or when a young man thinks of God and has to hold his pen
over the paper

Or when he takes an hour to work out the exact reply
to a letter

And, imagining he is about to catch a butterfly,
looks up to find the butterfly catching him

Just because
all this is what we wanted to know
and had to find out

do not think that we have grown weary
of the violets,

that we have forgotten
how they make the breath stand still
or how even a stupid person

can love them with all his heart and be happy.
I suppose,

You can hardly blame us if we do
go on talking about

whether one loves one’s children
or one’s parents
instead of quietly pointing to the violets,

that as leaves are green, petals blue
a star is pure light

and as silence is music
so here on the mountain

are the Mysteries
of which we must remind ourselves

after an evening in Hell.

(NB: TO TASTE AND BE HAPPY, TO LISTEN, TO LOVE, THERE IS NOTHING MORE BUT TO LOVE.)


===============


Before I Leave The Shores of Britannia I Will Set My Sail
Elisabeth Bletsoe

The peristyle below was at the heart of Hadrian’s Villa,
called the “Temple of Venus and Rome” and dedicated 
to the worship of the divine couple.
If they would ever let her speak
she would say all
of this and more
into his bad ear while he nodded
as if he knew, as if he understood.
Then, they might wander off among the tidy broken columns
of more rooms, more imaginations, of everything 
there might be, where all
that is or might be
would come to pass.

Near the aqueduct is a section of
The building dedicated to Bacchus.
That name made her hesitate, but she went on to say
that the god of wine was son of Zeus and Semele. 
She held her listener’s hand as if he were a child,
looking back at him until she saw him smile.
She was saying, “I love you,”
though he did not hear a word
of it. No sign of his opinion, but she went on, saying,
“And, do you know? Their satyrs
got so drunk that they fell asleep and dried up
into stones.”

Thus, went their lives—
I will tell you, I will tell you—
each living the other’s dream
but never together in it.

Inside his tomb, carved from the rocks of
Mount Latmos and decorated with precious marbles,
the imperial architects had placed
a poem, carved in Greek, 
“Crown what is mortal with immortality, 
And earth with night; so the stars
Will shine as the fairest things there are, 
Whilst every stranger’s influence grows, 
With the ashes,

Of what did once what none can ever do again.”
It is an epitaph the history of living into whom. 
It is a secret, come too late to tell.

He wanted to hear her reading, but he had no clue
to who it was that’d said these words.
She breathed his name.


===============


Absence
David Wagoner

The saffron high-rises blaze
Like headlamps thru the graying
Diffusion of their illumination.
Nothing is red here but the sun,
Less and less each noon,
Going down the mountains.
Are you in your cabin and the sea
Backs up like a blood clot in a vein,
And all at once the rafts can go no further?
Where does it let loose,
Flow backward like an ebbing tide
Along the swollen estuaries,
And what does it say
To the fragile children and to the whole
Bourgeois herd that is suffering from the weather?
And when the water
Drips from the rocks like blood,
What will the white gulls say
To the high-rises whose heads are ablaze
Like dried oleander, and whose ribs are black
As the limbs of whalebones, and whose loins
Seem frozen? What do they hear
Behind the forest of cell towers, like bones?

John Donne


===============


What I hear
Mary Jo Bang

So much cacophony. So much bad music
that I clap my ears with hands, stop up my nose
with my own breathing, close my mouth in a pucker
against this brassy din. I start to pull the tapestries
from the walls, to drop the curtains from the windows
and to scream until everyone in the neighborhood
must leave their houses to come out into the street,
looking for the source of all this disruption.
But they look for the sky, for the birds,
for the trees of the gardens that conceal them.
And even so I cannot make it stop.


===============


Hölderlin's Grave
Louise Glück

When I was a child, I turned the pages
of my mother’s Bible. I would take the book
down from its shelf, cover my knees
with the black velvet cloth, the border embossed
with gold angels. It was cold—
the wind pulled at the slats of the shutters.
I loved the weight of the book, its hard
leather binding, the edge of the gold page,
the soft thump when it fell
open between my palms. And then one day
I reached the page on which, neatly folded
and pressed between the gold margins, was
a prayer my mother had written. Her name
was printed at the top, and her age,
which was nineteen. I knew how to read by then
so I read it, of course. Her prayer,
lifted out of the even script like an island
from the sea, was written in cursive.
The narrow columns went on and on,
making of themselves a darker and
darker pool, that nothing, not even light,
could escape. I stood up and went
to tell my mother what I’d done.
The book was a black hole, or so I imagined
as I explained, trying to show her
the possibilities—if you stepped
into the black hole, you wouldn’t have
to grow up. No one would have
to die. Her face changed. For the first time
I’d taken the curious weight of her love,
and made a weapon of it, and no one
would ever forgive me. She said,
“It’s not a joke,” and took the book
away and, of course, I grew up,
just as she did. Now I’m older
than she was then. It’s snowing outside—
the sky is filling up with light. If I could
get past the angels, I’d go past the despair
and past the questioning. If I could read
a page of the ordinary, and just let it go,
like the snow does. But I have to ask you
this—
where does a life stop and the white
page begin?


===============


It Just so Happens
John Ashbery

It just so happens that people exist
Though none of us perhaps can remember ever having met
These people—and of our having met them they remember
Still less; people who have never seen one another
But think of each other daily, hourly, each other’s name
Cleaving their mind into rooms, rooms far apart
They’ll never enter, whose separation, though having no substance,
Has the last word on them, “you,” “me,” who cannot
Exist for them though the sum of them now weighs in
As heavily, it seems, as if they were the only “ones”
In the world, if not the only existing thing in the world,
Wherein they had never been thought of by another person.


===============


First Love
Andrew Hudgins

It was hard to believe, but she had really never done it with a boy. She was fourteen, and for over a year, I had made her laugh, talked to her about poetry and philosophy, held her hand, hugged her, and kissed her.

I was a virgin myself, too. We could do a lot together in the back seat of my car in the daytime. But that wouldn’t be enough, because we loved each other.

I was sick that night. I thought, when she called, that I was going to vomit. Then I did vomit. I just didn’t tell her. We were going to spend the night together in the car, in a cove where I liked to catch crappie. I thought it would be like the movies. It was not like the movies. It hurt, and it lasted no time at all.

She was worried that she might have started her period. I think that was the only thing we talked about on the drive home. And by then we were strangers.

I never touched her again.


===============


“Everyone Is Reading the Blue Book” (from The Art of Fiction No. 37)
John Gardner

I wonder if a poem would be stronger if it were not an anecdote,
if it could somehow just lay back and dream like a crocodile
while the mind still recognizes what’s going on,
if the words spoke just as a spirit might to that very spirit
(as, let’s say, a dream itself speaks). What happens then is
that many small thoughts begin, linked one to another,
no longer blocking each other out,
which could otherwise distract us so we don’t understand
or take in or begin to piece the fragments together.
As in a poem, if the mind doesn’t rush to pieces the work
at once,
and though we might know we were to stop,
begin to pay attention, and take in what it is trying to do,
trying to turn to us.

So it really isn’t the choice of words at all, is it?
No, no more than the colors with which one paints. It’s
what is being said
within those chosen lines that is important.
Because every poem is trying to turn itself to the reader,
it is by its very nature a direct appeal from one soul to another.
Because, I must tell you, Mr. Eliot is dead,
and we don’t want anyone else to put us into the position
of listening to
the poet talking to himself. The figure is gone. So that
everything’s direct address
and infinite in appeal. Every person the poet might ever know
could understand the poem, had they the mind to.
Is that what you mean, Father?
Yes, that’s how I imagine it, much the same.
Everyone is reading the blue book. In the case of poetry,
I believe, it becomes an endeavor, no matter what else
one might say of it,
to invite that closer communion between writer and reader.

[Part 5] Trio for Two Girls and a Boy
Robert Lowell

A great clap of thunder, and April’s over!
It stutters, it flows, the springs in the mind,
deep waters call up a weather of islands,
a wild summer breaks into the woods.
Then,
driving down to the sound, dazzle of sails
over the
===============


Medusa
Fanny Howe

The awful fright of a wild boar caught in a thicket; 
the pig rears on his hind legs, he rushes through every thorn;
he gnashes on every upright, the gleam of his bloody flank.
No sooner raised than the wound is unbearable,
and each drop of blood blazes on the jungle floor.
As for the veiled bright woman lifted from the nest of snakes,
their little hisses keep her afloat over the spaceless plunder.
If eyes could kill, people would die in droves;
if thoughts could kill, people would be buried alive.
But I live, lying alone on earth, the invisible eye, the vicious thought.
Sometimes in the mirror I see my body as a cow submerged, sunk,
bloated with waste, its legs sticking out of water.
At the butcher’s I scream out loud, women I don’t know say,
“Why are you screaming out loud, you stupid woman?”
The cows themselves do not see what is about to happen,
though they can smell the entrails like hair.
Those who do not know what has happened here are dead.
My eyes are painted with a blue mark of hatred;
my sex, the stroke of a bloody claw of slaughter.
At midnight the footless boar emerges from his thicket
and scampers in a circle with a lit torch inside his mouth.


===============


A Message from the Emperor
Cesar Vallejo

Hello, my boy!
  They tell me you’re an incurable fatherland
  and a hopeless poet: that can’t be true!
  Tell me about it, youngster—you haven’t
  forgotten your mother tongue, have you?
  Which is?
  Which was?
  I ask you to go home, you’re
  turning pale.

But I must go now, good-by!
  I’m a thousand leagues from my past,
  from my childhood’s fatherland and
  my skinny girl.
  I’ve got to take off, I’m an emperor!
  How much for the license?
  I’ll pay it, don’t worry!

How much for the road?
  Hasta la vista,
hasta la victoria!
  ¡Vámonos cantando!
  (An only message from the Emperor.)


===============


A Dog Has Died
Jack Gilbert

There is an hour around the middle of the day
when time stops and the mind is perfectly clear.
Then you know there’s nothing more than the world.
You have a body that is doing something, living,
a natural activity, and inside it is complete,
and you know the following with complete certainty:
everything you know is worthless.
Your position in the world is worthless.
Your satisfactions are worthless.
Your achievements are worthless.
Your virtues are worthless.
Your feelings are worthless.
The history of the world is of no importance whatsoever.
The history of the world is just the history
of one thing happening after another.
What you want to know is simple and clear.
I’ve thought it for years.

Your own life will never satisfy you.
Your own life will always be impossible.

You are going to die.

It will happen to everybody you love,
everybody you hate, and everybody else,
it will happen to you and everybody in the world.
To make something out of your life you need
to make up a good reason why you were born,
what you’re doing, and that is as interesting
as the world makes it.

If you don’t know what you are doing,
you will die looking in the other direction.
If you do know what you are doing,
you’ll die in time anyway and that’s as it should be.
Then the shape of everything else will come clear.

Those are the simple and clear facts.

The rest of what anybody says is trivial and obvious.


===============


Unforced Rhythms In Any Case
A. R. Ammons

I am so purely happy here
the thought does not occur
I was before: I am
here, now. I am because
I am. Because I am 
I am purely happy: to exist
is all; nothing further asked,
no reason, no cause, no source
required; just extant
with free attention that picks
everything out like diamonds
where none but only things
show, without a choice, without 
a thought, what there is. What
a beginning this is! 
and free to begin what may,
what feeling may rise up
in a rhythm, what inexplicable
shine in the sun, what mercurial
matter in the feeling, what way
the afternoon comes on ... The dance
of impulse and restraint goes round
in circles of larger and larger scope.
The farthest looks to the farthest and
the whole to the whole, contains it
and reposes. How can speech help? 
For talk is a pebble dropped in water,
with its spreading rings of disturbance.
I was so purely happy here, I
did not think of being. What has
happened? I was before and now
again I am, here now, again.


===============


you, however, are singular and incomparable. 
As a perfume has no individual substitute
yet can be smelled by everyone,
you are everywhere. 
The universe is both open and reticent,
as is the space between your eyes and mine.

I seek you in the shimmering of this place.
I touch you in the fissure of the present moment.
Every mystery in creation speaks your name
as wave flows upon wave,
each drop dissolving the previous moment’s heaven,
never recapturing what preceded it,
only deepening the shimmering.

for Sasha, July 2004


===============


The Mirror
Jane Hirshfield

No, you can’t reflect the father back
from the mother, the mother
from the daughter or the son.
The dead sit dry
and still as horse brasses
at the heart of all we are.

No, no mirror will hold them,
the lost and the never known,
so I want to leave this life
holding fast to those before me:
to my mother’s left breast,
the sea pounding at the rocky arm of the bay,
to my father’s calloused right hand
rutting potatoes from the earth.

Later I will have to find my way
without them. But first I do this,
before whatever comes
and takes me from them.
So I reach out and with my arms
curve the world until my own flesh
brims like a cup: Pour out,
pour down, silver and endless.


===============


To S.M.
Jorie Graham

What I want to do in words, you do in  
armor—iron-red, iron-grey. It’s here,   
it’s—  
what I want to do with words. Something  
arrogant in it, pulling from the shape of my  
body   
pulling from the light—I love armor. I love  
that sense of preparing for something. What,   
what,   
what? Oh, this? This peopled joy. Yes, well—  
iron. Blood. Battle. I want to be blood-oak-armored.   
I want a huge brown body   
with hands for shade, not prayer. I want to   
turn red in the sky. When the shape of the tree   
moves in wind, I want to know the meaning   
is in the tree, not in the way it looks. I want   
to move to the edge of sleep and climb up on   
a wall and look, from armor, into all of this.


===============


The One
Sappho

I loved you once, Atthis, long ago.
You’d gone away, you hadn’t taken me.
You left me, loved some other better.
Why grieve for you? Why want you back?
I wish I didn’t.
I wish it were over.

I can’t forget that loving you.
For all I’ve tried. I can’t forget.
I still long for you to come to me.
I don’t want to be hurt like that again.
Every day I’m anxious, waiting.
I can’t forget that loving you.


===============


The Wide Prospect
Robert Bly

As I’ve grown older, I feel no sense of urgency. My friends fall
on the sword, putting their fleshly bodies on the line, searching
for the truth. But I sense no urgency.

I know the imagination is the opposite of the will. The
shadow follows the body across the lawn.

Lovemaking always produces sleepiness, and sleep
is another form of the body’s surrender to the imagination,
which is the great form-destroyer of the West.

We sit in the office and translate the Iliad.
It is closer to the underworld than we are.

The imagination’s embrace goes further than the
thorny-fingered tyrant can reach; it envelops its victim
as a cloud over a silver airplane.

The imagination removes desire from the will,
which is why the preacher shouts for us to repent.

The young love truth for its own sake,
or self-sacrifice or fleshly beauty.

They leave the garden and forget its weight.
The cunning hoe of the imagination
turns and leaves no footprints.

It turns its leaves over so that no sign
of the path can be seen. When the women
curse us and leave, the imagination turns on its heels.

Youth aims for the ultimate explosion.
Each cell in the body wants to be justified,

but the imagination opens the small charmed circle
into a circle many miles wide.

The body rests a few hours, and then
goes back to the slaughterhouse.

There the picture of Dorian Gray will be hung.
After the father dies, the son loses the sense
of urgency. The night is lighted with lanterns.

If there is pleasure, there is pain.
If there is love, there is hatred.

There is a great pool, a deep well in the center
of us. Within it our ancestors are crouching,
in cold prehistory.

We know this because of the seasons, which begin to reverse
themselves, and the mirror of the lake which sends
back only the blade of the falling axe.


===============


Between Walls
Denise Levertov

A dog, lying near his young master,
Exposes his genitalia
And fiercely, tensely quivers
As the voice of the boy
With deliberate care describes them.

What makes those small boys
Grow hard when they touch each other?

The years when the sex
Is only the sex of the animals.

When a penis is nothing
But an ingenious lever.

When the body of one boy
Grasps another’s without fear
Or shame or desire or thought,
Only to be close, only
To be warm, only
For a moment to be held.

And then they grow up.

They touch each other, perhaps,
With wanting; turn away,
With hardening, perhaps.

But this is the childhood
No one suspects

Until some moment of compassion,
Of gratitude and love

Reveals its happiness
And the surprise of that happiness,

The mystery there within
Thought’s earliest apprehension.


===============


“Redeem Us”
Frank Bidart

Let me begin, as ever, by mocking the whole idea—
Beginning is an act of such unnatural thought.
What have I to do with “redemption,” as I wandered
Into the streets, my pockets filled with rotten tomatoes—
Were they a sign of my rottenness, still unlovable?
Was I entering by the book’s end the “dark night”
Of my church’s catechism—
Bats wheeling out of the steeple at high noon?
Even then I did not believe
Those hands would lift me, not lift me—
Those wild shadows blacker than the shadows of wasps,
Hanging from the rafters in the back of the barn.
Don’t start again

With the arid hope that eros might somehow redeem us
Or the arid hope that poetry might redeem us.
Better to call it miracle—
A hammer’s long percussion on the prefab nails
By men’s strange, tender faces.
Something breaks open. Light pours in.
We drown in it. If we can sing one true song,
It will be because of their love for each other.


===============


Paintings
Jennifer Bartlett

There is
my self-portrait
looking like myself.
There is
my other portrait
reproduced
five hundred times
and mounted on panels
of silk.
When I fold the panels
into squares,
my face, five hundred times, is mirrored.

There is
my portrait,
and there is also
another portrait of myself
painted by a friend.
In this I am wearing
red and green paisley
and when I wear this dress I look
as if I had been painted in oils.
But to see this oil painting,
to see myself in the mirror,
these are two separate events.

There is the picture painted
of me, and there is me.
There is the girl in the painting
who will die, and there is the painter
of the painting who will die.
And I will die. I am separate.

There are four people in this painting,
but we will all die.
There are four different personages,
and each of the personages has a different eye
with which to view this painting.
There is no way to divide the eye.

There is the way in which the painting
is connected to the body.
And there is the opposite way
in which the body is connected to the painting.

There is the painting and there is the frame.
There is the frame and there is the wall.
There is the wall and there is the book.
There is the book and there is the fact
that it is handwritten.

This painting can be anything.
It is simply an arrangement
of the color green and a small,
familiar woman’s face.
She is my face and she is my mother.
But the painting is not moving.
It is unchanging.
It is almost the same
as the person looking
at it.


===============


The Guest
Marge Piercy

She dreams
about her mother’s death, over and over.
She lies
under the covers wrapped around her mother,
breathing together,
the hills moving in the pulse
of the sea.
They drift in a boat on a golden current
without a goal,
softly caged in the boat’s ribs.
She opens her eyes.
She is ten years old and alone
in her bed,
listening to the darkness.
She is forty,
then sixty,
then ninety-two,
then dead.


===============


After Black Roses & the Seeding Winter
Myung Mi Kim

The sky is black. My mouth curves out and in and out and in in 

breaths/the sun shakes the hoopskirt of the clouds that hang in

a hearth of time in which the body turns slowly/and the thick-

falling lip of darkens what the light has let go a failure to suture.

The watchman knew how to see through: I could see the fire in

a glass opal that he gave me. You were the opal across from me

and the rest of them stirred in the cursive air we breathed between

our open bed. I guess the sun was taking on its mass slowly, the

dust of the room catching the slipping shadows of now/and I could

tell the mouth was closing and opening and closing all over the

sky like it did when we left the island for Istanbul. In a silk robe,

you sat me on the counter in our hotel room and bathed my face

in the palm of your hand. When you left the station, nightfall

mutated the mountain. I cupped my hand like a glass to draw

water from the black taps in the bathroom.


===============


Heat Lightning
Mark Strand

The lineaments of gratified desire
Appear upon the heavens, and the air, which nothing
sustains,
Is laden, like a field, with insinuated fires
Which hover and make close to look like paradise.
The great heart of the world strikes at our own,
And nothing but the ego intervenes.
Whenever I think, after a rare marriage
Of earth and sky, that hope still shines above,
A dark shape at my side presents a letter
With my own hand and envelope, unsealed
Yet formal as an announcement of blood
And printed in the dead, but legible,
Language of desire. And every marriage
Of earth and sky announces it again.


===============


Meeting Eyes
Akilah Oliver

at a party
my heart quickening
at the scent of your body
dipped in beer and thin water
rivers of smoke and moonshine
blowing through
new music and old
love resounds in me
like a fresh wound
and I am bleeding in a garden
I am the sun and moon and
rain on your face

this memory unfolds
for the second time today
I hold its broken wings
as it tries to fly
I swallow it like an animal
to save it from dying
who knows where it is safe
I swallow it before the music
dies or the clock strikes
10pm and the first limousine
pulls into the street

I know where you live
now that I have met your eyes
the undertow of your hands
will haunt my sleeping
now that I have licked your lips
and tasted the poisons of rivers
the undertow of your body
will echo in my sweet tongue
the same poisoned wine
I have choked on like an animal
and the flowers of your garden
will bleed a red river
before and after midnight


===============


“The wind of something true blowing”
Geoffrey Hill

Lord, it is time. The dusty evening air
Cools and ignites the skin. The walled field
Intones its geometry of futures lost.
The rooks rise out of trees, cawing their way
Into the gilded purgatory of day,
His reign too rich for souls as lean as mine.

The dove’s lament is a mere syllable
Sown with a hundred shades of grief. I am
Mere ink on fading paper. I am bone
In the earth’s mouth. I lie, a dulled flint stone
Within the ramparts of our heart alone.
O little people, motherly and just,

You chant your candles out for me as though
A crucible for jewels.
Dusk is a kind
Of music preluding the beautiful.
O evening smitten with its own despairs,
My heart beats with the fading of your wings.

I am lit up with places where I’ve been.
I am shaken, almost rain in apple boughs,
I am a crude raft, my own bare mast alone.
I am not here. I am arriving late.


===============


first, on living

Kit Yan

the girl in the yellow dress
and blue nails walks down
across the cold night
our shadow mouths
quiet
and behind our song is
only silent running of water
and the moment opens up
and all we ever wanted
is already within the trees
branches extending far
beyond what we can see.
when the wind hits
they sway and cry with secrets
to each other.
the horizon wipes its brow
knocking
the edge of the world back
to allow more room for what
is coming
until finally we are a world of sail
the wind full in our sail and
within our grasp.


===============


Abril Desnudo
Nicolas Guillen

Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi vida.
Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi pecho
Páginas de cándida caligrafía
Con azules manos enamoradizas toca
Los astros de tu boca
Y los perfumes de tus axilas besa.
Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi vida.

Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi pecho
Oh pechos dibujados en mi pecho; pechos
Peinados por mis manos, que bella
Cartografía del sur sobre mi latido.
Sus lunas calientes, sus tierras grandes,
Sus montañas tibias, sus mares temblando.

Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi vida.

Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi pecho
Hijos nacientes de primavera, sabios
Abandonados en este campo sin señales,
Hermosos senos a quienes yo enamorado
Trazo una ruta de suspiros y lunas
A los senos de la hembra enamorada.

Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi vida.


===============


Human Praise
Richard Wilbur

I like to hear the unconcerned human praise
Of arms and clothes, the vast and flowery
Vocabulary of silverware and motels,
The music of elements in simple words:
The snow that sparkles “like a billion
Diamonds,” the dust that “rides in on a
Soft, brown cloud.” Words that give us back the
World of children, words that every man
Possesses, every woman too, that light
The tree in spring, each fruit and vegetable
In turn, now that the frost is coming on.

And I like words that swell with human ease
In praise of personal worth and pride:
The print that never fades upon the page
Of some fine reputation, the white stone
That decorates a grave, the unstainable
Purity of a child’s first love, the
Truth that rides upon the tongue of any
Simple soldier. Who has not enjoyed such
Flowers of speech? For words, like everything
Else, grow sweeter as they come to birth,
Becoming the body and blood of sense
And earthly knowledge as they make their way
To our attention, and mean, when they arrive,
Whatever we want them to.


===============


Have You Forgotten?
Simon Armitage

It’s not my job to tell you how the war is going.
I don’t live round here any more.
I haven’t lived round here since it all began. 
Ten years. 

You can write to me care of the 6th Battalion
Madame V in Rouen.
The boys aren’t bad. They get all the steak they can eat. 
You know I’d rather be with you.

I’ve no need of reminders; I was born here.
I can smell cow dung on the breeze
and blue hills in the rain.
No one can match a girl from Wales. 

I know what it’s like when the hounds get scent of blood.
I’ve seen the fields run red.
All because some fat Prussian wanted a piece of Poland. 
I didn’t ask to be here, 

but I’m staying anyway.

How is the boy?
Is he walking?
Has he taken his first step?
If you knew how much I miss you
and him. 

There’s still time, and I still have the ring. 

You remember the ring I’m talking about?
It’s been in my family a very long time.
Fool that I am, I couldn’t wait.

Ask me to marry you when it’s all over,
and I’ll be the first in line.
This isn’t what I dreamed of, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

Look, I know things haven’t always been easy,
but you have to believe me when I say
I want to be with you for the rest of my life. 

Everyone says they love you, but I mean it. 

I mean every word I’m writing here.


===============


Soon
Richard Wilbur

Pretty and cool, in a dangerous day,
The public gardens came into flower,
And no one walking there could guess how soon
That little park would shimmer with fire,
Whose date was moved up to a week away.
To harden guilty hearts, the others burn.
The tired men of the Old Iron Age,
Enlarged by a sullen, modern rage,
Will set alight the morning, will walk proud
Of their teamwork, as Rome after the mob
Paid triumph to its philosophers,
Who led the people from the wasting woods.
The gardens burn, and all night long
The blaze goes on; and all its light and heat
Meant only one thing: some thinned, brittle myth
About a world of change now spins and droops.


===============


Aubade
Frank O'Hara

Now the beaches are scattered with
ancient men and women
who stagger, barefoot, outside
their minds, shuffling
the shiny pebbles and shells.
Every hour is
a last hour, yet the
families sit there
quietly, learning to be
empty,
something the rest
of the world seems to have
acquired with ease.

The twilight turns to
purple. Little pools of
rainwater mix with
the sea. The waves
breaking are muted.

The horizon has escaped
the land and is gearing up for a
big one. Leaving the beach and
the water, I am suddenly
saddened by how much
we miss and continue to miss.
It is not a tangible thing,
but a mixture of what's
evident and what's
remembered. The bare

feet feel cold on the
tarmac and the moon
has been polished.


===============


A History of Joy
Samuel Menashe

First of all, the animals were created, especially a white
kitten I have called, with some feline nobility, Blanche.
The first man, Adam, wandered an eternity in search
of that rose bush called Eve, without which he’d be a mere
lone goose or splinter of bituminous coal.

The sun rose one morning twenty-three hundred years
ago, ushering into the world a sturdy infant
who would one day huff and puff his way into history as
Buddha, Mohammed, or the Emperor Yao of the Fourteenth
Dynasty.

But it is something that happened three years ago this month
I think is worthy of celebration here. The Sun (nicknamed
Satchmo, George, and Old Zim, along with several other vulgar
names I won’t mention) set upon an easy journey to the
corpse of Creation.

It was twilight and a honeybee happened to visit a particular
rosebud that day, a brownish blossom with minute petals,
which I immediately named Terpsichore for my admiration of her
own light and nimble dance. But when at last the Sun, grinning
with displeasure, demanded identification, I was forced to name her
Joy.

The evening’s cocktail was a pleasant drink of freshly
shaken vodka and pomegranate juice, but if I could show you
a glass of ordinary water from that day, you would see
a clear, rich liquid sparkling like a flat crystal plane where two
waters meet.

The Sun, meanwhile, settles beneath the folded wings
of darkness, and wakes up now and then with a scowl.
But I have spread my old wool blanket, curl up beside
a bare pillow and, with finger or pen, summon forth
brief legends of joy.


===============


Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
Billy Collins

I am fishing on the Susquehanna in July.
The thick line hangs down through the surface of the water
like a straw into a cold drink, like a stick of ginger
slowly sucked and chewed.

All around me, the floaters are doing exactly that—
floating with their backs to the current
and their faces turned up to the relentless sun,
which has already dried the sweat on my arms

and which, with its ultraviolet rays, is causing the skin
to peel off their noses and making their lips puffy and cracked
and turning what had been their supple youthful bodies
into dry, brittle matchsticks

of the kind that you strike and then toss into the water
to see if they will really light.
Every half-hour or so, I reel in the line,
check the bait, squirt some more watermelon bubble-gum,
red scented, onto it, and toss it back in.

Along the banks, elderly fishermen in baseball caps
are tilting back their folding chairs,
sipping cans of ice tea, adjusting the antennas on their radios.
If this were Japan, I would raise my hand
to my forehead, bow, and say to them
the word that means “patient” or “amiable.”

In Greek, this is the word hios.
It describes someone or something that is cheerful,
relaxed, tolerant of delays, and able to wait.
I have fished all my life
for words like these, fished through
pages of the dictionary,
poems, essays, and stories,
and these are what I have found.

Yes, the floaters are waiting for something to happen
but they have their backs to whatever it is
and their faces to the sky
and so, whatever it is, it will surprise them
and they will never see it coming
not even a flash of light on the water
and after it has happened, they will think
it was nothing more than a brown trout or a sunfish
or perhaps just the wind or something they thought they saw
between blinks of their eyes.


===============


Morning
Richard Wilbur

The night has gone, the starless wet
Of earth has purged our sense of sin:
Love takes, this morning, a new road,
The marble threshold of the year.
A wind from the cold salt marshes
Brushes the spring and is gone.

The starlings warble in their marshes, 
The finches flicker from their thicket, 
Blue flags bloom in the puddle-margin, 
Swallows arrive, all fresh and light;
The old man wears a sprouting beard,
Young lovers meet across a park.

All over the spring’s bright rim
Migrating flocks of love are flying. 
What stranger thing could there be done 
Under the sun, under the spring, 
Than a child be born, a seed be sown, 
The world turn over on its King?


===============


Hymn of the Androgynous
Muriel Rukeyser

On the day I am
to be burned, the day
I am not to be burned, I love you,
I am afraid, I hope, I pray, I am
alone: you help me, you
show me a spring in the darkness,
the child I will be my last sun
in the flaming leaves of the fire,
in the water you give me forever,
in the tower of your faith in me,
in a silence like a long remembering,
in a joy that has no end,
in the light, in the force, I am
no longer alone, and the children
who are killed before they are
born, and the women and men
who are burning, who are tied
in lonely beds in a hospital, who
are abandoned at night in the streets,
who are given torture as
the secret truth of their days,
who are killing themselves slowly
with the strange poison of freedom—
I am the end of the burning
that is the beginning of their eyes;
I am the fire in their eyes;
I am the fire in their hands;
I am the power of their hands;
I am the wild warrior,
the hunger-fierce sister and brother,
the ones whose fury is open
to all the instruments of fear,
whose dance is terrible to lovers of death,
whose future is the promise
and the work of peace.


===============


The Hôtel Cæsar
Wendy Barker

The world is no longer your own. You have not yet had time
to understand, even in the dark, that your death is a kind
of hymen, a setting free, that inside this hotel we are all virgins,
regardless of what we may have or may not have done.
The sounds of that tiny keyboard have been churning
underneath me since the morning you died; I had thought them
the engine of this sleeplessness, but now I know they were you,
unhindered, playing some dream Mozart to me; now I know you have been dead.
Now they are still, but I have already gone on without them.
The whole room has become a dream in which you arrive
from L’Hopital, that citadel of labyrinths in which they keep
the faggots of our flesh and the cemetery of our hearts,
in which there must have been a mirror on whose surface
you saw yourself naked and alive, a shadow no more, and in which you
placed a little thumbprint in God’s ink, in which you lie dreaming
of me, in which you look out the window and see me go.


===============


Elegy
Mary Jo Bang

Would not the seasons themselves relapse
into stillness if your hand lay empty on the cloth?
Say nothing, no, I will believe you know
in the disquiet of dreams I watch you breathe
in a slow rhythm that beats out the heart
of the night watch. Hold me and say nothing
so the hours will lengthen into evening
and we will follow the sun under blue waters
of sleep—follow that steady sway of the ocean.

How can I look into your eyes and not believe
in the intricacies of the stars we name
by our hunger? In the darkness that thickens
every hour into morning, I watch you move
beyond all I know about you. Here the night
lies as thin as the skin between our bodies.
Here we live toward what touches us like water,
somewhere waiting for us, pooled in a corner
of a room where the corners keep their silence.


===============


... When The Lights Go Down...
Philip Larkin

When the lights go down
  How palely looms
  The remote control
  The numbered buttons
  How glacially glow
  The blank-faced talents
  On their banks of snow.

  How wanly does
  The picture spread
  Not in detail
  But an interchange
  Of quality
  A possession
          This well-lighted room
  And do you possess me
  With your beauty?

Who else's face
  Brings to your door
  Power of its grace
  Who will enquire
  The price and spurn
  Selling like this?
          That this will go on
  Until we say Stop
          No more, no more
  Between them and us
          So sadly shoved
  So soon unshared
      And even then
          Even to a rapturous pause
  There's something in the darkness that abides
          No death-defying leap
  No brilliant burst
          From a climax in the mist
  All glamour in the glow
  All future in the past
          I never wanted that
  I only want the trite
          Past, present and to come
          That can supply
          Mere images
  For my own voice
  Unrolling without end
  Imprisoning me.

  Sometimes I cry
  For there to be
  Nothing to lose
  Nothing to do
  Nothing to say
  With no one there
  At the end of nothing
  Only peace at last

  But better wake up
  Then let's decide
  The final curtain's
  Descending
  When the lights go down
  The house lights down
  They can all go down
          (With my blessing)
  I don't mind
  When the lights go down.


===============


The Dream
Anne Sexton

No one alive could remember it,
nor ever would, nor ever had
seen or even drawn the whole of it.
The body knows more than the mind knows.
The center cannot hold. This was the rose
unmarried, the white rose, the frightened
frightened white rose, the frightened
white rose trembling in the hand.
A man was counting out the hours
by counting out the cash, and if
it wasn’t quite enough
the clerk would never be remembered
or could tell what was happening
down the street, the yellow bulldozer
pushing the last of the people
out of their knees and elbows.
Behind the huge white hangings
a girl, rather small and simple,
lay as though on a penny arcade bed.
She folded her legs up. No
one saw her, no one will ever
see her again, folding her
legs up like a baby,
her toes sucking at her thighs.
She is afraid, she is cold.
She has this dream as the
doctors insert the tubes.
Now let us make a wish.
Let us kill this dream.
She will wish for an egg
to enter her nostril, a womb
bigger than her heart
and more alive.


===============


Reminiscence of Georgia O'Keeffe
Linda Pastan

As a girl I remember lying on the grass
and staring up at clouds in the sky:
one swan with open beak that slowly sank
until only the long neck was left, and one
which suddenly became a toothless skull,
an ancient riverbed I thought I knew,
the yellow of mustard or parched farmland
after rain, a lion with a great mane
come in his time to look for me.
Now all that is gone, the grasslands, the river,
the lion and swan. I have only myself,
which is as far as I can see.


===============


Fury
Lynn Xu

If it takes my entire life
to kill what killed my mother—
then my new is permanent
and I will forever be young.

This is what it feels like to burn
with the fury of the sun,
who has witnessed people die in front of
her.
This is what it feels like

to understand that I am alive
and will have to live
with what has happened
to her.

It is in my newly growing muscles,
and it is in my father who stands alone
in front of the sink, fingers the knife

in the kitchen drawer, pauses,
and then slowly shuts the drawer.

If the sun ever kills
the planets,

the sun will understand.
The moon will cry blood.

From the poem Snow, Pablo Neruda says, “Then a child appeared
swathed in a white sheet.”

Neruda does not name this child—
she is “the daughter of the snows.”

She is our sister, sister
blossom
with your mouth my frozen blood
with your voice my skin

Gentle and smooth against the sky
Neruda does not name her—

because she is all of our daughters


===============


The Early Purges (1983)
Gjertrud Schnackenberg

When everyone else leaves

the room, a man hunches behind his desk, sweating.
Outside, students squeal their rebellion against the college,
attack its brick-and-stone façade. Bricks splinter on the pavement,
glass explodes, a window flower bursts. Their slogan goes up in smoke.
The teachers inside don’t think of kids, but of money
and of parking: students are not the only way the members
of the college make a living—hence this crisis
of trust. The kids are no fools, they know
about money. They also know their elders’ grip
on the market of learning is beginning to slip.
They don’t mind this. They are tough as paper
under their health-aware shirts, their holeless jeans.
The fools are the old ones, still dreaming of security,
who hold it in their thick, plum-veined hands,
try to offer it to the kids. Exaggerated means
must be taken: acts of violence must be shown.
The hunched man weighs the costs: some human skin
will have to meet a heavy instrument, but
that can’t be helped. His own flesh has already met
the hard, unyielding lessons of a public and private life.

He looks out through his own windows at the falling
glasses, the alien damage done,
and coolly knows he must forgive.
He will be the man to offer forgiveness to young fools
(this is a balm, a flattery to the powerless)
and then the kids will get down on their knees
and take the punishment they have overslept,
wake from oblivion, the rose
of class war, the red flag that he gave them
when they still nursed their secret thirst
for love. Oh, they may not believe in him,
he knows, but he believes in them.
Believes that they believe.
He says aloud: repent, repent,
but he’s tired and falls asleep at his desk.
He dreams that they see through the show.
The rose thorn cuts the hand of love.
Outside it’s night now, and no one leaves a room,
not even in his dream.


===============


Paysage maudit
Maurice Scève

I 

1. C’est une montaigne
Qui porte le nez haut,
Et des pâmecils
Qui font la pompe.
De foule facelle,
De l’habiller bien
Et de la traiter
Grand raffol est le tien.

II 

1. Elle a tout dessus
Le hault de la teste
Une crottaine
Qui en est la teste.

2. Depuis ce haut orteil
Jusques en la bouche
Des pellefesses
Ront tout son corps.

3. Tu vois qu’à la bouche
Y a un collet blanc
Qui pour le couer
Ne monte jusqu’au tant.

III

C’est le bois le mieulx gracieulx
Qui se verra du monde entier.
Le plus preux des chevaliers
Pour ce visage ne ferait mieulx.

IV

1. C’est cette haute stature
Qui n’a mais qu’une pointe
Que ne sauroit bon nuit
Semer nulle matière.

2. Le plus long sierche est tout de laict,
Et mesle de crue luy semble.
Lors vostre Omont le laict
Bien te doi monter au ceruele.

V 

1. Est icy le flan du corps:
Le couer, compaignon
Du chantre, qui le cœur
Chante en l’entraygnant.

2. Je fus rencontrer le couer
Qu’à son meulstoir fut.
J’aurois volentiers
Fait de ceste marmotte

3. Du joujou des jouissans,
Et si en couchasse:
Mais la vache du monde
Ne face tant son compte

4. Pource qui sçay au pere
Que de mon couer esperis,
Quand celluy se tourneroit
Si vien me deseris.

VI 

C’est l’oeil le plus estroit
De tout le corps,
Le g
===============


We are the Creatures of a Day and a Night
Jimi Hendrix

And we are the creatures of a day and a night
We roll the night around and make it display
To show the eyes of a man what can shine in the light
It’s my day, it’s my night, to do it all right
We fall through the sky like rain on our way
On our way to forever
And we are the creatures of a day and a night

We are the children of the things that we see
And I say it’s a hell of a way to be born
To grow old all alone to prove there was nothing to know
And then to know that there’s something to see
And it’s everyones karma if you can believe
But the moon is free

We are the creatures of a day and a night
We roll the night around and make it display
To show the eyes of a man what can shine in the light
It’s my day, it’s my night, to do it all right
We fall through the sky like rain on our way
To forever
And we are the creatures of a day and a night


===============


Barn Owl
C. D. Wright

Darling
to walk toward the natural
clatter of warm
thinnish airfalls
in dark in warmness in
birds & blood without fin

Is it our winter heart what
cajoles against evergreens
against water
against the hard leaf-stick year

On the face of the planet
how much is left behind of how much

This night, a leg’s
length of stars
floats above the treeline

how sweet to part company
fades,
a brace of coal-black birds

off the uppercut branch

of my young & handsome
imagination

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===============


A Lover’s Quarrel With the World
Andrea Hollander Budy

Here, let’s stop.  Look.
If only for this moment.

Will there be more like it?
Who cares?

Here, hold my hand, I’m cold.
Let me unbutton you.

This is something.
A beginning.

Here.
Let me tell you where I hurt.

Dawn
Andrew Feld

All night the world outside the window has breathed.
No matter how quietly I breathe, the world
still has breathed in, in, until my lungs reel
with the worry of it, the fear that I
will never be able to breathe out.
And now light is rising
and with it the terrible pulling up, slowly,
of the gray world. There is a heaviness
in my stomach, a fear that now
I cannot release, that the sun
cannot warm away. Even if I knew
what to do with it, would I still
want to release it?


===============


The Winter Day
Mary Oliver

Every year everything I do is a farewell
to the sights and sounds and especially the people of the summer.
A friend has died.
We notice the silence in the neighborhood.
I stand at the window as evening falls.
A street lamp comes on,
and the faces of the winter trees appear,
brown skeletons revealed in the lamplight.
Such quietness, such patient waiting.
I imagine them in the deeps of summer,
standing cool, or flicking occasional shadows across the pavement.
People come and go, hours and days,
and I stand here now at the window,
knowing I am looking at this for the last time:
the bare trees that are filled with hidden birds,
the stone fence along the street,
the strangers on their way home at twilight.

This joy

And the one we go to meet
at the horizon
of that nameless
salt marsh
tangled in green grass
wild roses, blackberry thorns
let us stand there
in the long white pasture
which is blown
with star

and the moon
swimming upstream
into the veins
of our thought
the few stars
we keep in mind

We say, There are more.
Why not put them up
on the dark,
the boardwalk screen?

Forgive the dark.
Forgive our hunger
for starlight.
Forgive this death

where we begin,
where we cease
to be who we are
till heaven
makes the repair
we are forever.
There is a joy
which is forever
and we can know it
anytime. Even in the sleepless
night when
life is the hands
curling under your head
and there is nothing more
to ask for, not even
forgiveness or mercy,
and the mornings
flood in,
dark and swift,
to the window where
we lie half awake
listening
with our whole
bodies: the birds
the breeze in the trees
the voices of children
out in the street
the footsteps of mercy
and the hush of the waves
of darkness
that do not cease
And the one we go to meet
at the horizon
of that nameless
salt marsh
tangled in green grass
wild roses, blackberry thorns
Let us stand
===============


IV. Indra’s Net
Rainer Maria Rilke

Was it in deep error that I suffered this anguish,
but in that kind of suffering which is the awful
moment of love;
that in which passion, which man can’t understand,
submerges so deeply into a woman’s heart, that the soul,
before ever another man can appear in her,
must rise from the waters, change and begin to feel all things,
as she did before, with so much awe, with such ecstasy;
as if that were her first childhood?

Lila, was I, simply, the infatuation
at the moment of your coming of age?

And so, where I am the flowing river, as you felt me,
and forever the wave breaking on you,
you became this quiet lake,
in which each day is like the one before,
and night is sleep without change.

In you all things have become equal;
you are at peace; and somewhere a landslide
of happiness still comes, which smooths
out all things.
And nowhere is my love.

Plead for it with your soft full gaze,
with thisall-books-no-dedup
 mountain lake,
that it’s filled with the sky’s blue water,
with the eternal, holy pain;
give the name of something,
name the name:
was it only
infatuation?


===============


Dawn Revisited
Brian Doyle

This is the best time to think of you, your face,
your bones, your voice, the brush of your hair,
your speed, your inward gaze, your straight-backed walk
and perfect posture, your deserts of self, your bones.
The morning breeze touches the apple-laden tree,
bends the grass, drops the apples, and the kite lifts,
leaps, soars, dizzy, and the land dips and tilts,
and, sitting on the grass, we think of you,
we think of you in the morning breeze and the air,
the pale air alive with bees now, the sunlight glinting
back from miles of lighted windows, the clouds shifting
their white galleons southward, toward you, homeward.

--from "Notebooks"
Larry Levis

November 14, 1984

Of everything I've lost, I think mostly of my mind--
of those horrible mornings when I rise again
to the responsibility of being a man.
I think of those days with astonishment, with sorrow--
the astonishment of discovering
that on some mornings when I get up my shoes
feel very heavy, and all the air
a sad electricity, and the hard blue
November morning brilliant with mist
feeling like a conscious thing
meant to destroy me, or tear something out of me,
leaving me mutilated, the coarse ground
carpeted with blue leaves blown in from some
unimaginable distance, the huge white houses
outside my windows like the hulls of ghost ships--
and the sorrow of knowing that it's me,
the dogged, ordinary me, not some swift demon,
that weighs so heavy, heavy shoes on a blue morning
when the mist has turned everything to brass,
the huge white houses hulking and gleaming with mist.

The mist is cold,
the rough leaves under my shoes feel like coins,
like metal tablets inscribed with some sad history,
and I must walk through the mist, and read the history.
I must make myself, over and over, a man
who is capable of walking through the terrible
electric air, the gleaming white hulls of houses--
a man who is capable of reading the sad history
engraved so legibly on every blue leaf,
on the
===============


Eating Poetry
Mark Strand

I’d been away from school a long time when I opened the book
called Introduction to Poetry by Philip Levine,
and from the first two pages began to eat the poetry
as though it were bread. I was in the public library then,
a great room with a ceiling made of light. It was my first time back,
having made the mistake of leaving,
but now my wanting to be a poet had brought me back,
dressed in my soiled raincoat and dusty shoes.
I was alone at a table by the magazines
and I opened the book at random, which is the way
the I Ching works or the Bible. I read the opening lines
and fell into the book as if falling under a spell,
a light spell like the spell of the first warm day in April
when the winter sleep is still thick upon you
and you want to go out and do something
though you don’t know what it is. Here, then, was the book
of my deliverance, the book that was going to tell me
how to live. I had started to read and did not stop
until I had finished, the poems disappearing
like a cat eating its fill of fish, nothing left.
The first poem said eating poetry was better
than drinking wine and it went on to say
that it was better than just about anything,
that if you really liked the flavor you could eat forever,
but I was not an expert then and thought
this poem was only average, that it did not go far
enough in its praise, that anyone who was really a connoisseur
would think it was a crude piece of work, a caricature
in which the writer had gone out of his way
to hit all the obvious notes. I next read
"Entrance to a Wood" by John Ashbery
and thought that I had made a great discovery
which would completely change my life,
like opening a door onto a spectacular garden
you never dreamed of before. Then I sat and waited
for my discovery to take effect and felt nothing,
so I turned the pages and began to read
"Some Sort of Song" by William Carlos Williams,
a much shorter piece but at least a little better
in the line department, the secret to which I’d just begun to learn:
that the whole thing had to work in the space
between the
===============


Ancient Music
Thomas Hardy

I travell’d among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.

‘Twas half–recorded in my soul,
‘Twas figured on my map,
‘Twas spoken in my heart,
But I knew not a word of it.

I walked in woods, I dipt in streams,
I climbed the hills, I pluck’d the flowers,
The breeze blew on me from the fields,
The moorhen croak’d at me.

The mountain–shapes that was so huge,
The boulder–stones that was so grey,
The stars that streaked the hoary cloud,
The star that lead me there.

Why did I trust that star so much?
How could I, heeding it so blind,
Go off from all the rest, and stray,
As if to prove them false?

I wander’d over valleys wide,
I cross’d o’er flood and fen,
Nor knew, till doubt was dead,
What love I bore to thee.

I came not, England, to the test,
To some enduring yard or grange,
A grey–grown yard, a moss–grown grange,
And half–a–dozen grassy–fronted horses,

But to a land of houseless hills,
A land of lakes, of rushing rills,
Of peopled cities, and so forth,
To famous cities.

And could I choose a home
At sight of all that’s fair,
Or London, splendid one!
Even thou, hadst a more dear abode,

The which I found not, but the bond
Still holds us tied;
In blood, in heart, in flesh, I am
Of thee, O ancient Mother, mighty Mother,
England!


===============


The Work of Wolves
George Szirtes

The great dreams are about being devoured, or at least
accosted, at one’s most vulnerable, asleep, naked,
mouth agape with a dream of devouring. Even images
are likely to be emptied of detail and the more
spectacular they are the more they attract
and the more that there are of them and the hungrier
I am for the next. I am astonished by the way
stories and images repeat themselves in the frames
of sleep. Most of the men in the story are guilty of
some sort of excess or some sort of dereliction,
which is often the same thing. The women I know less
about except that they are in the dream more or less
disappear from it. There is always a lack of detail,
or in some cases too much. The men, exhausted from
their exploits, sit in the sun, towels, cool drinks,
then into the shade for more. The beds are white, the
sheets sheer, the houses lightly colonial with long
white hallways of which I know little except a sort
of smearing of interior and exterior, light itself
too weak to support the weight of truth. The books
I look through are no help: fragments of classics,
stories made up by schoolboys and translated into
which keeps me awake, the suspense, the pace of it,
the little deaths and revivals and the changefulness
of everything. At one with myself only when asleep.
The covers of the books heavy and luxurious, open
with a scent of wood and water, the smell of limes
on the trees, their hard white fruit pure and hard.
But it is not the world of the books that surrounds
me, it is the light and shade, the sand, the pool,
the people who never quite know where they are and
have forgotten their names. To be the subject of
a sentence is to live in a box with felt-tip and
scissors and sellotape. But the sentence will not
fit you, there is something defiant about you, in
the end there is only white dust and shreds, another
gesture, a sigh of frustration and you realize that
you are simply looking at the floor. The floor is


===============


To Time
William Dunbar

Thou must will, and I must spend
  Thy gifts, and be no more;
Nor win, nor woo, nor call to thee,
  For thou art will, and will must guide. 
I see, and all I have done in this shall come to nought,
For all things to their end repair,
And earth that’s green today
  Shall be clean mould to-morrow.
Here death doth reign, and here his darts are like to hit;
He hurleth out, a skull doth quit,
And like a ball breaks head to wit;
So is my song and all that is writ,
By such will as shall be sped,
  Without your leave, to die.


===============


Questions
Linda Gregg

1.
     Why is your life so quiet, so dangerous?

2.
    What makes the leaves break through the air?

3.
    Where can I find a church I can enter?

4.
    Why does the snow always look like an angel falling asleep?

5.
    Why are people always leaving a city they know well?

6.
    What do I lose when I meet your eyes?

7.
    What is it you taste with your tongue?

8.
    Where is the love?

9.
    Why are we here?

10.
    What is the most difficult thing about being alive?

11.
    Why is it that one person will make you happy, while others
will bring you only sorrow?

12.
    I am looking into a face very close to mine.
    It is her face.
    It is your face.
    I touch your cheek.

13.
    Where are we going?

14.
    Why do you sometimes close your eyes?

15.
    How does the music begin when I enter your room?

16.
    Why can’t I fall asleep?

17.
    Do I still love you?

18.
    When will I return?

19.
    Is there anything left for me to see?

20.
    I would like to find a hotel in a city that no one has ever heard of.

21.
    When can I come back?


===============


Sea Rose

The rose has been in the vase for several days.
I start to notice its force.      It is natural and
strongly scented, for which it was bred.     
I have never seen a rose so pliant or so strong.
It never stops moving in its water.
Its movement is constant.       
As I watch I have a sensation that reminds me
of being on a boat in rough water.
The day is like the inside of the rose.

One day, traveling with Rose from the south to the north
of the large island, the boat pitched so heavily in the gale
that I began to retch uncontrollably. I had, at that time,
eaten a large dinner, and felt that perhaps I would die.
Rose held a bowl close to my face, and, with her left arm,
braced me upright, as I knelt on the floor of the boat.
I never thanked her for that act.        I remember
at the time wishing she would simply leave me alone.

A strange desire now possesses me: I want to take the rose out
of the vase and eat its petals, but I do not.        Instead,
I watch it. I watch it as it swings in the agitation
of its water. I do not know why I resist the impulse.
I merely watch the movement of the rose in its vase.
I smell it. Perhaps if I were closer, it would overcome me.
It occurs to me that the rose is so alive because it is strong.

Or perhaps its power is in the fact of its small life.
Rose no longer speaks to me of such things.
It occurs to me that there is in such movements
among the flowers and the clouds and the waves,
a force that in the mind becomes a supreme idea.
In fact, a way of being alive.

The Chinese Nightingale
Jan Wagner

The Chinese nightingale does not sing
Of spring’s fresh verdure. As the winter snow
Behind the cold cloud in blazing bronze decays,
Buds to the blossoms of the summer glow;

In brightness thus the fire of hell doth burn
From bitter ice, is lastly to a flame
Of little warmth; but what the fire destroys
Yet in the furnace heat is not reclaimed;


===============


The Laugh
Elizabeth Bishop

It was when I told them,
This pencil must be a new one
For the old one has a break in it,
Or was it this one
I said, holding a pencil?

It was this one,
The little straight one
I used at lunchtime,
With a famous name on it,
But it was when I told them,

For no reason
Just being silly,
That I wanted an eraser
To eat with it,
And after lunch, when we were

Back in the room again,
And I was looking for that eraser,
I could only find the famous one,
I said, and it isn’t the right one,

For that isn’t the same pencil.
And they said,
In their curious pretty chorus,
Which has the eraser?

And I said, That isn’t the same pencil.
Then there were those sweet days of childhood
When things seemed so transient
As if a grownup spoke,

And all the little pencils
In their straight and broken ones
Pointed their tips at me
Like a posy of flowers.


===============


i found you in the mouth of the day
Dorothea Lasky

just a pair of lips   
then the rest of me   
a pair of boots from fiji

an equestrian scarf   
that says i love my horse   
sweetie   
nails   
of my incisors  

      my wet smooth eyes   
those things you love about me

you turned   
to see my shoulders   
they slumped and you saw   
how much i love you   
my breath too heavy to go on

we are in between    
parking spaces or   
while you are drawing us   
how would you know that   
the yellow about my form   
had such a weight   
the light that goes along   
with my legs you had never

seen that   
not the way you think about me 
under your umbrella when   
it is raining   
or your magazine   
we got married before

the rain did   
got married   
we have   
rolled around together   
made some photos   
and talked in the mouth   
of the street   
how little we need   
to disappear   
if we learn how to disappear   
at all   
if you paint my mouth   
so you have a reason   
to remember me     
and do you   
and do you hear   
what I am saying right now    
in the pit of our stomachs   
always       
in the pit of our stomachs 
we get sad

and then   
lick the sad   
from each other’s throats

give me the back of your neck   
where you signed   
in the middle   
will you marry me   
there   
among our supine branches

to help my knees   
walk down our hallways   
in the light


===============


The Waking
W. B. Yeats

I have heard the pigeons of the San 
Angelico 
Cooing in memory of their ancient too   
Loud delight, 
And the orange-tree was in flower. 
Faces and dusty redface glimmered 
Through the orange-tree, 
And there was talk of them that had faces. 
For it was the hour when a man 
Remembered a friend, 
Or a friend a man. 
The closeness of this union overwhelmed   
The heart. 
How many, I said, who have loved this
lovely earth 
And the things of this earth and the   
essence of this earth, 
Must go un-comprehended! 
And what of knowledge? 
A grape turns purple on a broken wall, 
A tattered book in an ancient script 
Is all the tracing left, 
And you and I— 
There is no closeness amongst us now,   
And who of all these is the unknown 
he loved? 
He that of all she loved, 
He that she is dying now for, her last breath   
Torn out of her for him? 
Whatsoever of dreadful or lovely has gone   
By, 
I have found the general drift of things   
Most noxious. 
Should you and I return— 
Or not return? 
No, all is gone.

Years had served their purpose.
I would no longer struggle  
To pluck the heart out of their debris.
Neither would I be  
Crowd at the hand of God  
Or be laid aside.
O  my dear friends, 
We with our weather-cock affections, 
We must exclaim at last over life's failings,  
Yet winged as we are,  
And half loth to be folly's prey,  
What are we when the shawl is rolled away,  
But spectators, who have paid  
And so are free to go?  
—Vergara

Where I want to go  
and what I want to know  
No matter  
The weather-cock turns—  
Wing-spread or earthbound,  
What have I learned?  
My faith is the same
===============


The End of the World
Archibald MacLeish

There shall be love
Now that the lake has been cut through. 
Though the sun is still there shining,
The burnt umber of shadow, as a heavy curtain,
Shall obscure the first night in a room.
So, the heart’s final argument,
The worm at the root of the apple,
This moral that turns into an apple,
A worm, an apple, a leaf.
So love that surpasses knowledge.

Love without limbs, scapulae,
Palate, larynx, hands,
Labia, and hungers.
Love that surpasses the end of the world. 
Just a music under the blue sky,
The feeling of nakedness, of hair against skin,
The newborn’s breath, his blindness.
Ripe gold flesh in the half-light of morning.

The terror of death and birth,
The opposition of flesh to spirit,
The desperate incantation of religion,
From the rib that was stolen from the man,
The ends of the dark world, and their coming together.
Love that surpasses a woman’s knowledge.

That is what I mean. Love that is an absence
And a presence at the same time,
Love that is colorless and humble,
The long embrace, the stillness in the wood,
The first sound beyond beginning.

As we enter the last days of the great depression.


===============


Today I crossed paths with him on the street
Henri Cole

Today I crossed paths with him on the street
fifteen years after I’d left the city.
I stood in front of the door to his building,
wondering if he might appear.
I was thinking, I have a right to be here,
a right to stare at his house,
and when he appeared I said, I was worried.
You wouldn’t believe how far I’ve come.
He said, This is something I never expected,
then embraced me. I watched him climb
the old steps. I turned to walk away,
expecting him to run after me,
to tell me not to go, that I could stay.
But he didn’t call out or return.

1 of 1

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Revisions:
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01-
===============


First Love
Laura Kasischke

They’re on the first floor, but I can see into the room—
There’s just enough gap between the blind and the window.
She’s leaning against the headboard of the bed—
Her mother is on the edge of the bed—
Folding the laundry.
It’s difficult to hear from outside—
But I can hear his voice, sometimes, and hers.
I imagine them sitting on the bed, laughing.
I imagine her long brown hair, tied back, and her eyes,
The way she walks. I think I could love her.

The window is open—I can smell it—she is bringing
A glass of water to him now.
She sits down at the end of the bed.
Her mother goes into the other room.

It looks like a hotel room. The carpet is green. The
curtains are thin, yellow. The ashtray is full,
Someone will be back for the suitcase.
She stretches, alone now, in the hotel room,
Staring out the open window—
As though she is thinking of me.
As though she is sorry I can’t be there, as though she
is longing for me to be there—
Then she reaches for a pile of shirts, holds one to her face,
I think it must smell of him.

She will hold them until they wrinkle. She will wear the
seams of them soft, she will sleep with the smell of him
all night on her pillow, she will roll the soft blue wool
of his sweater up into a little ball—
A crown for her sleeping brow—and through the summer,
When she’s learning to drive and I’m working in my father’s
garden, she will hold it to her nose and breathe him in.
She will hold it to her nose like something alive,
For years she will hold that sweater to her nose as though
it is the thing that lives, like a secret—and she will dream
of him over and over and over—
And every time she does, she will remember me,
She will stand at the door, half asleep, her hair a knotted
hairy mess, her thin white arms outstretched, waiting,
Straining against the ropes of memory, waiting for me to lift
her up—we
===============


10-24-03

11:18pm

Toshiba Digital Camera/Copyright ©Reilly,
All Rights Reserved.

(For DC)

At the Farmer’s Market in August,
we were confronted by the primal fear that haunts us.
You stood facing me on the sidewalk, like a soldier.
I saw the whole world in your eyes.
In the breeze, hanging on a line,
upside-down from a pole, were the things
that had once flown but had grown brown
and could not fly.
The sky was sad.
You stepped inside me to see what I was made of.
On your face you wore the sun, and the light
rose above your skin and the light in you
shone and the light went out
out of me to glow, further and further
until it was gone, to the other side
of everything.
Then all the colors of the world
gathered in your eyes again.
The books you’d read rested
quietly on the shelves of your head.
Things in boxes, closed up, hidden
from the cold, peacefully waited.
The stories people make stayed
in the heart.
The fear we have known held us.
The future lay in wait.
The wind parted the clouds
to let in some light.
The world and the sun waited for us
inside you.
On the end of the line, the brown birds
hung still, about to fly
and die.

From Song of Myself

Walt Whitman

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

For I am not one man, but many.

I speak the words of my different times, yet I am the same,
I speak the words of you:
One who has struggled with this conflicting self and made a new world
in which he has passed through and made one world
of the old.

A country of wilderness,
cities, pastures, farms,
a nation born in a day
like none other, the song, one song of many voices,
the rivers of the world, the languages of the world,
the birds of the earth, the eyes that see, the souls that imagine,
the soul that loves,
all people and all places, all lives and all deaths
===============


We, with our mountain,
Climbing in the night
Anna Akhmatova

We with our mountain, climbing in the night, 
We do not fear the rushing wind 
Nor the driving snow, 
Nor frost, nor night. 
But, embraced by the young fir trees, 
Willingly we climb, 
Happy are we, enjoying love.


===============


Hölderlin's Grave
Louise Glück

When I was a child, I turned the pages
of my mother’s Bible. I would take the book
down from its shelf, cover my knees
with the black velvet cloth, the border embossed
with gold angels. It was cold—
the wind pulled at the slats of the shutters.
I loved the weight of the book, its hard
leather binding, the edge of the gold page,
the soft thump when it fell
open between my palms. And then one day
I reached the page on which, neatly folded
and pressed between the gold margins, was
a prayer my mother had written. Her name
was printed at the top, and her age,
which was nineteen. I knew how to read by then
so I read it, of course. Her prayer,
lifted out of the even script like an island
from the sea, was written in cursive.
The narrow columns went on and on,
making of themselves a darker and
darker pool, that nothing, not even light,
could escape. I stood up and went
to tell my mother what I’d done.
The book was a black hole, or so I imagined
as I explained, trying to show her
the possibilities—if you stepped
into the black hole, you wouldn’t have
to grow up. No one would have
to die. Her face changed. For the first time
I’d taken the curious weight of her love,
and made a weapon of it, and no one
would ever forgive me. She said,
“It’s not a joke,” and took the book
away and, of course, I grew up,
just as she did. Now I’m older
than she was then. It’s snowing outside—
the sky is filling up with light. If I could
get past the angels, I’d go past the despair
and past the questioning. If I could read
a page of the ordinary, and just let it go,
like the snow does. But I have to ask you
this—
where does a life stop and the white
page begin?


===============


Bed
W. S. Merwin

We fit together like a puzzle,
my little melon, cat, acrobat, almond,
we pass the night going in and out of each other,
whatever names I know of to call you by
I use, and invent others, giving you
new ones you love to hear, and showing
how my mouth’s moving makes the shapes
of each one, and that all of them fit
you as well. We lie beside each other
on our mattress on the floor
like the bodies of two saints
embraced at the end of their martyrdom
and rising up together to the Throne of God,
transformed into one another
now in Paradise, the man’s thigh
into the woman’s, her breast into his,
his face into her shoulder, her leg
into his back, into the back of his knee
her hand shaped to its perfection of form,
her eyelids the same as his, opening
to see now through two pairs of eyes,
and both our hearts under our tongues
simultaneously
beating and tasting forever,
the way the air tastes, and the way the body tastes.


===============


I Have Been a Woman Driving at Night
Margaret Atwood

I have been a woman driving at night. 
On my own. 
Lights licking at the corners of my eyes. 
I took the forest for a city. 
At a distance of one year. 
Snow fell like the raw hem of a dress. 
I could see the upholstery of sleeping houses. 
Now that I am living in the country.

After midnight. 
The thinnest crack of light. 
Then, nothing. 
Was I sleeping? 
I was awake. 
Only not in the present. 
The present is not always clear. 
At the time of a sad farewell. 
I was in two places. 
A third person observed me.

Or nothing was observed. 
But there is an image. 
To think the observer was not observed. 
Until now. 
Here I am now. 
In the middle of the city of winter. 
Cars are moving in streets under a smoke-coloured 
moon. 
There is too much to look at and no reason for looking 
unless 
you are a fish at the bottom of a well. 
Now that I am living in the country.


===============


By Chance the Cypress
Dana Gioia

Pray for those in loneliness, for they do not remember   
Gods exist. They have never seen their faces,   
and soon enough, they will forget that once,  
when they too felt lost, they prayed,   
not even sure to whom or for what.

But it is God who is absent, having left this vacant   
statue for a poor soul to inhabit.  
It is God who is absent, having deserted this   
bloated sea of illness   
that overflows its shores.  
It is God who is absent—then who am I   
praying to when I pray for you?

prayer
Ted Kooser

We breathe, and God begins again.   
On the pond the ducks start to row home,   
and the soft rise and fall of their strong   
wings,
that breathe beside you and me, here,   
breaks the water, breaks   
and gives us this radiance of evening.


===============


A Summer Garden
William Carlos Williams

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; 
I lift my lids and all is born again. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The red-beaked robin stands beneath the shedding tree;
Three laburnum and two nightingales 
Are in the desolate garden, singing of the lilac.

The laburnums flower in great, thrusting sprays: 
And all the nightingales and robins sing; 
Nor death nor eternity comes near to them: they have their song.


===============


Kristallnacht
Paul Celan

A burnt child on a cold stove shivers in the realm of myth.
A thousand skies unfold above it.
Apotheosis of garbage.
An attic collapses in the city.
Lightning is able to strike even God down.
It will be your good fortune if you succeed in escaping.
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped
A man lives in the house your golden eyes
grow bigger and bigger a man lives in the house
his name is everything he is yours and yours and yours
and he’s at home in theexecutioner’s flourish
when he shudders right into you with
the frightful appliances of his office,
black milk
you widowed bride
we drink you at night
we drink you at morning
we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink.


===============


Sentimental Question
Kenneth Koch

If you and I were the only people in the world
And there was a beautiful garden all around
Which we could look at but never touch
Would it be good that way?
Would it be better than other ways?
How do you like the questions?
How do you like the world?


===============


If I Could
Anne Bradstreet

If I could choose with whom I met; 
By some miracle to take the best 
From the whole world abroad, I’d find 
That none on earth could be more blest 
Than thine, whom I have always found
So free, so true, so loving, kind
That Love, which hath my heart enthralled, 
So fonder, deeper did prevail 
That my heart’s cordial joys were doubled, 
And whatsoever it reveal’d 
It neither started, sought, nor hid; 
And but for those who think it is 
The dead’s cold ruth, their friendship’s ship 
Had ne’er the seas nor coasts did kiss 
Of any but of one who is, 
As hope’s bright flame doth ne’er decline, 
As faith doth never warp or wane, 
So constant, true and loving still, 
To thee alone my joys I will 
Thy heart my Paradise enclose, 
With thee my cares and sorrows pass.


===============


In Hawaii
Billy Collins

Between the boat and the pier,
dangling over the abyss,
my sister and I hung side by side
in the sagging net of our grandfather’s arms. 
He was the only fisherman I ever knew
who caught menhaden in the bay
and then, bloodied and battered by the surf,
delivered them back into it.

And all of us tossed and winched in those ropes 
that held us to the pilings,
to the lumber, the deck planks of the world.
We bumped the pier, and scraped,
then he hauled us up to safety. 
We were all something he had caught
and brought in.

I remember how we leaned on the railing,
wide-eyed, still, after that rescue,
staring out at the dazzling and dangerous water.
Years later, in Hawaii,
we sat on the side of a volcano,
my older sister and I,
and stared out at the Pacific.
We had left our husbands and children behind,
forgotten about our lives,
forgotten about everything,
and there we sat in our bathing suits
sipping gin from waterproof cups,
relaxed and content in the lava heat,
absorbed in the magnificent world
of blue before us,

the Pacific swelling and subsiding.
And I remember hearing the hissing of steam
escaping from a few yards away,
and asking my sister,
Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?
I looked to my left, and the slope of our crater
had cracked open like an egg
and a great river of molten rock was flowing
down the side of the mountain,
hissing and rippling and glowing
as it passed me by
on its way to the sea.

When this short essay on Poetry was composed for the Chasers, was it when it was written by Wordsworth in “Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads”, 1802, or did it come before, in the late 1800s, or after, in the century that we are in now? It doesn’t matter really, because the definition of poetry never changes; it is a nebulous mixture of truth, images, insight, beauty, balance and rhythm. Whether someone recognizes it as poetry or not is irrelevant, as the listeners in the story of Cupid
===============


Into the Arms of God
Issa Kobayashi

Into the arms of God
    I commend my mother.
Into the embrace
    of my family
    I commend my mother.

I will hold you on my shoulders
    as though lifting
    an ancient melon.
Then I will place you
    in the depths of the earth.

Shovel it in, the cool dirt,
    layer it like a comforter,
    but it will all blow away
    like cherry blossoms.

Your body will rise again
    into branches, into light,
    into the loving arms
    of God.

© 2018 by Mary Kay Zuravleff

[Back Cover]

John Keats

James Wright

CP Cavafy

Linda Gregg

Jorie Graham

Richard Siken

Wallace Stevens

Issa Kobayashi

[Back Cover]

[Back Cover]

To Children

Poets have a calling from the muses

but adults feel that poets are in fact disturbed

or at the very least imbalanced.

But poets know why and what they write about

every single day and every single night

of their lives—the dead know what they write about:

they write about the living.

And that’s why the dead poets, who wrote of love,

mourned, and anticipated death, wrote for the living

and for future generations.

So I write to children:

the living are the dead of the future,

when you, too, are among the dead.

To children, I write in their language,

when they still have dreams in their throats,

when they still dream poems,

because, when they become adults, they will not dream in poems.

Children have poetry and goodness in their hearts.

And, when children become adults,

they take poetry out of their hearts

and they become just like adults,

who are really like dead children.

To children, poetry is poetry:

not a hobby or a pastime.

You will not become rich and famous from poetry,

you will not receive accolades.

To children, poetry is not a career but a gift,

so keep it in your hearts, do not become

like all
===============


Rue Tatin
Marie Ponsot

What has ended again, what is occurring and what
Has not yet begun. I suffer or not. But then you began to be.

Here it is still, the same evening, the book, the next of them, to read.
The next star to appear in this white sky.

All of it may or may not have been enough.
I turned the day about me like bread dough

On a round board—head or heels, head or heels.
Whichever face was up, you had your way.

Now the stars will be visible. The red day will be ended
All over the world. Then you can be. Then it can begin.

A tree. A book. It can’t be a book. That’s the triumph and torture
That has not stopped, you know, once they made a mistake.

You know what I want to say, even though you haven’t guessed it.
Let the sound of it rise into the white air,

Float among the darkening signs and stars.
Put it back on the page so that I can try to tell it.

Someone else is even now revealing their name.
And there are others, still, that we cannot ever name.


===============


The Forms of Love
Cathy Park Hong

I love what you would whisper in your sleep,
your soft muzzle of a word against my breast.
I love it just as you slipped off your silks
like a dress and held me close like bare cupped hands
and sang the first chords of a lovesong
when we met each other, just as you sang.
We stood before each other, in front of the mirror,
barely brushing, like two setae hair,
in front of the frame, watching it
grow it slow like our slow skin, how our skin
mutated in vermillion, crimson, and rose,
how slowly the words, in formal wearing blacks,
grow big in our name. That’s what I love.
That’s what I want to hear. That’s what you sang,
your soft muzzle of a word against my breast.
I love how you cupped like a dutch oven
my face between your hands and held me close,
how you tugged on the sheets and made small coos
when I sleep, how it is like two hands cupped
holding a face, how that face that grips
holds a word to breast, sings a slow chords of a lovesong
how it’s so deep that no words will do, it has to be
a soft muzzle of a word against my breast.
When we can’t sing it when we only have two hands.
What are you whispering? Don’t whisper it. Don’t say it.
Hold me close. Let me feel your breast rise and fall.


===============


American Triptych
Louise Glück

‘How does it feel to be the wife of a great poet?’
I replied, coldly,
‘Your Majesty, I can’t say
It is especially strange.’

And the Baroness was left to contemplate
My insolence,
As I turned to look
At her husband, now my husband.

The bitterness, a bitterness past belief
A prelude to all I know
This man against me, and his books
Against me, and my children against me.

But so what, I’m not afraid of history.
History may think it knows him;
But she doesn’t know him, she’s asleep
And he’s just waking up.

The Baroness was much too beautiful
To feel what I felt.
And what I felt was not for the King’s wife
To know. And in that was power,

A private measure. We agreed
To keep things separate,
To move about the world discreetly
And not to be found out.

It isn’t simple, giving up a life.
Whatever one hopes to gain
One gives up the earth
The comfort of knowing the earth.

And into what one never knows.
However grand it seems
It is merely possible. In this
Lies uncertainty and the sense of risk.

It is uncertain because it has not yet been done.
It is risky because it might be gone
At any moment;
One never knows.

How it begins, with taking off a coat,
The turned-up collar on a wet day.


===============


The Huntress
Mary Oliver

“Was I now dream-wandering in a fading hunt? 
Was this the world?... I’d been barefoot,
cold, and running free... Was I then only
a girl that the wolves among us had dreamed? 
And if I raised my head and barked,
would I now for an instant be startled and known 
by my own kind? or only by the wolves?”

—Mary Hunter

All day I think about it, then at evening I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
This doubt and darkness is for starters.

Meanwhile, I’ll try going to my own corners,
those places I liked when I was alone, and I’ll try
making myself at home. And, if someone
bothers me, I’ll explain, politely, that I’m not living
here, although it looks like me, I’m living
elsewhere and just stopping by. I speak, of course,
of the body. But this life in the body,
what is it supposed to be about?

All I know is that with each bread crumb
we cast out, heaven gets closer, a little closer.
And so we learn to be thankful, and step by step,
our wandering and wondering, our trying
and failing, our soul-making begins.


===============


Another Song For the Brokenhearted
Gary Snyder

The night is wide
I cannot see
to the other side.
My heart is a fish
at sea
so dumb and deep.
O laugh if you can.
Take off your shirt.
Make love here.
It’s the only way.


===============


Much Madness Is Divinest Sense
Emily Dickinson

Much Madness is divinest Sense—
To a discerning Eye—
Much Sense—the starkest Madness—
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail—
Assent—and you are sane—
Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—
And handled with a Chain—

In Me—a circumstance
Distinguishes the Keen—
The Querist—from the Mystic—
There’s somewhat of Compound—
Of Bracket—
Howe’er is written a rule—
That Subyts (Terrific
And blameless) comprehends
Elements—The Rough—

And Philadelphia—

      Death

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Death! Death! thy elbows on the bed!
Thy temples in my hands!
Thy lips dripping with the dew of death!
Thy feet like newly sprouted leaves!
If I should meet the princes of the earth,
Or any snatch’d from pleasant breasts,
He or she, receiv’d by thee,
Embracing thee,
Would not presume to give a single bliss,
To buy a minute’s ease!


===============


Between Walls
Denise Levertov

A dog, lying near his young master,
Exposes his genitalia
And squirms in sleep. He is lucky.
I envy him, his dream thicket,
His young companion.

A constellation of unresolved longing:
Like some full-breasted, heavy-limbed
goddess of an archaic people—
At night along the horizon
Bodies of murdered queens
Tumble into view—
Grief, affliction, sorrow.

How far is home?
Dear one, I’m lost.

Far down, far down: a mirage
Green underfoot,
Grape vines, a rose arbor:
Earth, perhaps.

Or is it merely sky
Refractioned, bent towards heaven
By this double-glass of grief?

Can I not go back? How far?

From your death place,
Through what distance am I exiled?

The snow weighs down the branches

Thickens the roof of shrubbery
That shelters the entrance to our land;

Thins out the tree, the one tall fir
At the right hand of the door.

Inside, I keep thinking you’ll come back,
Fling down your furs,
Inhale, exhale steam, walk from the room.

Ah, but the snow keeps coming down.

Catherine the Great in a fur hat inscribed
To her lover Count Orlov

“The past is past, I love you now
So listen, dearest:
I have two gifts: a pair of gloves
(buttoned in the European style
With diamonds)
And the silver handle of a fan
For cooling oneself without interrupting a dance.
I think your skin, my love, is clothed in such heat
As in the furnace of a royal kiln.”

“Now I must go, dearest, and dictate a few letters
But I leave you
These historical fragments
Of wool socks made by rural women
Meant as gifts for their husbands in the army.
Kiss them when you place them on your feet,
Love, and think of me.”

At sunset a black cat streaked across the road
In front of our slowing car.
(A goddess from an archaic people
Made animal for love.)


===============


Marat/Sade
Peter Weiss

JUAN: Be quiet!

THE PATIENTS:      The man on the slab is stirring.

LUPE: His eyes are open. He is watching us!

PAOLA:      Will they sew him back up soon?

DAPHNE:      He’s trembling.

JUAN:      Who spoke? Who spoke?

EDMOND:      He hears us.

LUPE: He’s looking at us!

FRIEDA:      He is smiling.

PAOLA:      He is making faces at us!

EDMOND:      He is trying to speak.

THE PATIENTS:      He is trying to speak!

RICHARD:      The spirit of reason is gone.

FRIEDA:      Down!

RICHARD:      Silence! Let me speak.

THE PATIENTS:      How beautiful you are when you are serious!

RICHARD:      That is enough. There is still time. If we can only come to an agreement. We must begin with ourselves and reform our own lives. We are afraid of violence, and yet it is already among us. Now there are only the strongest ideas that will survive.

EDMOND:      They will survive because we all want a roof to sleep under and our bread.

RICHARD:      There was a golden age, when everyone shared in the wealth, but that was also the age of greed and exploitation.

JUAN:      That will never happen again.

RICHARD:      That is so. Now is the age of murderers, and soon to be the age of kings again. There is nothing we can do about it. That is what has to be.

JUAN:      No! The world will go on improving!

RICHARD:      Every step forward has been won through bloodshed.

EDMOND:      Go away from here, or I shall murder you.

RICHARD:      The days of our idyll are gone, but a new world is being born.

THE PATIENTS:      The man on the slab is laughing!

EDMOND:      An age of murderers.

THE PATIENTS:      He has choked himself laughing.

EDMON
===============


Faith Healing
Anne Sexton

You get up on a ladder and groom the roof,
touching the shingles as if they were the head
of a bald man, once, twice, and a dozen times,
pulling the odd weed from a rain gutter,
scraping at the rot.  It is not your house.
You do not live there anymore, yet you trim
the hedge around it as if you still cared.
It is your father’s house.  It is the one
you were born in, and that is important,
for you love him well and you love him much.
You kill the grass that threatens to invade,
throwing a cloak of green across his yard
that you imagine closing like the sea
over his head, his young and helpless head.
He is alone in that house, on a street
where not too long ago the neighbors were
your playmates and your sweethearts and your friends.
The mailman greets you every morning, then
goes into the house, leaving behind a stack
of letters, most of which have your name on them.
You read these letters.  You read the news.
You read about the war which is not over yet.
You count the years and days before he dies.
You will be here until he dies and you become
yourself.  You watch for death’s gigantic spoon.
You will finish what you started.  Then, perhaps
you can enter the church once more, you think.
The doors will be thrown open.  The ladies’ group
will applaud your return.  They will sit down
around the tables and applaud your return
and the bread in the oven will swell and applaud
as well.  Perhaps then you can kneel again
like a penitent child and take the cup
into your hands.  And perhaps you can drink.
And perhaps the wine will purify the room.


===============


Each element of time and space has significance
John Ashbery

At East 36th and Lexington,
one on each side of a first
trimester casualty (evidence
mostly gone by the time she
reaches the hospital’s shaky steps),
two old men with Greek-accented
declarations. Both resemble
Titian’s portraits of old men,
one in profile, one facing us,
each wrinkled of course, but wearing
quite different expressions
and moods, as though they’ve only just
agreed upon the identical posture
for their sittings—that is,
old, Greek, testy. The taller one,
in glasses, looks off to the side
rather than straight out, and as he
speaks, each ancient cell of his
is sharply pronounced; it’s as if
he can’t go on without contradicting
what he’s just said. It’s all a
matter of lively but unbending
intent. But the other has relented
to time and the itchy knowledge
of mortality; he wants to be still,
but he’s filled with ready speech.
What’s he going to say?

THE WHITE HORSE
JOHN STEINBECK

When I was very young and the urge
to be someplace else was on me,
I
took to the highways.

Wearing
robe and rope
in an attic
on
a coast,

I was looked at askance,
I was glad.
I
remembered the circus

men of my childhood
and the
seduction of their
life

to be
somewhere else;
and I, who
had nothing
to lose,

longed
to try it, to
live
like a
particle
of dust

free to
go
wherever
the
sunbeam goes,

the little
chances
taken,
the
do or die.

And I went
like a
a minnow
into the
stream;

I joined
the human
race
in a
search for

other places.
And sure
enough, there
were places,
and

there
were
some
grisly
discoveries
about

men
and
even a few
about myself
I
===============


Approaching the Supreme Scientist
Anne Sexton

Moving my long bodied
chicory in its cylinder
the woman with red hair
and blue glasses said
your way is abnormal.
I live above the beauty salon
she squints from the wheelchair
adjusting the lilies of the valley
with lavender spotted hands.

While my synapses split
my circulatory system
at last comes clear
as the stranger knocks
on the shaky door
of my Christmas tree
my winter dream.

My arms unfold
to the redhead
just let me die
in my tunnel of bird seed
on tiptoe—just so,
pretending it is my birthday

the tree is heavy
with gifts we do not need
desires of the flesh,
Camembert and melon
for the shy ones who will not
enter the parlor.

They sit on the staircase
looking up at the woman
who had all her teeth pulled
after cancer
singing Jingle Bells.

My underpants
on a string with a paper clip
I invented; my car
wearing its hairy sweater
shaken by mice
is hanging by one wheel.

My blender has forty pages,
contains five languages;
the sand falls from my hands
for its vaporizers.
My microscope searches for money,
my balance scale prefers boys.

Be with me
under the old oak tree
in its cage of light
the one you wrote for.

I live by a rock-foam,
by my magnetic cheese,
between my prisms and lenses
and my miniature golf range
in the safety deposit box
of my zero gravity chamber.

As with eyes in a face,
the equator arrives on time
to cloud the Pacific,
the North Atlantic and Indian.

Do not go into the vastness
of the chemical storm,
make no big decisions
while I sit in a fountain
near a brass-hinged
gold-rimmed circle of lilies.

Speak slowly your peace of silence
and then there will be an odor,
a symphony of perfumed cellos
the broken horsehair of the bows
pulled from the neck
in the immensity of the void.

A note escapes from the helmet
of the scientist,
the opera singer
le
===============


First Snow
James Wright

All day the snow fell
and the stars descended one by one
the twilight
going, the night coming,

the white way turning back
in the darkness
turning to white
way back, turning away again.


===============


The Wasp
Galway Kinnell

Under this blasted stump I met him
standing, lost, sick, the fluid in his eyes
fretted by the grit, not wept for by the oil,
who counted his pain all he had.
He read my thinking. Still, he carried
himself less slumped, a being.
He gathered, pressing them together,
two words: Sparrow. Silver.
Clasped, they hung from the branch of an idea.
Noticed me. Gave. Left. His hand
remembers my head this way, now that.


===============


Therefore I lie
Sylvia Plath

Often my body is just in the middle, a blind man and an old woman at
either end, giving me strict advice.
I am not implicated, but I am listening.

Then the rhythm starts, the old clothes, weather stains, and their
casually blooded messages.
And a foot plods round the face of the clock.
And I am a withered iris, lime-rind crusts splitting a ridged vase,
suddenly incandescent.

Then I am merely singular, one at a time.
Often a palm, a hand shaken by men, by women wearing white gloves,
till I bloom both ways.
Then a tail of stars behind a cloud, a loose anchorage.

I prefer the first, before I grow old and attentive,
suck the heavy humors of the aged earth, patient as a potato,
but somewhere inside, an inexplicable tree with red berries.

Some days the top of my head floats off into a cloud of red dust,
and I am the serene receptacle of all of the churned-up sky.
The dragon of anger stalks abroad, breathing blue fire,
and godlike, stamping on cities.

This is death, these states of suspension, mere wish, a dream of accuracy,
no feet to the ground.
The brittle accuracy of the iron tree in the teeth of the white
storm.
And what has blown away, always something, a body, a cotton shroud, a glove.


===============


Tikkun
Richard Hugo

I couldn’t find my body.
I wasn’t at peace,
wasn’t free of desire.
In this quiet and simple
mind I found
nothing I owned,
I was huge and present.
Night and day I held on
to nothing but
returned again and again
to this dirt house
as to something I owned.

The grass beyond the dirt walls
swayed and made a simple music.
It wouldn’t stop.
The night was a blanket of sound
over the grass and the dirt
and the holding.
There were no boundaries.
I didn’t know where I ended,
where anything began.

The moon smiled.
Nothing needed its name.
There was no silence.
The stars rippled and ran
in the river of darkness.
I began to cry.

I was far
from sorrow and joy.
It was beauty.
I could hardly bear it.

Toy Bells
Colette Bryce

The woman by the river is not a river woman,
though she fishes there,
and the dusty water smells dank in this heat.
She wears shades of purple, clothes not intended
for river-borne creatures
but for passing through daytime like a dark poem.

He does not know her name,
calls her Freya after the Norse love-goddess,
because he is often longing for his wife
whom he left in America,
and in future weeks, when he is alone again,
he will clutch the word, Freya, in his mouth
and begin to speak other languages
and she will become the fish, or the lovely woman,
or the bird he follows with his binoculars.

But today she is fish-like, shifting, changing.
Her chin is the point of an arrow
as she watches the nibbling fish, and there are snow-
drops hanging from her ear lobes.

He is not handsome in her eyes –
dark, yes, with excellent teeth,
and full lips made more shapely by age.
When he speaks, he laughs a good deal,
the laughter the signature beneath a black ink drawing.
She dips her white hand in the water,
the rings glittering, like toy bells.

Happiness
Galway Kinnell

When the embracing
===============


Against the Grain
Les Murray

To drive against the grain of the numbers—the battalions, the
ranks, the red-rust lists, with their help or alone,
against time’s coralling of this tack, sail, and drift or towards it,
to steer the sea’s pitted black fire out of this age’s duress,
with our sole vessel’s sigil of the wing and cross.

To be praised not for what I have brought to pass, or that the bad
was to full effect balked, the advantage kept and
won, the border respected, no shame imposed and no good cause
found unwanting or without witness, but

for what was simply true within whatever happened, the
placing-to of a sentence, the sacrifice of nonexistence
to a fresh climb, to a vista then from up there laid out by its own
making, a bridge of trees, the table of a valley

of grazing animals moving, peace, a small town, its orderly gestures,
other fields, the signpost for the distant river
and for the soldiers’ grave where the proclamation says no other
statue or marker may be set up, only

the general’s hand may break the sacred soil and put the wreath
of peace there, not some foreign prince’s nor the bitter
parties’ ceremonial sword—to play my part in the peacemaking.

The part of the charioteer had been sung by the lyre since before
Sybaris and by men with no more right to that post

than mortal men have now or ever will have. To steer, and play
the lyre, being what a charioteer
must do, as I would have had to, at best I can claim to have done both
as well as the blind singer whose gift is to keep

the lyre and chariot in harmony, all speeds one skill, to steer
by ear from the side of the galloping bow-shouldered horses,
driving the bronze body between these and the oncoming gods,
the dozen reins taut in the right hand, the strung

beast in the left, the beasts themselves, the thrumming spokes
the whole load on a spinning axle, while the poet
half blinds himself, the lyre’s stringing stiff in his mouth
as
===============


In California During the Gulf War
Roy Scranton

It’s a dry heat, not like Fresno.
But this whole coast is arid, porous, expansive.
The fog holds cool, pink currents and just keeps coming.
It’s like we’re in a cowboy movie,
The Westerner or some shit.
The G-Spot
Was once the new frontier,
Now it’s just houses and hills.
Even the Bay smells like fish and suicide.
Like all the men and women
Drowned their problems
And migrated here for better air.
Oil refineries as big as sequoias
Transmogrify the mist and settle it down on us,
This petroleum life—
Electric windshield wipers, six dollars a gallon,
This Volkswagen, this Chevette,
Who told us it was possible to meet again
At the end of the earth and just drive?
Or be coast?
To measure out with coffee spoons
the deaths at home—
Mustard gas, chemical weapons,
Rockets, bombs, why not caltrops,
Have they forgotten how to kill
men and women and children with ordinary shit—
And the car’s heat and smell
like a two-day-old baby.

All the gas stops are one-stop shops—
Hamburger love, two for ninety-nine.
Sometimes a punching bag: 
Iraqis, some America-hating
McThought.
The evening news outdoes
The shit they say in the voices of
The boys back home,
Their soldiers’ counsel, 
The war as a kind of simulation, 
A road race like Daytona
With Iraqi bodies strung across the track. 
Last time, I had to stop
To hug a tree, cry and piss in public,
Waiting for lightning to strike me,
One white electric finger
To find a vein and say 
All this here, all these hills and dry oaks,
And the temperature gradient that pushes the fog
Down upon us, in a stadium-light glare,
And the clouds that break
But never cease—
All of this, too, is artificial,
Synthetic, chemical, an American artifact
Made by the machines that run on gas
And I burn every day
So that we can talk
Just like this
===============


Credo
Sharon Olds

I believe this is my hand, its cells
my father’s father’s father
brushed on a wagon seat, the trek
from Cracow, the coral-gripping wheel,
wood dust afire with sunlight on the road,
I believe the molecular race in me
makes me male, and though my mother
worked with me pulled downward inside her
and my brothers pressed and kicked
in their whipsnake bodies, slippery,
I do not believe that the wholeness
of myself is in those damp cells,
and I lift my own hand to the door
of my mouth and enter myself.
I have sucked
the fluted marrow out of the boiled bones,
I have eaten my way up my arm
and down my legs and spine
to the soles of my feet, and then
into my feet, and then from the bottoms of my feet
risen again, sucking the dirt
that held me from my birth,
I have eaten mypile-youtube-subtitles brothers in the womb,
I have licked the hot fingers of my mother,
my tongue is an archaeologist
of my own body,
I have stood, head tilted back, and drunk
myself like wine, my throat
a vial, and if I were going
to dig with a trowel to find my father,
I would begin with my hip,
I would begin with the scooped pelvis,
where the womb was bony, and run
my trowel downward, dividing
the mosses, shaping the pit
and then the path the small body
of my father was traveling,
and when I reached the earthy dark of my navel
the second leaping would be done,
and then dig more delicately
through the scrolled slick and pearly layers
of my intestines, I would unwrap
the stardust of my memory—the glass
doorknobs I watched as a child, polished with elbow
grease—
I believe the cells of my father are in me,
they flow as my blood flows,
but I do not believe they rule me
or that I cannot give myself like water
to the thirst of everyone who asks.


===============


Beginning
Leonard Nathan

You ask how I’d like to die. 
	How a fish would. 
On the beach, flopping, 
	with the good and bad 
	that water gave me 
	gone, giving up 
	life's last electric 
	spark. 
You ask how I'd like to live. 
	Like a baby, 
	so new and ignorant 
	it could mistake 
	its mother’s breasts 
	for the wet 
	and wild mysteries 
	of the world. 
Because then I'd be new 
	and free from my 
	old self-conscious 
	conceit, I'd have 
	nothing to lose. 
	And you?


===============


from Even So
Gjertrud Schnackenberg

...Of course I love you: how could I not love you,
seeing what’s known of you in this world
and out of it, hidden away in your notebooks,
the hot childish pencilled scrawl of private letters
sealed away now for the archaeologists,
in complete control of it all as if your mind
had grown up to be God. I’m not one to
feign admiration, but you’ve moved me deeply.
But
how could we, as you put it, take a real
interest in each other. As if I’d known you
at the Medicean court, in one of your
century’s utter politest centuries. These days
I don’t know how to behave. In your presence
even the dog gets in the way of the conversation
and the dates get mixed up with the real news.
We say we understand each other
but I don’t really understand. The work
is so dominant: I’m only a lover of works,
and somewhat willingly over-awed, sometimes
far over my head in it. But I think of you
lying curled up, your knees drawn up,
with your head lying on your knees,
by the river some afternoon, or else
staring with startled recognition into your own face
in the mirror you’d brought along with you.
I think of us in Florence, these are good times
to be there. The sky is dark and changeable.
The streets are cold and unevenly paved.
There’s a bookstall near the Marne I’d like to show you.
We could make love there.
Even the dog would blush.


===============


In Chicago 
Michael Drayton

When I got down from the bus in
Chicago, the quarter moon
hung in the sky, its horns curled up,
almost like a grin.

I am glad to be here, and glad
to see a moon in the city, though
even as I began to walk
a trace of the world like morning

mist was covering the face of it,
so that when I glanced back again
it was gone,
and later the sky was hung

with neon signs and I saw a red moon
swimming in the clouds
and I said, “But we are
hurtling through space,

“I have to be here,
and it is almost worth it, for this light.”


===============


Summer Storm
Anne Sexton

All night long and all day until four o’clock
we had that hot stinking rain
rushing in rivulets down the back of our necks
in the attic where we hid with a flashlight
playing cards.

We didn’t even have the sense to be afraid
to hear the electricity snap
and the house go dark.

Even the lightning made us laugh, we had waited so long.
But then the thing we wanted came: the war
with its smells and candles and boredom
and something to do in the evenings
more than homework.

Something to put in the nights:
the electric piano, the silences,
the hours of reading, the slow chewing of books,
a broken doll lying on the stair landing
like a body, broken in two.


===============


I Remember
Philip Larkin

I remember how we parked, that first time, 
In the damp field, growing coarse grasses, 
Tussocks, and vivid, prickly carrot flowers; 
How the snake-like air-vents, stiff and quivering, 
Swayed with the vibrations; how the dashboard lit 
Our faces weirdly. We stopped the engine, 
Got out, heard cars hissing on the road. 
We pushed against the door of the wooden hut 
To open it: the floor was hot that night, 
The iron roof-girder creaked with our weight. 
How many springs since, my darling?


===============


Bluebird
Rita Dove

Once the last bloom is gone from the dogwood tree
each petal merges with light
& spins on its side for a breath
held in time
that we may share, how even the most vibrant hues
melt into the murky undertow
& raucous streams of glossy chicks
and winging majesties
and every potted geranium in the minister’s lapel
turns into earth
the shock of this ecstatic spring
like the music of a symphony
heard once & never again,
an exquisite lightness of being
the face of God pressed against the glass
you still remember
how you tipped your head back to hear
& slept, dreamed you were a bird that would never die
waking into that fierce blue beauty,
a memory to have & hold for a lifetime,
held steady by wings.

Rita Dove


===============


The Poem And No End To It
Norman Dubie

This is a poem that will not end.
No one has succeeded in ending it.

People have tried to end this poem with a bang.
They say it’s a good poem, they just can’t remember it.

Be patient.
Don’t ask me to hurry.
I’m really trying to concentrate.
Let me get through this part.
Hang in there.

It’s a bit like looking down a well,
down the well of yourself,
trying to spot the glint of a penny,
trying to find yourself before
you have a chance to get away.

It’s a poem where a railroad ties down a man
and a girl runs under the tracks
to free him.
And they crawl,
alongside the railroad, under the line.
That was a lonesome road.
That was a lonesome road.

This is a poem that is really headed somewhere,
but it can’t find the exit.

So it has no choice but to stay in here,
and set its tent in this space.

This poem is held in place by wings and breath.
We’ll get through this somehow.
If we keep pushing this,
we may pass ourselves.

O.K.?
Are we all together?
Here we go.

One of us is making a speech right now.
Our lives stretch out before us...
It is difficult, yes, to know what to do
to love justice.

One of us feels this is over and decides
to make some coffee.
You, over here, decide to turn the page.
All that has been,
and all that will be.
I hope that nothing—
Nothing—
Nothing—

The juice, however, is staying here,
try as you might to turn your back,
the juice will stay here until it is done.

That’s because this is a poem
that won’t leave us.

It’s a poem, baby, with some feeling in it.
It’s a poem with some feeling in it.

It’s a poem that goes on and on.
Like the universe,
it can’t help but keep us going.

One poem to another.
One
===============


The Invitation
Thylias Moss

Do not consider me, in fact,
to be your friend. Friendship presupposes
my being here (wherever here is)
to hear your complaint
and offer you
something like comfort,
or at least
a bit of advice.

You may have me read a poem
a love poem, or
perhaps a poem about
something other than love.
Or not about love at all.
Then, when I have finished,
I will
say: Not bad.

Or I may be
too much
your friend,
for I may
not be able
to be dishonest
and say:
Good. For
I may not agree.

In these circumstances,

you will decide:
I hate this bitch.
Or: I hate this bitch.
(I may be a bitch.)

I will not even bother
to respond,
I will
pretend
that I have not heard.

Which is a polite way
of saying,
I do not care what
you think. And: I hate this bitch.
(I may be a bitch.)

This is as close
to you
as I can get.

I will not stoop
to friendship.

Please don’t ask.
I am busy.
I am writing a poem.

In this poem, you do not exist.

Do not force me
to explain
why I do
not care.

Do not force me
to explain
why I care
when I do not.

You don’t exist
in my poem.

I write my poems
for the
songs in
the throats
of crows,
in the hope
they will see
someone worth
imitating,
worthy of
wiping away
the spittle that
trails from their beaks.

I do not expect
to be understood.
But it is possible
you will ask
for the answer, and
you will hear me speak
as crows speak,
a sort of cawing, a sort
of chatter.
A sound like wind.
Or hard rain.

I am feeling benevolent.
I may answer your question.
I will not answer in English,
but I am fluent in crow-speak,
as I
===============


Every Artist Is Great Who Has Come Before Us in His Struggle Against Obscurity
Charles Olson

i

Ars longa, vita brevis: “Art is long, life short” ...

as if, in life, it had there ever been any but in art.

So, in hope, g

et out of your work whatever

you can,

and to whatever you bring, with it, add

more! more!

Why should there be anything but what and

whoever you are

now, and in

the time you live in.

If you don’t do, what does the world do.

THE RECORD

ii

What of this amazing emptiness and light?

in that blue pasture, the fact that it is there for you to put anything into it, any old broken or lying thing, your hand, what you took hold of at breakfast.

To dare to do any of that, never mind; what of the unavoidable courage it took to be an artist, almost since there was this?

Wherever there was a need, which is, there was art

now art was then, but was it art as we know it in the forms we have?

What did man mean, always to take clay and fashion it into a rattle, to take bone and chip it, carve it, for then was it ever not art, what we call

like-our-own, in its essence?

Or were there then no rattles?

If so, then there was no sense of form.

Art (our-kind-of) is (almost) always an expression of sense-of-form, as distinguished from science, the like-our-own.

Art is the making, by himself, in matter, of a man (what-man-is)

the longing to form it (man-the-longing) into what he sees, even what he remembers and what he is,

that is his love, always, forever, if man is,

the form in the soul, which is the art in him and the sickness and the richness, and the achievement

in sum the world in a word, whether he knows it or not and whether or not he speaks it

iv

The primary, of course
===============


A Fragment
Rainer Maria Rilke

You, if you have forgotten your magnificence,
You who could heal and uplift the timid
  heart of a wounded man, a fearful heart;
You, if you have forgotten, let me tell you now.
  Your beauty is greater than all there is;
I wish I had a thousand million
  hands to imitate your beauties and proclaim them
to every last indifferent being,
  you are vast beyond reckoning.

Sometimes your body is like
  a sensually pure land from which all suffering is banished,
something almost ungraspable.
  Sometimes your body is a throne.
Sometimes you seem to be the departing
  light at evening,
a half-extinguished torch,
  sometimes a high altar.

When you come at last,
  the earth will glow brighter from your crown;
your shoulders will bear new things
  which we can only faintly guess at now.
Then, when we are healed and renewed
  in the water of your glorious consummation,
we shall all shout with gladness,
  “I am a child of God.”

I wish I could tell you how I
  long to be in your sacred arms,
you who have been misunderstood
  by the arrogant and despised by the vain.
You who appear in the rich and the poor,
  you who come in your millions and natures,
you who heal the sinners and the saints,
you who are sometimes too good for
  the most merciful heart,
at other times the unrecognizable,
  the forbidden, the tempting.

If a world were dying,
  I would do everything to keep it alive
for the sake of your unimaginable glory,
just to tell of the indescribable
  splendor of your eyes.


===============


You, Andrew Marvell
Gerard Manley Hopkins

You stood to teach us, and your daily word
Was beautiful as leaves opening day by day.
What else seems lovely? These, your verses, may
Move my content to tears and praise, but they
Are not your words that stirred, through coloured glass,
The sunburned marble and the cold serene,
And thrilled my flesh that climbs your long-necked vines,
To hear your doves and blackbirds sing my name.
Thought you great heaven’s child and earth’s wellwisher!
So did we praise our teachers long ago.
You seem to weep for what was sweet then, when
The world was your convent, and the sea
Your clear chorister, and the sun’s visible fire
Now never longed to kindle, burn, devour,
But in your cell a lamp, a tongue of flame,
More lustrous, more severe.


===============


Like Him or Not
Walt Whitman

My lover came to me this morning, and I said, “Why, have you  
     been here all night?”

She answered, “Why do you receive me so coldly, am I not your lover?”

She slipped in bed between my wife and myself, and my wife said, “What! what!” and passed out.

“Receive her coldly?” I said, “Why I have coldly received you for ten years now, dear, where have you been?”

“Coldly,” she says, “I believe it. And every time I came to you, through the keyhole, why, you slammed the door in my face. How’d you expect me to feel, I ask you that, as a reasonable human being?”

“Oh, that’s right, blame me. Just listen to him, dear,” I said. “Blame me, huh?”

“Oh, you was this,” she said, “and you was that, and you was the other. Like a rabbit.”

“What?”

“You was like a rabbit. Yes you was. You never stopped jumping and acting so timid.”

“I?”

“And you know what you did when I laid my head in your lap, and ran my fingers through your hair, and told you that you was better than anyone else in the world?”

“What did I do?”

“You hopped away. You run for Congress. Of all things. I had to laugh.”

“Laugh?”

“You know you’re a son of a gun. And that wife of your’n. Boy!”

“Now,” I said, “go easy there.”

“Please,” she said, “tell me, am I not your lover, am I not beautiful? Hey?”

“Go on, kid yourself.”

“Look at them shoulders. Am I not beautiful? Hey?”

“You do look good.”

“So you see I am your lover.”

“Don’t be too sure. I got my woman to think of. Women got lovers running out of them ears around here, lady.”

“But can’t I even get in bed with you? Huh?”

“Yes. All right. Now just take it easy.”

She made herself at
===============


What Does My Body Do
Allen Ginsberg

What does my body do?
Let me write it in numbers of notation.
My body makes new oxygen.
It leaps and mixes itself with methylene and oxygen, dances,
Smashing atoms, generates oxygen.
Smash, smash, dances,
It pours down energy, O energies,
Fire dances, on after sunrise,
Sun inherits it dances,
Dances with the ocean’s wave, with
Ocean, dances with rose,
Dances on my finger, on tabletop,
Dances finger with tabletop.
Dance, dance, my body dances
With all creatures that stir on earth
With kangaroos, with horses
With whales, with starfish, with mouse and marmots,
With planets around unknown suns,
With echoes of itself about the moons of Jupiter,
With soundless, blind avalanche, with snow,
My body dances with old mad buddha,
I think old mad buddha is my brain,
Dances in, out my brain, in out of me,
Sun and moon and mind, dance mind dances.
Mind dances! and my body dances,
Dances with mind, dances with stars.
With the stars,
Dances on eyes’ eyes—
My eyes’ eyes inside my head inside my body
Dance with my head’s eyes
With mad imaginations rejoice,
Dance with music, rise with music, with tones
With silent tones dance, dances,
With sun silent-dancing
With mind silent-dancing,
Dance, O silent dancers,
Waltz of their own thoughts,
Dance of thoughts,
Dance of red blood,
O muscles’ dance,
O motion of sex,
Dance, human fingers, dance
Human babies cry,
Crazy dances in red streets,
What does my body do?
Say in dancing, my body moves
With stars to that music
Where I am
At home,
and think that I am
at home.


===============


Adam
Louis Simpson

My father in his green shimmering hospital suit
But also in all his maleness, his shameless joy
In the arrogance of potency, the body becoming
A man. Oh she did not yet know how he hated her.

He was always my father, even then. The day
In Paris she called his work “stupid, vulgar and dull,”
It was as if she kicked in my heart, for I knew
He would never forgive her. From the moment of

That failure he determined she should fail worse
And be delivered into his hands to torture. But first
I was born, his image and living sweet revenge
On her rebellion. Into her hell.

That evening in Chicago when the snow was a blur
Against the glass of the lamp and the drift piled in
At the side of the window, he put the glove
On my fist and told me to hit her. She did not move.

She was smiling her brave mad smile. As she looked at him
Down the years, offering herself to what she believed
Was her own ideal of justice and love. Her fists
Were ice on the black windows, and she was smiling.

In the morning I shook snow crystals from my shoes
And tiptoed to the stairs, shivering. A winter month
And then my birthday. My poor father and his own
Birthdays, and all the humiliation of my life.

When I have heard her harping on the brute
And his infinite darkness which I was bound to inherit,
I have thought, “No. He was crushed. That’s what I saw.
He had to work, he was defeated. It made him mean

To those he loved, because he loved her more than he
Could endure.” Now in an instant it has changed. My father’s
Dream comes true. He covers her like a bag over her
Face. I saw it. For me she died long before this

Frightening unhappiness began. And now I see
Myself behind the mask, even my fears and even
My hatreds, for I still try to love her. And she will
Never know, never forgive me for what he did

Or was, and for his triumph in turning my life
To salt. Oh thank God she is blind at last. The snow
Turns day to winter night
===============


After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
Galway Kinnell

After making love we hear footsteps

on the gravel outside, someone ill or exhausted

walking slowly, then more rapidly, almost running, and cars

passing, their lights travelling the ceiling.

The dogs are barking: it’s a false alarm. 
The air enters my lungs and leaves me there alone. 

We lie still, listening as the cars

fade down the highway, as the footsteps

on the gravel outside fade, the dogs settling, our breathing

as it was before.

A silence begins to build around the bed.

All day you lay waiting for me in the new grass

beside the white elm. All day I waited for you

in the empty house, touching your dresses,

hanging up a white sweater to

see how you would look in winter. In the silence

we begin again, the wingbeats growing louder, slower, slower, louder.

THE MOON
Emily Dickinson

It’s the greatest art of all!
“Life without beautify”
Auden said. And he should know;
It was given to a man.

But everything was fine
Till it left us for the sky
And at first an upstart boy
To the earth who was nigh.

A rivalry grew sharp,
A quick contest, a race —
Though they ne’er met in direct
Yet each did his best.

This was Nature’s doing — And
I marvel if it shook
Even her, it was such fame!
A new renown!

I am glad to live
Said the boy to the world!
And it to him — Oh be glad!
It’s man’s origin.

But his due life’s course he scorns —
Hangs round mother’s room —
Goes the rounds; pays her calls,
And never is home.

Even those of us who weep
Know we’d have followed him —
And we left all the world could keep
And clung to the moon.


===============


Nuit Blanche
Théophile Gautier

I dreamt of you, I woke up weeping.
Why does one dream of those to whom one says,
“Go away, I’m not happy. I don’t love you anymore.”

I dreamed you had returned and were sitting beside me,
tall and very beautiful; the dead sometimes look like that.
And your eyes, how tender they were! But I
felt that my soul was dead.
“You have killed me,” I said to you. “Be kind.
I don’t want to get up from here. Lay my head against your shoulder.”

And then I felt, to my astonishment,
your warm breath, I breathed it in.
You were alive. And now I felt like a person
who stumbles on the road to Damascus and is blinded.
“Let me cry, let me cry,” I said to you. “My eyes are flooded.
Let me die on your shoulder...
But let me get over my horrible feeling
that there is no hope of ever finding life again.

What is the point of living, of seeing the sun rise,
of loving, what is the point? What is the point
of the beautiful books I have written?
What is the point of you coming back, if there is nothing left,
if I am dead... I’m no longer the same man...”
“Don’t cry,” you said to me. “I give you my hand,
I give you my heart.
I give you all that a woman can give a man.”
“Let me cry... and, as I cry, please say over and over
that you forgive me, that you love me, that your love for me
will never die...” I went on talking like this,
but no words came out of my mouth.
And you said to me, “Let me tell you what I love about you.
When I was beside you, beside you on the bed,
I felt safe, I was like a sleeping child.
It seems to me as I watch over your sleep,
that you are my child, that I have come back
after searching through the world for my own
dear child, my pure, beautiful child...
And when I sleep, that means I can see you at last,
I can see you, and feel you there close by
===============


Pirate Jenny
Bertolt Brecht

You gentlemen are very merry,
you make merry over pure blood.
My servant merely serves the roast:
Ah, you who serve the roast make merry.
Be on your guard!

You gentlemen are very wise;
you’ve set the great watchdogs loose
that carry off the mother’s child.
Ah, you who set the dogs loose make merry.
Be on your guard!

Let me tell you a story about you gentlemen:
You go to church in your pairs,
and one of you has the key to the house of prayer
and opens it.

Here are your footprints in the snow, ladies.
My servant merely serves the roast.
The Jewess I impaled last night, ladies,
was a thing like you.

You gentlemen must know the story of the peddler’s daughter.
A peddler went to a land that had a king
and sold his wares there.
The king took a liking to the man’s daughter
and slept with her at night
and when the thing was discovered
the king gave the peddler gold as a reward.
The peddler was hard of hearing
and would not understand
why they were giving him gold;
the peddler’s daughter pretended not to understand
and spoke to her father in a foreign language.
That was how the peddler’s daughter saved her honor
and is now Queen of Spain.

This tale has often been told.
What does it mean?
It is called The Peddler’s Daughter.
A shabby story.


===============


The Nightingales
Lizette Woodworth Reese

Faint in the western sky,
Like the far notes of a horn,
Are thy coming spires, O Spring,
Alluring one by one,
In the blue of the evening,
To my passionate heart.

Shall I not tremble, O Spring,
When I see thy faint spires
Rise over the trees, and know
That thy flame leaps for me?

Birds of the summer I have,
But they are not as thou;
When I hold their hot hearts in my hand
They are silent and dumb.

Nay, thy heart is not in them, O Spring,
Even as mine is not in me,
But they cry for thy lips as I cry for thee,
With a thirst and a hunger as keen as mine.

Give, O give me thy mouth, O Spring!
My heart is a well of flame
For thy coming lips, O Spring,
To drink of thy love and thy name.


===============


Verbal Icon
Miles Champion

Already half there
after the first three
or four words: skin
in the language, skin.

But I think we
will pass the window
here, and the whole day
like a rising

cloud on a plain
beyond you already.
And how, seeing a man
like that outside

a bus, or a woman’s
stricken face across
a crowded café, how
hear your own

pain, and see
again the storm
in a mirror, a mask
in a mirror,

a face moving in
confusion? Late, we
are in our own city
again, the city

we grew up in.
Maybe the darkness
was weather. That
worry was weather.

Our languages
and the knowledge
of our lives. Yes,
wind and rain.

And yes, the clarity
of this—this crossing
a whole morning,
this passing

a window. And after
a little while, the quiet
that is in a room
with you: an

ultimate weather.
But we are far
from ending. Already
we are becoming

dream, memory.
Already this must
be imagined.


===============


Lyonnesse
John Fuller

The north end of the Island of Wight
Bears marvellous desolations:
The gorse the only intervener
Between wild sea and wrecked pastures:
A few shells left, some footmarks
In the chalk. A herd of pigs
Gone long ago, then a house in flames,
And back into myth, The Island
Of Guernevere, of living waters.
Three thousand years and it’s the sea
Against chalk cliffs, whin running down
To the white-foamed surge. Skeins of geese
Fly the other way, towards Scotland.
Of a hundred thousand years
Only white gulls, these slate roofs
And rain trees. Inland, the ridge
Cut down to sea-level, where there’s a quarry,
A creek, and polytunnels. And the fields
On either side, poplars and the sea
Closer still. A swan dying
And, on a gatepost, the words
‘Lord, make me pure.’ Perpetual challenge,
The gorse, then white lime streaks, then the sea.


===============


Lark Song
Henry Vaughan

O thou that swing’st upon the waving
Hair of some degreeless cloud,
O thou that dancest, when those sounds are driving,
Which sweeten, and subdue!

Beneath thy spicy wings
As high as these, as high and higher fly,
But in a tuneful song, a Song as bright
As is the golden hair

Which thou dost toss and catch,
Singing sweet words, that make me love, to Thee,
O thou that swing’st upon the waving hair
Of some degreeless Cloud!


===============


A Face
Ron Padgett

. . .

A place where nothing can get in.

Or is it a place
where everything is
always getting in,
breaking and entering—
a subway at rush hour
or a Central Park dented
by rain?

But what then
is the difference
between staying home
and going out?
A little backache
when standing and a big
one sitting down.

And we could have gone out.
And we could have stayed home.

. . .

You pulled on my arms
and I pulled on your nose.
Then we realized
there was no difference.
Then we threw my hat
out the window
and tried to fall asleep
but were interrupted by a loud
noise, a sudden silence,
and a small whine.
The baby had arrived
while we were not paying attention.
I went to see what was happening
and you cleaned up a little
in the kitchen.
Then we sat side by side
on the sofa and watched
the news, which was all about
the Civil War and a man
who had eaten his wife.

What do you mean
they’re the same?

All the news seemed
like history now
except for the man
who had eaten his wife,
but we weren’t sure
if that was real
or just an idea.

The baby interrupted again
but this time we were ready
and didn’t fall asleep.
He was a restless little guy,
forever starting up
and we would lie in bed
waiting to see if he
would fall back to sleep
or if we’d have to get up.
He was a good baby
and he slept quite a lot
but when he didn’t sleep
his crying was so sharp
it felt as though it were
tearing the world
into little strips,
leaving us alone
with our eyes, which were
a little bloodshot.

. . .

The joke began
before we were born.
If we hadn’t been born
we wouldn’t have believed it.

This morning it was
cold and raining hard
and we wouldn’t have gotten out
of bed at all except
the baby was awake
so we gave him a bottle
and put him in his basket
and let him suck
on
===============


O Lago
Fernando Pessoa

As águas calmas do lago
Lambem as margens baixas.
Brilham ao sol poente,
Parecem correr
Ao longe e não acercar.
Do meu olhar alheio
As margens não separam,
Meu pensamento é fundo,
Meu olhar é de lago,
E só flutua o ver.

Debruço-me do alto,
E o olhar só vê,
E p’ra trás se demora,
Por ver as águas fluírem.
E um conhecimento íntimo
Do lago, sinto eu crescer,
De um tamanho maior que eu.
Penso sentir até:
O lago é insondável
Quase tanto quanto eu.

Parece-me a ideia
De um Deus pensando.
C’roa-se-me o sentimento,
De um lago sentindo.
Sinto fluir de mim,
Devo estar a olhar
Para dentro de mim.
Que grandeza de tédio!

A minha vida, o Lago!
A minha sabedoria,
Só águas dos olhares!
Que meditação amarga!
A água do lago é o meu ser,
A minha perdição,
O grande Olhar, sem ter
O que ver em si...
O passar, o passar...

A luz cresce, e eu penso
Meu olhar, e águas vejo.
E ser, em lago sentir,
Um sem-sentido tanto,
Tanto como um sem-lago.
Sinto o lago no ar
Crescer ao sol baixo,
Sem margens, sem fundo...
Um brilho que seja
Um lago sem ser lago.

É fundo e do sol à vista,
Sem margens e a não ter.
Um lago que o não sou
No olhar de quem está...
Um lago, só porque,
Por brilhar, de dia claro
E passar, em tempo alto.
Um ser mais que eu lago,
===============


In Midas's Country
Allen Tate

I cannot forget that in a field as far 
As I could make it out from Midas's hill, 
Corn trembled like the hair of Midas's child, 
Rich, noiseless hair, upon a tender skull, 
In September, when we walk upon the hill 
And smell the fir's adhesive needle-dust 
And view from there the gradual ocean like a bride's 
Adventure, cottony in the tremulous light. 
Midas's child presses upon my heart, 
His coat of nails...as bitter as the sweets 
Of memory, what wild spirit cries aloud 
In stillness...what sharp cincture holds my heart 
Upon the moment, Midas's fatal child?


===============


Sight Unseen
Anne Carson

What kind of thing is a river?
Which of its shapes would you say
Is its real shape? And if the river
Was frozen how would you know
The ice was not the real way
The water always wanted to be?
And if it was flowing
How would you know the water
Was not the real way
The ice always wanted to be?


===============


Remembering
Harold Brodkey

1

Years ago, when my child was just a year old,
I made my wife get up every few hours
And watch the baby’s breath
To be sure he was still alive.
If I woke up myself,
We went in together
And watched the terrible power of a human being
To pull against everything
And not break.
And then my wife went back to bed
And I stayed watching in the quiet night.
And now he is thirteen
And his name is Richard.
And I wake at four in the morning
And that is all the world is:
His name and his breath,
And the shape he used to make with his arms
When he lay on his side
In his crib.

2

The world is made out of what is gone,
Out of all that is taken away.
Sometimes it is hard to find the past
Because it has slipped off to the side
But it is still there, always still there,
And nothing can ever make it go away.

3

There are times, like now,
When I’d like to sit at the edge of life
In this world of other people’s breath
And never touch another human being
Again.


===============


The Night Stars
Mary Oliver

I went out walking along the sea.
The dogs thought it was very odd.
It was one of those blue-black nights
and the ocean was shimmering.
The dogs sat on the sand beside me
and watched the waves.
I do not know what they thought.

After a while it seemed we had walked
a long, long way.
I looked back and saw that the lights
from my house had vanished
and I knew it was time to go back,
and go I did.
The dogs trotted at my side,
keeping close,
as if it were a strange country.


===============


Persimmons
Li-Young Lee

Here, I give you some seeds of persimmons. Put them in a glass of water,
and in a few days tiny sprouts will appear. Twist their green tails
gently once a day, and in one week they will be ready to plant.
In the spring, just before the buds break, dig small holes for the trees.
Persimmon trees are small. In the fall, if you are lucky, they will bear
fruit. Then comes the best part. When the fruit turns from orange to
black, bruise the skins slightly. The sweet odor of ferment will rise.
Put some of the soft, mushy fruit in a clean cloth, and press it again and
again until all that’s left is juice. Add a spoonful of honey and some
wine. If you have any left after a week, fill each little bottle to the neck.
The wine will turn a darker gold each day, until finally it has transformed
itself into an amber color with the faintest touch of red. Put the bottles
in the sun for a few hours. Now, only now, after months of planning and
waiting, is it ready to drink.


===============


Piss and Muses
Nin Andrews

I know I couldn’t write before I knew you 
had a special kind of flu. 

Some are saying it might be ebola. 
Others think it might be bird. I don’t give
a fuck about the label. How are you? Tell me. I need
some symptoms. I need to know your intestines
are twisting. Tell me you’re shitting blood.
Tell me the doctors can’t even touch you
for fear of infecting others. Let me have
your cell phone. Let me call you in the middle
of the night and say your name as if my heart
was on a moon. Let me be the one to feel your
eyes water when you laugh. Now I have
a flu. Feel my head. Feel how hot. Feel
me wanting you to feel my fever. And tell me 
this is just the beginning, and tell me I’ll
be looking for you to crawl out of the hospital
covered in puss. This is how you want to be loved
isn’t it? I know this. I can feel you on the other
line as if you were calling from your bed.
And I’m climbing into your long-distance
exhale. Then, you’re looking down the hall,
and you’re feeling for your pain meds. And feeling
for me, as if I am a part of your body
and you need me as your body needs this meds. 
The only cure is you. And I am the cure.

~~ 


[Edited]

For John Keats

Now in this hour that we may see us free
the secret seed that slept to spire
consorts with sun and strange air;
a madness echoes down the slopes,
tricks from this yard-conspirator's grasses,
or the sun throws jewels from the moss-drapes,
stones with wishes and bells with pleas
to be the ad-man's things, wished for words
that need appeasing, orphaned books,
a plunder of the world for pens and brands;
in cellars men lie gathering ink
from spiders as ascended dreams
and by the milky flood of light
grown wild they imagine; now in this
all ecstasy eternal, all rhyme,
now my
===============


Sonnet III, New Year's Eve
Brendan Galvin

There was this poem I once wrote about Westport,
a box held lightly in the hand,
that was what I called a thought worth chasing.
What I didn't say was that the thought worth chasing
had already been caught: it was the poem.
Especially what happened in the poem
in those awful scenes where you'd hear a family scream
one scream at each other, that would last a lifetime,
and whose scream was that? The poems said they would
come one day to reveal their names.

And that was all right. I wrote a poem
called Daylilies about the Fourth of July,
the American tricolor. I had my son here,
we both celebrated, and it was August,
and hot, and it was okay. And I think I once wrote
of the patient old dog, lying in the yard in summer,
how he had come to accept each day, each day,
each one new and fresh as if it were made of plastic,
and he would not have liked it any other way.


===============


Milk & Honey
Kay Ryan

Bumblebees never sleep in their lookout flowers. 
Or if they do, they don’t snore. 
If they ever fall asleep, they don’t nod. 
Off the blossom, they give the whole nod.

The bee at the window, the bees at the walls, 
don’t scare. But I keep the house wide open. 
Why are bumblebees so lavish in praise? 
Because our business keeps us roundly in mint.

Every language I know boils down to one word: 
More. More and more and more. 
Milk & honey and you. 
Can’t possibly ever get enough.


===============


Sonnet II: "Love, all alike"
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
All days are equal in the glory of love;
Equal the nights and mornings; nights to day
As mornings to the dark and ever-morn
Before the which the spirit shuddering came
Into the shivering and sad world of flowers.
These, as men dream, to woo him to a throne,
Maiden and passionate near the snow-streams, bowed
As if before their lord; or him they praise,
Strewn with white flowers, though all white flowers are,
And the most loyal of them crush’d in hours.
Nor will he stay with us; he hastes away.
Not wearied yet, nor satiate with our love.


===============


Turtle
Brenda Hillman

I lay my defenses down beside your love.
It’s a pretty heavy thing to give, and you
are a slow and considered craftsman;
when you went inside the story
to work on your age-old prose, I waited, 
as you do, your whole life long.

In the late heat, you were an orange moon
above the reservoir, where you’d been fishing
in a net of light. I saw you scoop out
the soft rock, grip it, scatter the sky like
white noise; when you die, you can go inside
your shell. Nobody can stop you.

All the living are in movement,
the fox crossing under our deck, the ticking flies,
the wasp humming around your groin.
Now, the usual silence, the starlings
pulling the moon into the branches of the willow,
setting your story on the ocean again,
sinking down under the tide.

I want to be a turtle,
to breathe below all this noise and struggle,
with my neck ten years long, touching the sand floor,
with my smile forever fixed on the dust.
Above it all, you’re made of air,
of time, serene as a dream.

from Presence (Greece)

Michael Palmer

For Monica

We do not see this fragmentary city,
transparent, dark mirrors of the
fragmented city as it is
or was, seen again, to be seen again,
seen before we knew it and
for the first time, for
it is a woman and the one we see
in the child’s eye who is
going through the rooms of
the house, who is with us
when we are alone, who is
going beyond the borders of
our own vocabulary of
distance and desire, who is our
daughter who is our lover, our son, our
sister, our mother, our aunt
who is us here now, beneath
the remains of the rotting fruit,
who passes through mirrors,
who sees through the great
vulgar immeasurable room,
broken down through excess
light, books, memory, torn
at the seams,
in ruins through the light we see.


===============


The Gift
Czeslaw Milosz

Nothing has happened yet on this earth.  
The girl's ecstasy, the fire rising from roasted meat, 
and sleep after love are still the only miracles. 
No angels have come to separate good and evil; 
the leaves of the tree have turned and turned, 
the ages of man have brought no one up to heaven. 
We have few events worthy of the angels' interest: 
we live in a poor time of crumbling plaster and dried-up poetry. 
Only the diligent effort of man keeps the garden going; 
only our wishes enable the flower to open.

Even on this earth nothing is perfect.  
After the heat of noon I lie down in the grass;
the blades cut my naked thighs,
I doze off, I waken,
and with my outstretched hand
caress the sleeping butterfly.


===============


What the Light Teaches
Toi Derricotte

What the light teaches us:

If we turn toward it
our bodies cast half-shadows
that hold the world in place.


===============


Reading to My Father
Albert Goldbarth

The covers are as blank as a slate,
The poet on them lovely and old.
His book’s a house he has built of rhymes
That’s better kept than a portrait of rooms.
It will last longer than he himself
And better describe how it feels
To be ill at ease in your own skin,
For it’s the book he spent all his days
And nights cooking up, and you taste
Him as you read, word by word.

His life was as angular as these
Rhyme schemes. Later his eyes would go,
But when they could yet see, they took
Off from ordinary things.
He’d make of the headstones in the graveyard
A place where he had things to do,
Of pet dog or cat, a millionaire
With coronet. His bed was a raft.
He would climb walls and ring a bell
Stuck there. Two and two would be five.

He was playing still as you read to him,
His gaze leaping from line to line.
His turning page was a current,
His fading voice a lone radio
Still tuned to the game long since played.
Life hobbled, he limped to the side,
But in your voice, he still runs
Toward the goal, his heart grown thick,
With lines of words that he has spent
His life in making. They aren’t lies.


===============


Heart’s Needle
Ann Fisher-Wirth

The ocean was deep and rested, rolled
a little in its bed. All day the stars
burned their holes in the heaven, the woods
held their breaths. Nothing to distract
the heart from its stitching. You might have thought
the sun was a housefly trapped in the blue.

I would have stayed longer if there were need
for a keeper, a lifeguard in the cove.
The baby calmed, she floated on her side
rocking her watermelon of a belly.
Gulls clamored in the park. Crows with smoke in their throats
fell dead from the sky. Anything could happen.

All day the sky held its blue breath.
Things passed through—
the moon, a frigate, and now
the sun, with its hair on fire. Nothing

to distract the heart from its needle
like an eye at the center of the fire.
It said: Before you comes, as well, your going.
You are the fire, the wind that sews its mouth shut.

John Ashbery

Daffy Duck in Hollywood

There are the teasing and the being teased
but where, in the fabric, is the weaver?
It’s nice to know, and at the right price
to look at it from time to time.
It will only end by getting worse.

The dead season reasserts itself.
Remembers the curtains, the leaking ceilings,
all the illiterate fools who miss a script
when they’re instructed to re-write it.
What counts is that you should have known better.

Truth to tell, you were not a serious soul.
You preferred being lost to finding.
And so, for better or worse, you remain
the executioner and the victim.
Even so, let’s start all over again.

Mistake one: whatever else I do

when I die I shall do so, as Spinoza says,
without an idea of death, a position
I have done nothing but retreat from
ever since the conception of this poem.
That is the final clause. It serves
as a master to any verb, and to any thought
that might accompany it.
For nothing except silence will ever become
the integral to which all
===============


April, National Poetry Month postcard from 2011
D. A. Powell

On March 22, thousands of dead starlings
fell from the sky over Beebe, Arkansas.
They dropped into the yards and streets
and parking lots, where people in the throes
of spring fever went outside to find
them. The birds didn’t land with any
meaningful fanfare or particularly
engrossing emotional crescendo,
just a steady patter of random death,
like some cheap and bloody sitcom.
This, I suppose, is how it ends, not
with a catastrophic collision of hawks
or a rending thing with talons big
as bear paws, but a gentle careening
toward ground in a bright and soul-
searing dash of unintended color.
I’ve always wanted that moment of
illumination at the onset of my end,
sudden immolation that fans out, row
after row, a sort of fireworks display
commensurate with my passions and beliefs,
blissfully blanketing the ground and sky
with evidence of my restless heart.
I’ve never asked for much or begged
the planet for any desperate promises,
just an instant blaze of recognition,
a parting gift of useless wisdom
to a future civilization that doesn’t
really need it. I won’t be looking
up, since every other image of death
showcases calamity and open eyes,
broken gazes scouring the horizon
as the curtains go down. I’d rather
just close my eyes, lean my head back
as if listening, and imagine wings.


===============


Song
William Carlos Williams

Is it that, since we’ve made, of love, a metaphor
for life, but life, a metaphor for love, there’s nothing
to love more dearly? for nothing’s less like love than love,
and nothing more like.
What now have you
to love with all your life?


===============


Northern Pike
Ted Hughes

This pike has haunted me all year, 
With its length of jaw, and dislocated 
All articulations of design. 
A twisted, tormented, screaming face 
Out of some medieval wood; 
But even a tormented pike is a sleek fish.

Psychozoic. Eater of trilobites 
In some primal vertical ocean; 
Compassed on four sides by limitless water 
Impersonal, abstract, inhuman space: 
No trees, or dawn, or birdsong, or love, 
Only the oxygen in the icy water,

For him to breathe and kill and feed.
In that primal vertical ocean; 
Eternal boundary; the dread substance 
Of death itself. He cannot tell 
The sea from light. He cannot tell 
The motion of his own feet from vertigo.

In spite of all, like a glistening snow-scape.
Darkness itself is only defined 
By a total inaccessibility 
To his eye, and every landscape is 
Not far from his mind. The ice-white teeth 
Set in night: and the white jaw set on teeth.

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Though the circus of death has left town 
There's a baby born in another town.

T.S. Eliot


===============


Listen
Gregory Orr

Listen, these are the days,
when birdsong dots the trees
like diamonds in a necklace,
stolen and carelessly scattered.

When every possible angle
of light is gathered
in the hidden hub of blossoms,
and we are the silkworm
spinning the precious thread.

Listen, when we think we are alone,
the universe is laying down its bed
of fiery daisies, anointing
every mole on your back
with its blessed fragrance.

Listen, your hands in my hands,
how we become the gesture
that encompasses the garden
and as many stars as possible.

Listen, you are the metronome
that keeps my heart ticking,
and in every other living soul,
the golden bell that rings
all day long.


===============


Roosters
Carl Sandburg

The preacher climbs into the pulpit
          shoves his hands into his sleeves,
And while he shouts his text

        the roosters in the yard begin to crow—

      All except one with a limp in his left leg

      and a slight defect in his voice,

      Who used to be the leader of the flock—

      And it’s a rising cry of a sound

      coming out of his throat

      The preacher shouts his text

      the rooster leads the echo

And the preacher reaches in his pocket
      for his handkerchief
      wipes his neck
      and eyes

      While the pulpit rocks

      as he shouts the text

      and the rooster leads the echo

      until the preacher
        decides not to preach any more

      and shuts his book

      while the rooster keeps on a minute or two

      till he sees the people leave the church

      and then he too stops his effort.


===============


The Swing
William Butler Yeats

The bawn is closed where was the hospitality
Of houses when men went about the world
Free of a comely woman’s jealousy;
My thought flew up, because a blade of grass,
A strake on the white wall, a rock in the grass,
Or anything that’s come to hand in idle hours
Can spread a kind of fever in the blood;
And fell on the heavy-headed, thin-faced horses
Feeding and fading in their pasture-grounds.


===============


Study of History
Robert Pinsky

Even with computers
Our knowledge doesn’t increase in proportion to the amount
Of what we know.

You could know the locations and orbits
Of every microbe in a drop of water from the Ganges
Without knowing the current politics of India.

The tiny puffball swaying
On a tree in the breeze is luminous and vulnerable
And looks at us.

History is the mind distancing
Itself from what it knows, not proportional to what it knows.
It builds slowly, the spiral stair, the little languages.

What are we trying to make up
Our minds about? The nature of the general?
Is history a progress, a plan, a cycle, an accident?

A history of thought, history
As thought—Who is the maker of an argument?
What is the nature of time?

Earth’s second atmosphere, the oxygen
We breathe, was made by tiny plants
That appeared suddenly, half a billion years ago.

Tiny shifts in the earth’s orbit
May have brought sunlight and warmth to the planet’s surface
And started the clock, the celebration.

Life celebrates itself—a leaf,
A newborn mouse—the poet’s insight and inspiration
Embodied in a sparrow.

Each of us embodies the large, flowing
Crowds of heroes and rogues, dreamers and leaders,
Lost people, the solitary.

More comes into our minds
Than we can say; the one we choose to say it for us
Stands up on the hill in a wind.

These are the contemplations
That make up the world’s mind. Where do you see yourself
In the scheme of things?


===============


your missing eyebrows
Michael O’Brien

late and early sun lights my fingers like an ordinary thing,
as i speak as i can, without riddles in plain as a word.
whatever the mouths may seem to hint,
stir is a state of mind.

there is a guitar for how the fret board spirals out of thought
beyond any transference.
shoulders falter in their winters,
lips evade place.

some colors that swirl in the mixture of civilized smiles.
the intimate urge to witness, a dinner
and the royal court.
wind dunes, bats, flies
or the lightless before sunrise

as sleep folds out of mind’s line, further in a frame
of your own making, these scattered pieces.
but this room is open and the air inside.

A BLESSING
Ted Kooser

Now that we are
snowed in

I am
free to be

with you
as I want

to be,
or as you

want me
to be,

which may be
hard to tell

from
the way

I want
you to think

I want
to be.


===============


Nuit Blanche
Théophile Gautier

I dreamt of you, I woke up weeping.
Why does one dream of those to whom one says,
“Go away, I’m not happy. I don’t love you anymore.”

I dreamed you had returned and were sitting beside me,
tall and very beautiful; the dead sometimes look like that.
And your eyes, how tender they were! But I
felt that my soul was dead.
“You have killed me,” I said to you. “Be kind.
I don’t want to get up from here. Lay my head against your shoulder.”

And then I felt, to my astonishment,
your warm breath, I breathed it in.
You were alive. And now I felt like a person
who stumbles on the road to Damascus and is blinded.
“Let me cry, let me cry,” I said to you. “My eyes are flooded.
Let me die on your shoulder...
But let me get over my horrible feeling
that there is no hope of ever finding life again.

What is the point of living, of seeing the sun rise,
of loving, what is the point? What is the point
of the beautiful books I have written?
What is the point of you coming back, if there is nothing left,
if I am dead... I’m no longer the same man...”
“Don’t cry,” you said to me. “I give you my hand,
I give you my heart.
I give you all that a woman can give a man.”
“Let me cry... and, as I cry, please say over and over
that you forgive me, that you love me, that your love for me
will never die...” I went on talking like this,
but no words came out of my mouth.
And you said to me, “Let me tell you what I love about you.
When I was beside you, beside you on the bed,
I felt safe, I was like a sleeping child.
It seems to me as I watch over your sleep,
that you are my child, that I have come back
after searching through the world for my own
dear child, my pure, beautiful child...
And when I sleep, that means I can see you at last,
I can see you, and feel you there close by
===============


To the Harbormaster
Marianne Moore

Tell me, Harbormaster,
where do the waves go
when they roll away from the shore, and why
does the gull, with so much room to fly in,
circle the pier?

Does she do it because it is her nature, or because it is her nature to follow
men who follow the waves?
The fishermen say
they do not know

whether the sea is hostile or friendly. 
The sea has never been hostile to me
but once, when I asked it
to move so I could walk on it. 

I should not talk as I do
to a man with heavy burdens,
nor intrude on your thoughts! 
What's the use of talking anyway? 
Better we should remain silent, 
listening to the weathervane 
and looking

into the eye of the wave.

Note
It may be that when the tide is out
I can get to that island,
where the gulls are flying
around the pier.

In this case, all theories are refuted,
except that I do not like walking on the water
any more than anyone else does.


===============


This Beauty
Susan Stewart

These late crocuses falling
from their sprung sockets
these unmotivated clusters of
brook-thrush and clouds
these spiders erecting themselves
honeysuckles blossoms and these
cowslips—these colorings
are blessings. O that we could
retain these earliest bound-
arities


===============


The Evening is Tranquil, the Sky
Hayan Charara

The evening is tranquil, the sky empty of swallows.
Or of birds, or words. I call the moon a waxing moon
a diminished moon & each name adds a shade
to the light we want to hear. In the desert we sit,
snow-white but cracking under the weight of rainclouds,
shackled by our little shacks and little names.
I knock on the door, on the heart, of another day—
the door is a face, the heart a jailer. Wait. Wait
and I will sit with you until the sky’s grief
presses your face into a storm of rain, then stars,
then a tranquil sky, a moon waxing beyond us.
When I lay out the constellations on the desk’s
black varnish, the dark rubs its feet in awe.
Each blot is a tear. And in my sadness each tear
becomes a bloodshot promise of sleep in a sandstorm.


===============


Philetas of Cos
Fanny Howe

Woman
pressed my hand
back to life.
She said,
the ages
aren’t interested
in you, but what
can I say?
I liked her.
She kissed
me and I was
a king,
A waxen seal
melting
on a corpse
at dawn.

She wore my
ring
and disappeared.
The avocado tree
would not
disclose her
sex. I was scared,
I am scared.
She pulled the
fishhooks
from my tongue.
I do not know
whether I
kissed her.


===============


Come, Thief
Jane Kenyon

Even if we were venal, something better 
than money or love would wash us daily.
We are one body, what we do to each other 
we do to ourselves, we say about someone
else, about someone else.

There was a red-tailed hawk on his nest in the cliff 
the other day, when I went out to the barn 
to bring wood in. I stopped to look.
She walked to the edge, opened her wings.
The wind blew her off and up.
She flared and veered east, holding the angel.

Cats and dogs push at us like babies.
The clouds in the long summer twilights 
are like rubber nipples for the sky's huge teats. 
The sunsets are slow, like deep draughts of milk 
swallowing themselves.

But if you drink too much milk you get woozy. 
You grow bloated and soft and strange. 
You burble like a baby.

Come, thief, and steal me, take me.
I have a life to show you, skin, muscle, bone, 
the small sweet skull like a hard-boiled egg.

There's no hiding the dream that will take you, 
one day, to your knees.


===============


A Simple Heart
Gustave Flaubert

As the cart grew heavier, the road seemed to her longer and steeper. She trembled over the rough places, stammering a Ave Maria. She still believed she was being carried along to heaven, though she had no idea what sort of a place that might be. Her heart quaked; her mind was uneasy and wandered through dark bewilderment. For, even on earth, she had scarcely known more than the cows she tended. She took as they came the things that happened to her. The only difference was that in the city there were more of them, and fewer turkeys. In the stable she had hardly ever thought of anything: her soul had never been wide-awake except a few times during the year, when her son came back, or at the great annual fair of Saint-Leu, when she went to get her livestock entered and to wear her best clothes, those she had not taken in or let out too much. And this long voyage was so painful that she cried. She would have liked to set down her little boy and get off for a while herself. Her arms, that for four months had had no use, began to ache and her bunion flamed.

“Lord! What punishment!” she kept saying, without, however, really understanding what was happening to her, or why God had thus withdrawn from her His blessing.

She nearly died of fatigue when she was set down at the door of the hospital. The people were unaccustomed to seeing her and did not recognize her. They took her for some beggar who had stolen the dead child in order to lay it on the doorstep of this house of charity. For half an hour she had to explain in her weak voice who she was, and they believed her only on seeing her red woolen shawl with yellow spots on it, and hearing the name of Jean-Paul, the little foundling of the Plantels.

As she was dropping with exhaustion, they took her into a room, where two straw mattresses lay on the ground. She let herself fall on one of them and did not move. Around her nurses, laughing good-naturedly, kept repeating: “Well! How now? Won’t you get up?” A young, pink-faced nun with tiny hands was saying to her: “Come now, Mamma! Get up a bit, and take a little of this soup.”

===============


The Smuggler
Philip Levine

Have you ever thought
of taking
snow up a mountain
at night?

My mother always thought
of things
like that. She had such courage
to imagine.

To gather your stars,
your moon
light and your snow
in a crystal shoebox.

To carry them through customs
casually
as if you were accustomed
to this sort of thing.

Your train leaves early
in the morning,
so for heaven’s sake
be careful.

You may be forced
to throw it away
when the guard
tries to search you.

And you, too,
must make
a decision.


===============


Dialogue of Self and Soul
William Butler Yeats

Soul: The way is plain before us, and the childish
   old discoverers of knowledge followed no other way
   than this of perfecting natural knowledge, and
   there is nothing in our way to show us that we
   have mistaken the direction. 
Self: That was another world, and other countries have
   other manners, but our tongue has not changed its
   sounds since Shakespere’s day, and the English-
   looking antithesis of ‘perfecting natural knowledge’
   and ‘nothing in our way’ is at least as fine as the
   best lines in the ‘Antony and Cleopatra’. 
Soul: One at a time, please. 
Self: I am not to be denied. You have a right to make
   your own discoveries, but you are under an obliga-
   tion to show me them; and as I am unable to judge
   them without incurring the danger of ridicule, I must
   be satisfied that there is nothing ridiculous in them
   before I put my dignity in your hands. 
Soul: I will not deny that, to most men, my failures
   must seem ridiculous, or that they must have a
   point of view which I cannot accept before they can
   estimate the amount of failure in these moments.


===============


Sex without Love
Sharon Olds

When I saw you were untouched
that no one had taken your lips,
straight like a horizon
or spilt at the seam.

When I saw your breasts began
in a nest, from a nest
to breathe, I thought:

flock,
falcon, falconer, father.
I want you for your body,
for mine,

and for the chance.
I want you to go in
and as you go in
have your body
grow wide, begin.

When I saw that no one had opened you yet, I thought
this is my one chance.
This is the one door
in the one world
left open.

I feel like I can write you poems
until my thumbs break,   
if you’ll be born that way.

No spirit or monument.
I could say it’s to have you,   
to have you with me.
If I get inside you   
I will not come out   
I will be so wide   
inside you.

I will fill every place
you ever occupied   
my child.   
I will grow a language   
inside you.


===============


first, on living

Kit Yan

the girl in the yellow dress
and blue nails walks down
across the cold night
our shadow mouths
quiet
and behind our song is
only silent running of water
and the moment opens up
and all we ever wanted
is already within the trees
branches extending far
beyond what we can see.
when the wind hits
they sway and cry with secrets
to each other.
the horizon wipes its brow
knocking
the edge of the world back
to allow more room for what
is coming
until finally we are a world of sail
the wind full in our sail and
within our grasp.


===============


Still Lovesong
Lucie Brock-Broido

I am in love with you. It has begun to snow
invisibly. The flakes gather in the grass, which was last night
glowing green, outlining the blades in silver; 
green seems a color for the sea, the grass is cold;  
all things are withdrawing in the season
toward the dream of crystalline minerals.
Even the crows are softer in this year-end season.
I am so cold I go back to the house. The heavy doors
shut softly. I am in love with you and dream
that death will never change this. I am in love with you
but never kiss you. Every night the snow
falls softly on the pasture; every night
the stars burn brighter in the branches; and you
will always, always be in love with me, in love with me
against all reason. Even the wind that never
blows softer says, we are like this always.
I burn because I never see you; the flames
at the window-glass seem lit from within; 
the world I’d thought to find cannot hold fire
of this color, or air this clear, and if in your eyes
I seem to see myself, I’m not afraid; 
I simply gaze into the lovely distance
where I know your eyes are shining in the trees.


===============


March 1st
Mark Strand

Today you may take the rectory walk
from Emerson to Thoreau
a crisp clear hour after lunch
with the sun set fair in the western sky.

Or in your thoughts, you may descend
the staircase to a day in January—
the cold so sharp, the slush in the yard so
icy, you are forced to remain inside.

What is it about these poets?
How did they get the way they are?
Why did they go on as they did?
How did they ever get to this?


===============


The Past
Jean-Pierre Rosnay

What must have been in the past was never real,
so what is happening now is surely an illusion.
When the future begins, then, something real will take place.
The question of whether this future is where the self
will take place, is that itself the illusion?
If I cannot sort this out, I will do something,
take something off the table and arrange the plates, 
decide whether I want to die, find out the present.


===============


Late Fragment
Robert Lowell

And what, you ask, does the future hold? 
More of the same, I’d say, and then some: 
The ocean getting warmer, bluer, brighter,
And the Burma Shave signs almost disappearing. 
More non-stop crying from the charts, 
And an old man going mad—in the White House? 
The sky over New York? Tiananmen?—  
Yes, but how can I tell? I’m no prophet. 
And the armies, the marketplaces, getting bigger, 
Soon I’ll be free to make my own mistakes,
If the bomb doesn’t kill us all in the meantime. 
What might that do to the ocean? the sky?
But I’ve already come too far on my way,
Passing the closed caravansary, 
The gates to the empty gardens.


===============


The Saint Of The Day At The National Gallery
Joanna Klink

Even a blank face has a thought in it.
Each church doorway a story   
& there’s always someone   
who will say you are coming through

into beauty. I missed,
in the few minutes we had,
all the saints in the back rooms,   
and would not, to be fair, have been

interested in the saints, at all.
But anyone who says you see   
a room full of people and know
the things about them that count   
has another think coming. I got

her face from you
and not from the woman herself.
And it only hit me later
I was so busy looking for her
where I had
put her that I saw   
the other one first   
& it was all there   
in her expression   
that what I didn’t see—

you—was sitting   
in the other corner,   
seeing all of us.


===============


Swinburne’s Song
Tomas Tranströmer

A shooting star flew through my little room
   And wiped out the city on the black horizon.
It’s not you I want, it’s not your name
   I want on my lips. I cannot celebrate
You, too much is still in the way, maybe I lack
   Rapture or a lute. But your loved body
In my bed, you are living flesh, not the memory
   Of a far-off galaxy. While you sleep
May all desires be emptied from my breast,
   May they not come creeping in again in dreams.
This is a serious love, which has no use
   For doggerel. Don’t worry, I’m not about
To give you a name that may echo between us.
   Those echoes resound in an empty room.


===============


Sometimes I watch the Egg Girls & They Have What We No Longer Can Reach
James Tate

Sometimes I watch the egg girls and they have what we no longer can reach
They are in bed with one another with their nighties on
& I can’t help it but I have to say
isn’t that too beautiful for words
For many words that we no longer can reach
For the one we like to like to like the most


===============


Sparrows
Gary Snyder

The way it works is, you see some really poor people
  as you pass by in your car.
Then it hits you. You get it. You know what
  the poor are like. What you do to be
  like them is, stop for gas. Go to the washroom. Use the
  library. Buy a map. Buy some food.
  Treat yourself to a slice of pizza. Talk to somebody.
  You see what I mean?...

The thing I’m trying to get hold of is, every place
  is full of poor people. It’s the definition
  of “place.” A person is poor if they are
  living in a place where there is nothing to do there.
  It can’t be done, there’s no place for you there.
  If you really get down to it, it’s just too
  much to take. You have to figure out how to quit
  your job and how to move to another place.
  You find a place where something can be done.
  Somebody there cares enough to do it with you.


===============


Leaving Church Early
Marvin Bell

The world blooms wet and green, under glass.
Above the fragile pews, a fly
buzzes like an eternal
atom, electric & desperate
to escape our gravity. Everyone’s
breathing is being baptized
in the day’s absurdity, excepting
the preacher. He’s got the plan
nailed down. Grace is genetic,
love distilled like whiskey,
all knowledge fits into a book.
Resistance cancels out the clock
or time is meant for school & work,
the other elements don’t want your
business, & this world is not
a hand or ear or toe. Take
a breath of smoke & fire. Have
a look around: Is this the best
we can do? Find me another
song to sing while we
ignore the past, while I make
the ooh-oohing of pigeons
penetrate the mind. The clocks
are set ahead; I’m leaving
church early, & the world
blooms wet & green.


===============


The Magic
Giorgio de Chirico

Immobile I remember the deep of my childhood
A supreme instancy of the life of the soul
In me grew vivid as the morning.

All was pure freshness and surprise around me.
I was amazed to see things that exist and can be touched
That look so strange to the eye, so alien to the heart.

The world of constant presence stood before me.
I walked inside it as if inside a diamond.
I hardly managed to think, watching it grow brighter:

It is you, the fabled land of long ago.
Already you feel your power becoming more solid
Throughout your body, rock your soul with joy.

Innocence already renders your aura visible,
So that everyone sees you without suspecting.
They are content to brush against you without grasping:

You alone know that you are magnetic, forceful,
And with an impetuous surge you embrace life.
The poetry of motion in you with magnificent intuition
Creates concrete figures of energy and beauty,

As above you flames the sun in the implacable heaven.
A great gust rushes through you; here the angel steps down.
I was a boy when he touched me.

A great calamity opens its gigantic mouth in me
And drags me to the depths of new, eternal life.
Nothing will ever appear more beautiful than this moment

When I witnessed myself learning the truth.
I worshipped God, who was able to create me
So different, so far from common people: so innocent!


===============


Snake
Mary Oliver

When I asked the boy
how he was doing,
the boy at the corner
who has troubles,
he answered,
“If you saw me playing
with a snake and it died,
would you feel bad?”

He is too young
to think about death,
or too old.
I stand there shocked
by a glimpse of the country
I carry inside me,
of my own love
for everything.

My love for light
and my love for silence,
my love for blackberries
and the shore of Lake Michigan.

My love for the morning
after the night’s rain,
and the country of heaven,
wearing a new dress,
and small copper coins

beside the overturned plow.
The face of my love
looks out at me
from every private hurt
and from every corner
where a private hurt
has been discarded
like a bloody snake.

And then I think
how can anyone
live like this,
with this much love
and this much fear?

But we do, and I
am relieved
when the boy finds an answer
and it is simply this:

“I don’t know.”
We are alike, we are
so like each other,
strange, with two eyes
and one mouth,
each the other
that we have to
carry into the dark
this world of so much love.

May it be easy.
May it be possible.
May it be possible,
being also easy.

What is certain is
that I love him.
That I would die for him
if it would help,
but it wouldn’t help.
That there is nowhere
he can go
that I won’t be
because I’m inside
with him,
and I love him.

Listen.

When I fall asleep
a voice inside me says,

“We’re going to hell,
we’re going to hell,
we’re going to hell.”
All my life I’ve asked myself,
what does this word mean
and what do these hands know?
But when I sleep
it is with a stone on my heart.
It is with the cold tongue
of a snake against my eyelids.

I wake, and I call my son
and
===============


The Night
Paul Éluard

The night on my shoulders
Will take me to sleep one day
I will go with it willingly.
The night on my shoulders
Is my fur coat
Of an inconsolable beast.
And I will gently
Lay my hair against my shoulders
And warm them with my hair.

The night on my shoulders
Will freeze and thaw them all night long
And I am the comrade of night
The night is on my shoulders
A song of a thousand cities
Sings me to sleep

And I breathe this fragrance
This heavy melody
That comes from another climate
And the source of the thousand winds
And I calm down and tremble
And my eyes no longer see
And my mouth tastes nothing
And my ears no longer hear
But my shoulders are burning
Under the ashes of dawn.


===============


The woman who loved an illegal immigrant
Michael C. Ford

finally told me she loved me today
on her breath was lime juice, baking soda,
vodka, and gin. i was annoyed by it,
both the content of what she was saying,
and the way it was affecting my friendships,
but at the same time we were talking
about our families. she knew my dad
had just died and today when i said
i’d miss him, she began to cry. she told me
her mom was bipolar, her dad was crazy,
and her brother was homeless, living
on the streets of brooklyn. we talked
about san juan and where we might like
to spend the summer. she told me she
wanted to paint me, take photos of me,
my body, but i stopped her and she said
she was thinking about my leg, the one
with the collapsed veins, gangrene, and she said
i shouldn’t let it get that way again, but now
i’m not worried, you see, because i know
that i can at least do something other than
just lie on the grass and read, but she’s dead
right. there are at least a hundred ways i could
paint my side of the story and that, perhaps,
is what i can teach her. she tells me she used
to live in brooklyn, so i tell her the week
i live there, one time, and she says that
didn’t really count because i was there
in a real way. i didn’t go to any of
the boring galleries but instead i lived
on the block with her and we talked about
me and my dad and what my parents were
like when i was a kid, and we were basically
talking about her dreams and her parents
and she was there telling me her story and
mine, telling me about the subway and what
her dreams are made of and we were happy
on the ground in the grass as she whispered
these words: “i think we’re meant to be
friends and also she loves me i mean you
love me.” she reached out and stroked
my hair and for some reason i didn’t
want to tell her what happened, how the
girl didn’t love me and that’s why we
both had these bleeding, running feelings
streaming out of
===============


Miracle Enough
Edna St. Vincent Millay

It is this it is this that I wanted to get
back to that day by the seaside with you
when I was certain
when I was sure
when our sameness of soul it seemed at last
set us free for all time
forever
forever
and afterwards the world came almost to an end
in the first still hour when the mind began to waver
and to question itself
in the morning dark I woke and you were there
for me as you had always been
and it was then
in the first grey hour
when faith too died
and I reached for my clothes
and left the bed that had never been made
that had been our bed
and went alone into the new day and the world
that had not yet died
had not yet ceased its striving
had not yet lost its faith


===============


The Unclouded Day
Gary Snyder

(1950)

Who are the people
In the Iliad?

Is there something odd
About them?

Has life perhaps changed
So much?

There are war poems, drinking poems, archaic snapshots,
A good many cruel things,
But where are the poems of resistance to war?

Never a word of Gandhi.
Has Homer let things slip?
A long way from the dark ages,
But has the human mind shifted gear?

Where is the prince?
Hiding somewhere?

The Iliad: a medieval morality play,
A series of doctrinal illustrations
For the teaching of classical culture.

The full-plate camera
Protests at the rites of passage
Leading from poverty to affluence.

And Achilles does not say
Even once
That he is more alive than the others,

More perceptive,
The finger on the pulse.

Who has suffered?

Three thousand years
Of itinerant teachers
Showing the stone knives and the wooden cages,

The womb of civilisation,

The prototype of the mass-produced brooch

Telling the story of how,
Once upon a time,
Lucky things happened to a handful
Of semi-nomadic herdsmen.


===============


Aerialist
Jenny Joseph

And now as I lie
Under the poinciana tree
I ask the gods, is this
the best you can do with me?
And if so why?

And here I am
Who once performed miracles,
Flame-filled, all aware
Of my own power,
Now a stiff, grumpy old hag
With stiff, grumpy old bones.

You thought I was happy enough?
Well, now it is time
To paint my face
And pray the rope
Snaps on its first turn

And I tumble out of sight.
Then we shall see
If I have been good enough
To get another chance
To do something.


===============


Crystal Fire

Smudgy cosmos. The edge of a “radical” order.

I think, if I go quietly, you will melt into the floor. 


===============


Channel Firing
Thomas Hardy

This is the war-house: soft you tread above 
The British battery, sheltered from the moon 
By the tall withy’s arms, and going by 
The little garden-plots; and now you pass 
The sentry’s footsteps, and amid the grass,

Which is looped for the faithfulness of the dead 
To drooping fame, you come upon their shrouds, 
Which carry no inscriptions, but have shed 
Such flakes upon the graveyard as it were

Snow of an Arctic night, uncharted snow 
Upon the graves all white below.  And then 
You stand at a gun-slit and see the plain 
At night beneath you to the utmost plain, 
With shadows of valleys, distance-tinted now

The very brownest shades and purples; where 
The moors lie low before you and are barred 
With lines of frowning trees, whose pillars are 
Twice Venetian, when the thin lights slant 
On drawing-room furniture and not strange ships.

When all beyond was black, and all was grey
Within; and see now, round the gun-carriages,
In the pale-frosted circle, blooming faintly 
Their spectral rosettes in the breath-like air, 
Straight-hooped and dainty, all the little daisies; 
Like wind-sown snow about an orchard that is hung

With fruit through all the blossomed branches.  They 
Shine out among the grass, but all unseen,
Who now is standing here, and in their place 
Comes death on spectral feet, not visible 
From where you stand; and no man knows the time

Of his immeasurable instant.  Will you dream 
Of this and take it home, and that the fire 
Is fled, and of the old gun-towers that seem 
To struggle from the earth, which history reeks 
With blood of violated faith, and lust 
Unlawful, and of those wild hours and deeds 
Which flash upon the soul before it goes

From what is called the world?  —For who has known 
The spirit of one night upon earth stands 
Moved of unusual powers, and sees strange
===============


The Aquatic Ape Theory of Human Nature
Linda Gregg

This is where the horse droppings used to be,
this my father’s aunt’s house, steep and almost completely
made of concrete and buckled now by the sun.
We sat on the porch after dinner for many weeks
while my brother shook with convulsions.
Now his skin is turned yellow by the lack of oxygen
in his blood and of course he wasn’t fished from the sand
when the wave came as the rest of us were.
This is where I sat with my snotty nose
when someone yelled for all the siblings to come.
We ran down the stairs through a line of nettles.
This was my first experience of touch
and of my body moving in secret ways.

Now the car is backed into its place
for packing at daybreak. Last night
the house was streaked blue and glowing from the street
as the summer insects spoke. Late in the afternoon
the light was the color of coins.
A blush came onto our faces, yellow cream.
Now the wind blows my skirt up.
I saw my body turn to smoke in a kitchen
with the water running over dishes of milk.
Then it slid away and out the window
in a line of light.


===============


Child Poems
Jane Hirshfield

A person would say that a child is like a flower:
a full self-givenness of living in the world,
present as that abundant thing. A boy,
of maybe seven, out of his bare feet
into the sea one blustery day, coming back wet,
beautifully chill, dark freckles across his pale
arms, blue smudges across his shoulders; then later,
asleep, hair spread across the sheets, warm
from sleep as a loaf. Or the little girl who stands
in her fat snowsuit, this winter, and says,
small voice, eyes with every look full
of something much deeper than a look:
“Mommy, do you know, the snowflakes
that fall have faces with smiles?” Or the child
napping, upturned face still, hands
open at its sides. Now what was that
about Jesus lying down in the hull of a boat,
in the company of the sleeping fishermen,
curled like a child, the waters of his mind
closed like an eye? Think then
of that leap, that taste, that swing—his own—
that hush, that all of it, miraculous.


===============


1808
Yannis Ritsos
Translated by John Burnside

Rats have been nibbling the wires that bring news to my house.
Where are you? is a question that now has a different resonance.
Do they stand you upright with a lever? Do they hang you
with only a single rope? Are you hungry? Do you remember
sunlight? Seagulls? The white beach. Your legs in a line of ants.

Wheat in the field? Do they give you stale bread?
Does your mother think of you? I have neither book nor bread.
All I have is your name. Today I looked at an open book
in which someone had written, One is One; but to be only One
is a fate for the lonely. Now you are only One.

I tried, but I couldn’t stay, and I had so much to say to you.
Do they give you a warm blanket at night?
Is there a woman who looks after you?
Does your village dream of you? Is the ghost of your village there?
Is there shade in the colony? Is there a blue apron?
Do you know the name of your hanging rope?

There was just one day when I had to leave the celebration.
There was just one day when I put my mother and my son on a bus.
I went to meet a woman in a dark tavern and she said,
Wanderings, killings, betrayals, and we smile,
we drink, because we have fingers and toes.

Tomorrow the birds will wake me, they will peck at my body.
Birds and ants will eat me when I die.
I feel that I’ve been crushed by events as if I were standing in the hail
of a bombardment. You won’t have time to hear this,
because they’ll be putting the dark hood over your head.

But, my child, where I stand, there’s still room for the random event.
Gently, the sky still trembles, as you tremble now.
There are doors that open. There are young people.

There is no place where the hand doesn’t reach. And the gulls
never stop circling in the sun, and death is just another island
In the chain of islands.


===============


Slow
Clayton Eshleman

Terrified by the widening of darkness: black on black,   
by a frailty tethering the vastness:

all of us see-saw, clinging to a doorknob, flicker
of a draft in absolute night.

Glad to be touched, the ear pricks up to a minuscule
crick, the truth a sudden scratch.

Creak, faint crick, hush, worse fear is to go
out of one’s mind, only the stone-blind

rest like boulders in a pond, they sense that all
is yes. I think of the living

brought to silence through luminous milky days of mind,
of the dying who wander alone at midnight,

shunning the company of strangers, listening all
of their final hours to the mind

slacken, the mouth empty of word, of poetry,
for we always last touch each other’s lips

and then disappear into the air, returning
only in the shudder of a violin.

The word word makes my breath catch. Slip and there goes
the clock, sifting the silent crowd.

At noon light shrouds the earth. In a sunlit field
a few old oaks – the ones we miss in sleep.

What stays with you: the matted fur of the dog.
Desire keeps her distance until you shut your eyes.

Thinking of you, I cover my head with a cloth,
thinking of you under that white canvas cloth.

Tears weigh nothing, even with the sun out. And what
if each minute was a year of darkness?

What if one night I’d lose the slippery grip?
Then could you refuse me? And if death struck me

just when I thought I was forever rid of it
would that be a compliment? Would that calm me?

Staring at a fallen starfish, an old woman
mutters, Where are you going, so late, so alone?

That tent of darkness gets smaller. People’s skins
still tremble at the faint murmurs in the tangle.

Touch my hand. Take me a little of the way
I am no one’s child. Others speak of ‘escape’.

She and I sit at the edge of a dark gl
===============


In Defiance of Foxgloves
Christopher Hogwood

Whatever is bravest, whatever is brightest,
and whoever is strongest, whoever is most loving,
whatever is most sacred, whatever is most lovely,
whatever we pursue with pains, however much we look forward
to its completion,
whatever it is with joy, whatever it is with torment,
whether we would make of it a jubilee,
whether a burial,
whether we would kill ourselves to obtain it,
whether we would go to China, to India, for it,
whether we would give up everything for it,
whether we would commit a crime for it,
whether we would endure any time, any place,
whether we would be punished for it,
whatever we think cannot be attained,
we think that we may not ever attain it.

What is it?
It is a flower.

What is it?
It is a shadow.

What is it?
It is nothing.

What is it?
It is everything.


===============


Sonnet XVI
W. H. Auden

The tiny mustard-seed of faith is fine,
But the great mulberry-tree's alive;
Go cry your smoke-drifted heresies in vain
To the vast Thomist oak: the prodigal
Must return upon himself to light
Upon the solid vegetable sight
Of an actual garden where the flowers breathe
Questions he cannot answer but delight him.

One day he woke up and saw the sun:
The next, his Father's world was all unknown,
Ruins upon a hostile shore.
The lost His ancient kingdom; but a babe,
An exile who needs his mother's care,
He crept back to his Mother-Church alone.


===============


Skunk Hour
Elizabeth Bishop

Smells are surer than sounds or sights
To make your heart-string crack—.
They start those awful voices o’ nights
That whisper, “Old, old, old are ye,
Oh, very old indeed, by now,”—

No one with any sense of smell,
That lived with it from day to day,
Could fail to be affected by,—
Mostly a bareness more or less,
Unfurnished by archæologists.

In these oozy, olitory aisles
Tattered weeds hang from the walls;
Old decomposing baskets spawn
Tomatoes, corn and cabbage-stalks.
And the first gold-clawed, silverfish

Arrive already. Soon will come
Big clouds of flies and millipedes.
Let’s settle down in our dark room—
In our horrible, harmless gloom;
—While just outside, green-jacketed

And glassy-eyed—with their slender snouts
Snuffing and snouting through the night—
They wait, and somehow don’t feel right.
By midnight, sheer hangover:
The feeling that the longest night

Before us is the one to come—.
“To come”—that is, must come, some time—
Though nobody knows just where,
And nobody knows just when,—
And soon
Nobody’s left to say “I know”


===============


Reunion
Yusef Komunyakaa

Each morning on a break from
the insurance office,
I practiced my two-hand rolls
on the sleeves of a quiet
T-shirt, and watched joggers
race by the dock’s rusty chain-link fence.
I was a Christian without Cross or 
Bible, a man sitting
in solitude each Friday
with maybe thirty dollars
and my dreams of seeing
her blue spiral notebook,
touching her again.

I’d just split from my wife,
and she’d fled her husband.
Both of us were going on twenty-two.
I slept on the boat deck, and talked
to more ghosts than the captain.

I’d been circling her white porch,
and I still remember

each crack in the asphalt,
the shotgun houses
with their television antennas.

Everything ended so badly:
by the time I reached Manila,
the trail was cold—so many 
whores, I didn’t know
which one she was.

But here she is again—
this dream I stumble into,
my body in uniform
as tattered as the one that burns
inside our high school yearbook.

At the edge of the hammock,
I can almost feel the click

of her fingers, a cigarette 
between them, someone
tapping me on the shoulder,

tongue, and throat. 
I turn to say something.
For one second
my stomach cracks open
and all that’s left to do
is let my life wash
over the vast brown river,
the breath she opens like a knife.


===============


October
Louise Glück

In the evening,
the ginkgo tree
is standing in its robes
of bone-white leaves.

It happens slowly, the way
a half-conscious child
puts on its heavy clothes.

They say nothing and go up,
the hundreds of gold hands
and silence sits on the ground.

In the cool morning, the same tree is
a girl whose hair is caught in flowers.


===============


“Fighting Babies”
Eduardo Corral

Someday your father’s going to die.
To comfort you then, I will not say
that he’s gone to a better world
where he doesn’t have to hear you say
that you love your girlfriend more
than you loved him. I won’t say
he’s in heaven with the Lord
or he’s down in the warm arms of the Lord.

To comfort you, I’ll think of an image
that puts neither heaven nor hell in mind.
I’ll think of your dad in a tiny, tiny
wound in the brain. He’s tiny and barely
breathing. My image is funny because
your dad was a big man, like your father.

Someday your daughter will say
that she hates you. She’ll say
that she’d rather live in the wild
than in your house. When that day comes
and it will, look at her closely and say,
“You should live in the woods. You should live
in the dark trees and not return
to this house for three years. Don’t come back,
even if I say I’m dying.
I’m already dying.” Then she’ll see
you in the eyes of her brothers and sisters
who fear what they don’t understand
and want what they never had.

So teach your children to look at their hands.
Teach your wife to look at the night sky.
Show your daughter how to sit in the dark
with a pillow under her ass and look up
at a red star. Let your children see
you in the stars, not the shit you do,
which is all you really are. Teach them to name
the constellations: the Tail of the Man
with a Horse’s Face, the Mourning Dove, and the Condor.
Teach them there is nothing more serious
than naming stars. Make your children memorize
the names and positions of all those dead stars.
And when you think of your kids years from now,
you’ll think of your kids on their backs
out under the red star, out under all that
emptiness, whispering a word for every star
that lets loose from the sky and falls.


===============


Life Is Goodbye
Joe Haldeman

Life is goodbye: the gulls
Sliding off the summer spray;
The summer leaves crisp-sliding
Down the winter’s last grey day.
The note, the note to say goodbye.
The note of loss: they say:
The note of death—so say the toads.
Goodbye to being, even.

Goodbye, without death,
To all things done and said.
Goodbye, without being,
To all things thought and thought.
The note that says goodbye
To being, being done with,
Is little comfort to me.

Goodbye the world, goodbye.
Goodbye to love, and hate,
The pendulum of the mind.
Goodbye to love and all
The loves of love. And God.
Who uncreates deathlessness.

Only the note survives.
The note that says goodbye,
The scribbled note, the note
That was a note in time,
That now is a farewell.
Who sings in this farewell?
The note that never ends
Its slow goodbye, goodbye.


===============


The Wave
Wallace Stevens

I

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning, 
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason 
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers
Are brilliant in the molten light.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

II

The eros of logical conjunction 
Is ours, and the gospel of the plain sense,
The sensible and logical
In the Mind’s ear and the Mind’s eye.
Wherever these lead, the palm
Follows, and many a mystification 
Is at last clarified, the high trees clarified.
The living flesh returns to the phantom.

The wave of the sea is not single. 
In this monotone of the senses, 
The erotic conjoining
Of sky and sea and sand
all-books-no-dedupPerpetuals the incarnation,
The excitement and the mortal measure.

The wet sand fastens and glues the print 
Of the bare feet, kicked by the waves,
The tide leaves, and water likes an odor,
And water subsides
Without motion, except to say
The same wave that never completely cancels
Is without cessation and without place,
Is part of the changing universe.

IV

The wave cannot be saved,
The wave goes over the mind
And over the land, and is not this,
And is not that.
You cannot stop the wave,
But you can learn to surf.

You can ride to the beach on this green crest, 
Or this one, or this.


===============


No Time of Year
Seamus Heaney

Well you remember, whatever the summer said
It said in the last week of August
The daylight lowered itself down the horizon
Like a woman gone mad with pity
For something she could not save:
Nights, though, stood up in the trees
Like a small weasel in its cage.
How everything throbbed and burned!
How the touchable air flared!
How briars caught at our ankles
When we walked out, you and I
In search of the doe that had fallen
Darted once like an innocent lamb.
How the lame deer crashed through bracken
Into the clapping woods.


===============


III

Ezra Pound

He lieth, who maketh no biography
Of his friend, dead ere the black-bordered fly
Came to sleep in the chink of his hatband,
But releaseth him to the phantom cat
Who will, with a tenderer doting, do
What the lime-twig man is surer to forget:
What within the globed brain is the soul?
Have ye tried the wife-soul?

Kathleen Fraser

here is what i remember about us:
after the blindfold, waking
in a strange bed
finding your words in the ear
blossoming around me, a faithless chrysanthemum
of the eye,
trailing across the sheets, detritus
of a jewel shop i once heard about.
i remember light through the dark window,
and the sound of your breathing
in two parts,
two separate persons
interwoven. in three stanzas you wrote:
“when will i be strong enough to leave your arms?
i miss everything in the world
i love,” and i was (it was) beautiful
to hear, because it was the sonnet’s friend,
if one had ever felt the flowers of the sun
blow, rooted, in the body. the friend was truth,
the other, time, & i’m free
to move as the poems i’ve practiced,
dreaming & aching for your touch,
always sailing away
from the chaos & dread
that drag me down, sucking me
toward the city of horror.
somewhere in my heart i don’t
remember the answer
to questions such as
who do i love, and what do i make?
the whisperings of chance
& possibility
speak my chiseled name.


===============


The Animals
Randall Jarrell

In their bright boats the people sit
Watching the enjambed shore
Slowly as the memory of a knot
Sunk, slowly as a silent thought
Float by. Their faces and their hands
Tremble, and gravely at this height
Of summer as a flight of birds
Softly dissolving where they pass
Through the pale field of memory. And their eyes
Care for the brown net of the river’s eye.

They know how the forest-fire would stand
And shiver like a thought, and free
Birds and beasts climb and stand and stare.
They are their own fire and their own birds,
And, in the boats that stretch afar
In an indolent line, they have leisure
To think of time: to see time burn
And grieve to see the fire return
On their children’s and their own lives. But now,
They, and we, in the fire’s mirror
Shudder, seeing there as in a glass
The clear, the admirable future pass,
Redeeming the live world that is to come,
From all the darkness under sun.


===============


A Suitor
Catherine Bowman

1. “O, you cannot know how odorous you are!”

And yet he sweats, a fetor he carries.

2. Kicking a sack of coal

towards his room, she can smell the alcohol on him
even then.

3. His eyes are filmy as untuned piano keys,

still he wooes, pianissimo,

glints her gown

for the shift, her shoes

for the sprig of a heel.

4. She slips out, time

like a dead thing

under her.

5. Ursine he is,

dishonored,

insulted, shuffling, wild,

his tread

so endless, that halls grow timid.

It is he: the great oaf


all-books-no-dedupwith his talk of

two organs and

a firmament of aching

and their separateness

under robes, wet-dream slur and blabber

toward his lady, bare-legged, asplashed with mud.

6. When he presses her hand, she disappears.

For herself, all she takes is the blue of that dress,

and the vagabond who pierces her

only to sing a disheveled ardor

sung aloud in the street.


===============


Healing
Meg Kearney

Like this: like the slit tongues
of twin serpents slicking
a smooth rock, like scraping the bone
white from beneath the brow, like looking
down into each other’s grave, the love
that makes you raw. The love that heals
you. Like listening to the wind
blow through your insides, knowing
someone else hears
the doors creak, and moan, and hold.

You knew the claw marks left in the sun,
and they healed. Your whole life
you had healed, and each man felt your
scar tissue like slipstream, knowing
that just beneath the surface, the beast
still ran free. The beast that now, you
keep caged, with someone else’s name.

All the trees still reaching
at a vanishing point. All the cities
always burning—the babies charred
like coal in the daytime streets. Someone
puts his fingers in your wounds, and you
open like a book. Whispering,
“The hurting is what heals me.
I have no other way to live.”

You have licked your own blood, and
you have done it with grace. Maybe
this is how we heal, or marry, or
juggle the moons. Maybe this is how
we are made whole, broken open
and threaded back together again—
the halves never melding

to make a sphere, the forever
billowing, the delicate
red veil between us. Maybe this
is how we love, or pray, or heal.
Maybe this is how we make it
to morning—marriages and selves
carelessly cracked and reassembled,
the jagged pieces pinned together
by the widest sky, by the most invisible
air of the lungs, a whole breathing
on broken wings. Maybe we don’t heal—
maybe we are healed. Maybe this
is just the air, the sky, the shifting
sea opening its arms and accepting
us home, scarred with light.


===============


some of these were hard, but in the end, they came.
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LISA
LAPORTE is the author of the acclaimed BAD BABY, which the Village Voice called "the most distinctive book of the year." She is also the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction. Born in Iowa, she now lives in San Francisco.
Awards Bad Baby has won several prestigious awards including:
A San Francisco Chronicle best books of the year, a Village Voice best fiction of the year, a Great Lakes Book Award, an American Book Award, a California Book Award, and a Willa Cather Fiction Award.
After appearing on Oprah, the New York Times reviewed Bad Baby, and it made the Time Magazine Ten Best Books of 2000 list, which included several big name writers: Atwood, Pynchon, and McCarthy.
Lisa's fiction has been included in many anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. Lisa has given readings and talks in the U.S. and Europe, has received grants
===============


Dawn Revisited
Brian Doyle

This is the best time to think of you, your face,
your bones, your voice, the brush of your hair,
your speed, your inward gaze, your straight-backed walk
and perfect posture, your deserts of self, your bones.
The morning breeze touches the apple-laden tree,
bends the grass, drops the apples, and the kite lifts,
leaps, soars, dizzy, and the land dips and tilts,
and, sitting on the grass, we think of you,
we think of you in the morning breeze and the air,
the pale air alive with bees now, the sunlight glinting
back from miles of lighted windows, the clouds shifting
their white galleons southward, toward you, homeward.

--from "Notebooks"
Larry Levis

November 14, 1984

Of everything I've lost, I think mostly of my mind--
of those horrible mornings when I rise again
to the responsibility of being a man.
I think of those days with astonishment, with sorrow--
the astonishment of discovering
that on some mornings when I get up my shoes
feel very heavy, and all the air
a sad electricity, and the hard blue
November morning brilliant with mist
feeling like a conscious thing
meant to destroy me, or tear something out of me,
leaving me mutilated, the coarse ground
carpeted with blue leaves blown in from some
unimaginable distance, the huge white houses
outside my windows like the hulls of ghost ships--
and the sorrow of knowing that it's me,
the dogged, ordinary me, not some swift demon,
that weighs so heavy, heavy shoes on a blue morning
when the mist has turned everything to brass,
the huge white houses hulking and gleaming with mist.

The mist is cold,
the rough leaves under my shoes feel like coins,
like metal tablets inscribed with some sad history,
and I must walk through the mist, and read the history.
I must make myself, over and over, a man
who is capable of walking through the terrible
electric air, the gleaming white hulls of houses--
a man who is capable of reading the sad history
engraved so legibly on every blue leaf,
on the
===============


The Gleam
William Butler Yeats

Swift as a thought

When every feather fits, and sits

On the danger of her feet,

Winging it before my face,

The hawk’s shadow flew

Right down the middle aisle,

It struck the apex stone,

The altar and the cross,

And quivered out of sight

In the little locket hung

On Mary’s breastbone bone

But long upon the Aisle

There lay the fiery trace

Like a tiger’s terrifying face

Painted in fiery red

Upon the stones of the Street

Where he has passed by

And the trees about the shrine

Were stirred or shaken

And a bell struck a sudden note

That vainly tried to tell

How the birds sang out of tune,

And could not mend its chime.

A Flamingo, caught upon

An islet in the Rhine,

A place no other bird

Or human creature frequented,

Once knew the wish to fly,

And stood, and stood, and stood,

Hoping that some aëry phase

Would lift its weight of passion

From the longing heart, and raise

Its body up to take

The good omen and the praise

That had come so far to seek it;

But the moment ever slipped

When the captive would have leapt,

Or the head soared back, or the knee

Knocked against the body’s side,

And the heart stayed heavy with

Its glittering desire

And the bird remembered other birds

And a natural life

Among the reeds and rocks

And the long sweet lake water,

And made a cry of sorrow,

Like a sound that is not heard,

Or has finished its journey and lies

Among the farthest spheres,

Or as a creature had cried out

In a dream we share,

As the rain begins, and we start,

And change the dream for light

And recollection of the open sky.

But the bird made that sound,

As I had just now said,

With its breast upon the ground

The phoenix lives five hundred years,

And
===============


Poem
Sylvia Plath

I am neither intercedes for there is none.
I touch this desk. It is mine.
Why should I stay content with these trivial roles,
Let be be be.
This particle, this rather-be-us
Is of a singular sort
Like us singular it coheres
And by this it is good
O let this be-ness be
Lover and I.

No choice, no need, no sense, no desire but one.
There is nothing else to lean on
No green pastures
No golden thought
Except this and this and this and this and this.

How easy to be rid of the world.
This desk shall sprout sky and its black foliage cover me.
This, now, is everything.
I need go further no more
And what more facile place to grow up in
Than this womb?
What room, what apartment?
Here is the only wall I need.
The rest, study, mask, the pantry
The rest is vanity
This is my cave,
Here I have come to be anonymous.

But there is no but here
There are no roads or cities
No deeps
No animals or birds
There are no families or rapes or mothers or children or friends.
There is no yesterday or tomorrow
There is none like me, none.
That is the only peculiarity I can see.

Here is where we are.
It is enough and it is simple
It is pure and it is simple
Let us close the door against nothingness.


===============


My love has asked me, on this night of all nights,
for a lyric of truthfulness. To write of her
anything less than the compulsive desire
which has possessed me—all this is like lying.

If I am to write one thing of her, it must be
that her eyes give her heart away.
They rise over hills that blush for sunlight.
They tremble in a flush of vibrant stars.

At her first opening glance, a line is strung
from east to west across a sky so vaulted
it is like a vision passing through it.

The higher the velocity of the gaze,
the more it loses its line of archery.
At best, it sparks as it courses through the day.

In its hurrying to remain she becomes so purely
the desperate shedding of what she was.
There are nights she flows off the heavens into sleep.


===============


Muse
Rafael Campo

The earth is not flat. It is wrong to love
one person in a way you can’t love another.
There is a single God, but every rule
has an exception. Patience and diligence
are prudent, but moderation may be impractical.
You may succeed even if your throat bobs like a cormorant’s
with its strange bark of taut wet skin. Don’t repeat yourself.
Be wary of homeopathic remedies, but herbs are often efficacious.
It is usually better to beg forgiveness than ask permission,
but only when the giver cares. You may require pills
to live a long, boring, but generally healthy life,
but you’ll also want to love someone for no reason
other than that he or she burns
into your life like lava, fast and scalding.


===============


The Pure Good of Theory
Elizabeth Willis

1.
For the erotetic Muse
Sweet Cal, let’s go to the zoo.

2.
By dreaming, I solved the problem:
unborn children turn into swans.

3.
The infant metamorphoses
into the luminous body,

4.
by swallowing its own hands.
The slumbering parents awaken.

5.
You, the beloved, whose dark eye
is porthole to an overflowing.

6.
I close my eyes.

7.
I feel the logic of cruelty now
in all of its perfect necessity.


===============


Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit, Si bleu, si calme!...
Arthur Rimbaud

The sky is, above the roof, so blue, so calm!
The lovely summer day just droops and dies.
A flock of birds toss, fall, and vanish, one by one.
The cattle, on the soft damp ground,
rest standing up, as evening comes on.
The child, his games all played,
walks by himself, nearby, engrossed, all in silence.
The village bells begin to ring:
Women and children, as in the old days,
stand by the doorways, listening,
and wait... and wait... and wait.


===============


Skytrain
Barbara Guest

An unfinished universe
rushes
to conclude
terrifying

our ideas—delicate
bare wires
wanting
attention—

ineffectual
against the power of
presence—

only the sky
an elephant
covering an egg—

which is us
and the universe
a moment

unsatisfied.


===============


Egrets
Dick Allen

Ruminants raised their heads.
The army beat drums and put out fires, 
And you held me in suspense
A river of children flowed through the houses,
And a power not yet seen took
Every skirt of smoke from every rooftop 
To sea. My tongue did loll with thirst, 
I suppose,
Because I’m used to leaning to make rain.
And from the slight rapids of the morning
I drank, and by such grace 
Of armature by daylight 
Took cover from the heat of afternoon,
Lulled by the false promise of a summer
Breeze. You can see this breath
Upturn the leaves of a distant tree
And one little boat 
Tie to its embankment.

As to the heart and its attempts
At love,
I saw you have eyes for me,
But heard the bear cry out
And tore myself from the spell
Of wilderness. 
Without, in the distances, the hills
Were no shelter, no hollow in which to lie,
No village in sight. Or city. Or castle. 
Yet:
In a single curl of hair a memory 
Of song
And time, in which a cock is
Just taking his unswaddled, blooded count,
And wherever I hang my hat
The roof will show the scorched marks
Of egrets. So that these hills, which pass 
Beyond any desire
I can afford for them, 
Some future will recognize:
The howl, the nesting ground, 
The castles and
The enemy country. And the roar
Of the first, ancient form of fire.


===============


Days
Frank O’Hara

Today it was a gang of gnats very high up.   
Then it was a light fall of snow over the grass.  
Then it was a bald man holding a book on roses,   
reading with his wife by the bay.

It began again, the blistering perambulator   
of the sun through the branches of the oaks
and the traffic warming the asphalt   
where a car idled, its doors wide open.

It was the river, too, down below the cars,   
disturbed by a wind, bringing in branches and a man   
rowing steadily toward the sound of an aeroplane.  
I wondered what he saw and thought about it.

These days I am troubled about the sun,   
its faint heat,  
its non-committal ashes   
floating like resolve above the thin   
parallels of ocean.

I watch the mongrels playing in the empty field   
as I wait for my lunch, or the hours it takes
for the day to subside   
leaving the night in which we drink.


===============


World Without Objects
Keith Douglas

I

The tree takes in the light. The animal of the leaves
Breathes out in green the summers and falls
Against the spread of fruit. The man
Is rooted. Both like statues, not the heart-stir
That changes to wings. Our present tasks call to our hands.

No cherub shapes in the tiled roof,
The image unreeves and sticks like a doll
Propped in a cradle. The wind sings no seed tune
And throws the shadow of the easel at night
Across a sheet. Nothing will plant a world. We suffer

From the examples of each other,
Our shameful instincts feed like cats. And absence
Prints space, dispels all useless longing. There is no object.
Seeing the edge of the absence, we feel
Doubting. But there is no silence of the heart to interpret.


===============


Last Gods
George Oppen

A certain confusion about the tragic...
Only the last gods can hear you.

No other can hear you.
It is tragic that we will never hear the speech of dragons.


===============


Nothing
Mark Strand

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was 
Spawning snow and color and almost milkily

Translucent portraits of the two of us flashed over the floor 
 Like the bright panels of a jacket of thought.

And in the windy light there was a storm of serene knives 
Which flowered in the air and hung silently 
Before us like an open fan of remarkable 
Faces we somehow knew. And then it was night
And we two in a story of enormous distance
Filled with blinding regularities of blizzard,
The eye, its pupil swallowing its own lid,
And the other brown and bright and agate shaped
Staring fixedly up at the falling sky.


===============


The Room
Joyce Sutphen

One good chair and the people who want to use it
create a space, clean and benign.
If there’s a table nearby, I’ll sit down
to eat or read, write letters, work the jigsaw puzzle
that flows along on the top of the bookcase.
Otherwise, my walks go clockwise or counterclockwise
around the room, my fingering across
that felted surface of deep-edged neatness
where a clean-swept cobweb, now collapsed, curls
the air behind a drape. Without ponderous furniture
to block the views, I can watch it snow
before I have a coat on, I can listen
for the postman and the paperboy
in the breath-caught space of winter light.
In summer, I see the edge of the lime tree
catching the last of the sun on the roof.
If the curtains were down, the iron-mesh fence
would flood me with its orange-vermilion face.
The angels heaped atop the church steeple
close their wings to the blue.
The room lets go of me, I let go of it.


===============


Going It Alone
Naomi Shihab Nye

We were six. We went out for a ride,
  and when the car stopped moving we were here.

Now four times two girls wait by the 
wall that keeps in the unknown.

All the unreturned messages pile up in a shoe box.

We make ourselves yellow leaf crowns.

Once a week, each one writes a poem
and drops it in a rusty slot.

The tulips know many secrets, but they tell
them to the wind, not to us.

We are not each other’s closest friends.

We will never be heroes.

We will never climb that wall.

We will never understand who put it there,

why it stays, why it shuts

everyone else out. There must be a reason

but we don’t know what it is.

We don’t know, don’t know, don’t know.

This is not a good town.

We never hear sirens here.

No one shouts on any street.

Do you think you can live this way,

say nothing when the wind

blows your coat open to reveal

your silver whistle still hanging

around your neck?


===============


Saint Sebastian
Amy Lowell

At times he felt the shaft descend
Between the forest and the sky,
And his own arms were heavy with great snowdrifts of arrows.
Sometimes the fierce shoots flamed into
Another beautiful flowering of pain,
While the scared self cowered under the
Budded white steel, panting and trying to cling to the shade of a thought.
Always in these sharpest leaflets of his death were hidden
Sweetest words of an unknown speech,
That would have condemned the tyranny of Church and State.


===============


A General History of the Western World
Charles Wright

Out of the sifting put a plant or tree. We put in
the name, the origin, the species—the history of its
use and utility, the envionmental conditions of
its domestication. I am tempted to say that a poem,
like a plant or tree, should be put down in this way,
starting with the hand out of which it grows,
the dirt and stain of origin, the weather of its
growth. The root system, as it were, the blood and
kin that it sprung from. Always, in history, and
even before it, you can find the perennial seeds
of alteration, the scavengers of thought, among the
older feathers, bones, teeth. How the hard incisors
of the world eat into the roots of the new idea,
the dreams of elasticity, that place where language
breaks out like a young plant, like a child in the
thick thigh of the natural world.


===============


Epiphany
Richard Kenney

This moment, this sunlight, all this love,
The surface of this lake the waves slapping
At the dock, the osprey soaring in the updraft

Of air, right here, right now. Some things are so
They just exist. You make the decisions.
You have to really be somewhere, feel it,

Start to understand. Somehow this got made,
The sun put it all in motion, the earth,
You, me, the leaves falling, the snow, the snow.

I think of all the emptiness, the earthquakes,
The cataclysms, things living, dying,
Things just being things. We are dying

And something else is coming, it must be,
But for now the shoreline, the osprey
Soaring, this kiss, this laugh, all of this

Love, and you in my arms. I won’t hold back.
It’s all a gift. There’s no sense to it.
I don’t know how it happens. I just love you,

What I feel, where I’m going. Something is
About to change us. Oh, yes, we are so
Much more than ourselves. Something

Is about to open up and everything is
Intricate and known and beyond all question.
Something is making us. Let’s keep on.


===============


Two Kinds of Deliverance
Carolyn Kizer

After two weeks of nonstop rain,
the sun comes out.
And I ask myself,
Where were you, all this time,
so self-centered I never even thought
you might have been imprisoned,
your light and warmth 
stolen, and kept prisoner, somewhere
underground?

Someone has sat at my table,
made my coffee, set out three English muffins 
to toast, and now
stirs the batter for the blueberry
pancakes: I must live, this morning
as always, a hostage to the routine,
and count the minutes till the hour
I may meet with you, again.


===============


He Catches Butterflies
Rosanna Warren

Hiding behind a tree,
he waits for me to pass.
He throws a net and catches me,
then lifts the net.
I am free.

But the root of a word sticks in my foot.
He holds up a mirror
and I see my foot is bleeding.
He kisses my foot;
blood swells and thickens.

Later, he mends his net,
shaping its small squares.
It is like darning
a piece of cloud
to make it solid again.

He lifts the net.
It is the size of the moon.
It is like a patchwork quilt,
a crazy quilt, a sky
tattooed with ragged stars.

He is out on the lawn at night,
a bright sickle in one hand,
spreading the grass with a long thin knife
so that his feet will not hurt.
He will lay his body down
as the thin sheen of water
over the marble floor of the sea,
and I, his net,
shall be the moon.


===============


The Daylight Moon
Michael Blumenthal

Sometimes I’m terrified of being there, and then
I turn back to my books, they’re always there
like a dark blue shadow of an oblong moon,
of dense paper, black ink,
the tingling pleasure of accuracy: one person
follows one person through one hour of one night,
one series of feelings engenders another,
suddenly love turns out to be the metaphor,
every possible small event begets a system.
Outside, though, the air is cold and hot all at once,
day and night both at once, and everybody
feels like rushing away, like rushing away.

My friend at the university describes early man,
painting on cave walls; he says even then the fear
and the desire to record were one and the same,
which leaves me blinking, and shouting out loud.
Some nights, when I read late into the afternoon,
my breath comes fast and hard, my body flies,
the smell of tobacco and flowers comes back to me,
the sweetness of flesh. I relive all the goodbyes.
Once, among twelve thousand entries, I found
the mother and child painting, the only beautiful one,
and I traced it with the smallest movements of my hand.

Inside me are mountains, the strangest animals,
dozens of birds. In the midst of waking, I sail
outside my body, I dangle from a tree or branch,
I hear the voices of everyone I know and love
talking at once, praying together, in a tongue I don’t know,
air enters and leaves the holes of my body, it is clear,
and I myself am clear, the lusts and longings
do not tear at me, I come and I go.

I can tell from the way she laughs on the telephone
that she’s drinking. She’s not going to explain it,
that’s what she said. But, I said, everything has an explanation.
But, she said, it would be better if it didn’t.
Everything falls a bit, you know, like fruit from a tree.

And yet, I’m so alive when she calls,
when she lets me speak to my son
(they’re coming to see me again, I’m overjoyed,
why don’
===============


November 14, 1978
W. S. Merwin

It is a beautiful October day and on the hill 
the scarlet of the maples is startling 
almost untouched among the green 
and pale yellow of the oaks and ashes 
and beeches

That was yesterday 
and the frost came in the night and turned 
the green of the grass 
to white in the early morning darkness 
and I am watching a high and small 
black cloud in the south 
that is bringing the rain 
against the wind 
moving more slowly than the clouds 
and the birds are gone 
from the hills 
and I sit here writing 
I am alive and glad that I am 
and I think it is beautiful that 
I can sit here and the sunlight 
is shining on the hills 
covered with grass 
that is pale grey 
after the night frost 
with the maples on the high ones 
with the red leaves that were 
suddenly there 
more beautiful 
with the leaves so still 
and the wind gone 
that is bringing the clouds 
and the rain from the south 
at the last moment 
before it is here 
I am alone in the sunlight 
on the hill 
waiting for the rain 
with the earth 
warm under my hands 
and an earthworm 
moving in the palm of one 
small wren on the roof

unmoving as a post

I am alive 
and glad of it 
while the sun shines 
and the wind 
and the cloud 
approaches over the hills 
until it breaks over the tree 
and I shall hear the thunder in the hills 
that moves the air 
that moves the red leaves 
of the maple

and the dark rain comes 
and the world is beautiful again.


===============


Dream Song 18
John Berryman

An old man stood by the window
Fishing (in his dream)
All night (in his sleep) in the enlivened river.
“The flies,” he said, “are hatching now, and the sun
Slips behind clouds over in Moosekill.”
He had fished the river all his life
And he had bought the farm beside it and sold it
A hundred times to support his life
And the life of his daughter who he dreamed adored him
And married a boy he hated and had borne him
A grandson whom he loved and watched grow old.
The birds waked him. Light frightened the water.


===============


Cartography
Yusef Komunyakaa

We drank rum & coke; and you told me how 
Your big brother had hung himself 
In the barn, to the hemp noose, strung 
From an overhead rafter, & how the birds

Gathered and sang at daybreak, 
And the chickens pecked at his dangling legs; 
And the dogs would not approach the tree; 
& your grandparents laid the corpse on a long table, 

Before any callers arrived, 
& forced you to help wash it; 
Then you flapped the legs like unlaced shoes 
With their empty language, though you could not speak. 

And then, an ocean from that table, 
We walked out on the pier that night, 
You touched the moon off Key West 
With your finger. You were getting a divorce, 

I was going to Africa for the Peace Corps; 
We sat side by side on the bench; your legs 
Hung over the waves. You took a swallow of rum, 
Then let your glass drop over the rail, into the water,

Into something like my life now. 
The water was black. We couldn’t hear it hit. 
You slipped your hand into mine. Your hand felt
Older than you looked, in your thin print dress;

Then the pier shook with one hammer of a wave, 
Waking something in the pilings under us, 
And I knew we’d never see each other again. 
How fast it was that the years passed then. 
Your hand, in my hand, an equation
Of time, with something gone from it now,

Like all those who came up the beach, 
And then back out into the island of time. 
Someone was singing to a steel drum 
Off the shore. You whispered to me, 
“Don’t worry, baby.”

Your hand was like one of the maps 
Of ancient kings, where the dragons are drawn, 
& the mountains, and the deserts, 
That lead us out of our lives. 
And your hand, still in mine, 
Was an African jungle, under a blue-brown moon.


===============


I watched the great yellow
sun descending
as far as the eye can see
the limewashed
buildings arching over the blue
barnacled sea its uneven surface an infinitude of multiplicity a rock pool glistening
with gems of unmined wealth
sunsetting before my eyes
I consider the sun the moon
the planets
the animals the flowering plants
the naked fish 
the furry caterpillars the spotted snakes
and the dustmotes the blackbird’s
beak the fish the fishes mouth
red orifice glistening
I watch the clock pulse tocking its beat
the petals the leaves
rushing into stamen pistil
pollen an unending influx of minute particles
I watch the minute particulates
soar and spring onto my tongue into my eye
the corporeal spark burnt out into
another light the wooly daffodils
the sudden banks of crocuses the buddleias
blue mauve lilac the great
quince plum
and cherry blossoms the magnolia
opening ivory silk petals its scented
mouth the serrated edges of ferns the
pocked pitted creamy toffee almond skin
the flavour of a fruit pealing skin
to crimson red soft sweet flesh
eating these gifts
its is bliss
to consider the gifts of the sunlight

[Credit and thanks for the inspiration of “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” go to John Cage who created “water walk” a performance piece of that name in which he waded out into a pool and then threw rocks in.]
John Ashberry

These Lacustrine Cities

No one hears the layered voices.
No one is raked over the blue coals, or should we say, 
awash in swamps of light at the pointed threshold of the ears.
No one is a great crocus, folded at the root, that has survived another season. 
Everyone is a vast mercenary army, stitched up from various parts, also set for spring.
Of course there is an estuary or lake, of course an air that explains itself.
The phrases, for example, are heaped on the tumbling floor.
Somebody asks to be carried back, and a round eye gives a staring, red-plum look,
back to where the images can be heard: the
===============


Valley Candle
Lisel Mueller

How it dwindles into the shadows, our long, narrow street
with this one building on it, three stories high,
unlike the surrounding places; like
a tall candle in the valley among the hills.

Why I think of it as a candle I don’t know.
It is also like a ruin, abandoned to a quiet,
languid grief for its own failure to be what it was,
and to be here, where it could well belong.

The bar on the corner used to be jammed,
weekends, with young men in jeans and boots,
young women with impossibly long,
shiny hair, and cars parked two and three deep
into the alley, so that hardly anyone could park
except the drunks. I never knew why so many.

Liquor still flows down the street to the bar,
but the young have gone away. Now, only
a furtive few from other neighborhoods
come, still respectable, still in work clothes.

Even I sometimes go there—I don’t want to see
old friends, they’re all dead now, but the woman I see,
in profile, at a table, her face so swollen,
so puffed it looks nothing like her at all,
knows me, calls my name, talks to me.
I believe I had to leave here to see her
for what she is, but I don’t want to see any more,
the shine of eyes from the bushes, women drunk
and sleeping on the sidewalk, men who reach out
shaky hands, saying, Give me some money.

I think of the candle, how it dwindles,
how time has muddled it, but how people
still love it, as it has always been for them.


===============


To the Reader
William Carlos Williams

Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.

There is nothing that love

cannot face, Empty is the heart in which it cannot sit. Hold back the edges of your gowns, we are going through hell.

Williams, standing in front of

the bumper of a taxicab, Good-by and remember: every loving is, by definition,

unhappy. I cannot discover in

the past, or present, any happiness—unless it be in

courage and faithfulness of a man

—holding back nothing and, facing the worst,

giving himself utterly.

Which he does.

[image]

As well as a writer, Ted Kooser has had many other careers. After studying journalism, he spent a year at university on a creative-writing scholarship. Following his mother’s wishes, he entered divinity school and was ordained into the Congregational Church in 1956. He spent the next ten years as a minister, serving on rural homesteads in Nebraska and North Dakota, and then he turned to radio, working as a broadcaster in the American midwest until he retired in 1992. He is the author of two books of poems. In 1999 he published To the House of the Sun: A Poem for Paula, a prize-winning elegy, the previous year, he’d been awarded the National Book Award for poetry, for his second volume, Delights & Shadows. He is a frequent contributor to The American Scholar and Poetry and he also writes the popular Midland Column for the Omaha World-Herald. His chapbook New and Selected Poems, 1981–1999 is a perfect introduction to his work and there is also a biography of the writer, Six Seasons: A journal of a small town by Lance Herndon, illustrated by the poet. From March until June 2000, Kooser served as American Poet Laureate.

KEATS John (1795–1821). Poet, critic and biographer. From early childhood he tried to deny a desire to follow his brothers into medicine, but under pressure from his family, he briefly studied at the University of Guy’s hospital. During this time he stayed with Tom’s, on whose deathbed he was present, and whose last breath he caught with his handkerchief. After two years at University
===============


Keep Quiet
Philip Larkin

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

At ten, they condescend to tantrums,
They seem compulsory, like rows of trees,
And parallel the vices of their fathers
And give as lovers, to be parents soon.

At twenty, in one brain, they wake like bruises
That never heal because they never close,
And let us hear, for years, the same old crises,
The shattered glass and the same old borrows.

At thirty, with a mouth like mismanaged fire
We pour our fresh & fortune-favored role
And tread the maze we used to call our home,
Meeting our double at the bedroom door.

At fifty, we haven’t been alive so long
We are tired and supple at one time,
At eighty, we stumble by mistake upon
The murderer we have become, all crime

Exists in the first being and must flow
In a flash from there. The time before is gone,
And I, in my tender turn, will go
That scarcely was, or is, or next will come.

And you are not yet, though I see through you
As though you were air, not the warm beings
Who will happen with me a little while
And then happen no more. This is a kind

Of cure, what I must do; a principle
To lose one’s memory, for fear it should
Find its own loss unendurable,
And would change to something else. You wear

The universe like a loose coat, and am,
Like certain unattached women, free
To murmur whatever comes to mind
With no one to imagine me amiss.

It seems I am not what they take me for,
And would claim to be dead if I were.
In this cramped hell where they keep lesser souls
I make one scorn a sopping of their tears.

Whatever stopped the heart or dried the point
Of honor, with one blow, at least held hope
Somewhere beyond this deepening atmosphere
Of sense and selfishness. My love is dumb.

Routines, I do them all, in full amaze
How other
===============


The Wasp
Galway Kinnell

Under this blasted stump I met him
standing, lost, sick, the fluid in his eyes
fretted with blood, with glitter.
I’d gone there to chew a cold blade of grass.
He trembled like a one-legged dog,
he bared his teeth to me.
He and I are shaded
by the same black lid,
we are the same fever.

I put the dog in an old laundry cart,
he and I tied to an oarshaft,
wheeling over a white spring that struck
cold fire from every pebble.
How he sweated when I pushed
that long-nosed land scow
north through an east wind!
I was thinking of my father
who’d struck me in the eyes
with his fist. The dog and I looked
at each other the same way,
him because he was burning, me because I was blind.


===============


2 A.M.
Irving Layton

It’s late tonight, 
And the moon 
Coming out 
Of her white cocoon of clouds 
Has got no one left 
To watch her.
It’s an eerie scene 
With the trees, 
Like widows, 
Standing around.
I tell you 
There’s been a murder tonight 
And the murderess 
Has put out her last light.


===============


Complaints
Linda Gregg

One time
a deer came into the yard, that one
with the eyes that would become one's own
at his death. His breath made my hands cold,
he stood there like some
gentle prince and no one
thought to shoot him. I heard
the grass tearing open
like a doorway, but did not go out,
only let my hands run
over his wounded eyes. The hummingbird
tasted at my fingertip. It was night.
I could not see. Everything
I have needed I have gone blind for.
My own hands. The deer. The ancient
beauty. In sleep,
I looked for him everywhere, 
sought his eyes. I rose and went barefoot into the yard.
It was windless. No one
knew of my desire to touch
only his own back
when it rose and vanished. I waited,
but no one came. I'm beginning to forget
where I lived.


===============


The School of Quietude
Sarah Hannah

The night when the man called for the girl
to run to him,
the whole night was that running.
Her feet burned on the road.

She could hear him ahead,
calling and calling her name.
She saw him standing
in the distance and running
to him meant life—

this was the one she would choose.
He pulled her in as if he were a fire.
He was a fire.
That night was her life-life,
somehow they ran together in the red of him
into something like safety.

In his arms, in the dark,
she learned that she could forget the damage.
By morning, when she looked at him,
he was perfect.

And this knowledge
this dream of being loved
is what kept her in the place.
Every day she gets up and cleans.
She makes things how they are supposed to be.
She becomes herself
by making a house around the love,
the name of the love
the sound of the name.

And sometimes
from the window she sees the others walking
by the river,
up along the bluffs,
arms around each other, lost
in the wind or the light
or in some dark—
and her breath catches,
this is the hunger of love
to stretch out and find its reflection in the world.

But it is too late.
The others are gone.
Now she is the one who loves.


===============


The good enough parents
Elaine Equi

After packing up the pickup,
dumping off the last of your girlfriend’s furniture
at the S.F. Asian Emigrant Refuge and Relief Center,
you ease out of the truck—it’s past midnight—
handing me the key—mind if I keep the stereo,
  I’ll pay you back... 

You’ll head north in the morning
stopping at the free forest fires along the way,
and call me when you get to Bellingham.

This is as far as we can take you
since you have to make your own way in the world...

I don’t cry when the truck pulls away. 
We let your bags and boxes just sit in the driveway.
We’ll find another place for them in the morning. 


===============


Art History
Maureen Owen

For the last six or seven centuries
The soul has shown a certain hesitancy in deciding
its future; for example, the Italian exhibition

of Primitivism at the Venice Biennale
left the soul at a loss for words—images of cut-up
vegetables or disemboweled sparrows were supposed

to turn the crank of our collective conscience
but nobody was biting; it was a bird in the hand, etc.
Let’s go on to the Portrait Gallery where kids are bored

with the soup cans and “piss paintings”
of Roy Lichtenstein, and then on to Hopper’s
painting of the office with the two women

by the window, and then to its twin, his painting
of the woman in the polka-dot dress waiting in the café
at 5 a.m. for the first bus to Kansas City.

Across the way, the Tempera Room
with three Virgins that simply beg for
attention. In the Late Medieval Room, pictures

of St. George and the dragon-tailed, scaly green beast,
and various saints with red-checkered bandanas,
being dragged thru stony streets to martyrdom

while four horsemen draw up at the edges
of the panel, hunting for rabbits;
In the Hermitage Room, a portrait of a man

wearing a red square on his lapel, and then
a giant picture of the “Peasant Woman Eating
a Potato while Her Child Drinks Gruel from a Bowl,”

painted a hundred years ago
by the indefatigable Millet; in the morning’s Tate show,
a satire on Damien Hirst’s pickled animal carcasses,

some samples of portraits produced in space,
and a series of 15 fake bills with imaginary animals on them,
rendered in the realistic style of blueberry pancakes,

death’s-head hawkmoths, and complex interactions
of mercury and lizards—
Last stop, the same souls who were here yesterday:

Ruskin’s “Golden Tadpole,” Sargent’s “Bathers at La Grenouillère,”
Gaugin’s “Breton Peasant Women by the Seashore,”
a Cezanne
===============


Copenhagen
Richard Scaife

Are you also the fig leaf they put on the statue of S
for modesty’s sake?
What are you most

like? I saw you years ago from the plane, a smudge of smoke
at its point
on the ground. Is that what you are like?

Your grandmother, my husband’s mother, met André Breton. She
wanted to be the head of the surrealists.

The banal endures, the hand persists. I fold it in my hand: its palm
is not the palm of war, it is not the beach.

Mother, you cannot grieve forever, for I am not here in every
moment, you must lift your face, take us somewhere we have not been.

The dog and the cat sleep. They’re safe. The world is old and
stubborn, it insists on surviving and will not tell us if it is dying of love
or of ice.

But these are animal responses, a stifled chortle, a shrug, and
you are Sisyphus, you are Prometheus and things fall down,

down to the low places. Look into our mouths, open them
to the light and see what is alive, is alive to you.

Now it is night, I have placed the word
upon the altar, and I return it, waiting for your lips to burn.

I forgot to open the curtain. If he hears my footsteps he
does not move, and does not turn his head towards me.

I go to him, as if he were the problem, and pretend that
I believe we’re all right, that I am settled.

I open my umbrella. Fills the room with peacocks.
I stand still.

I open my hands, but nothing shows. I didn’t have to
tell him he was not one of the pretty people.

We have peeled away in our raft. We travel on sticks and
broken oars, crossing the prairies, the causeways, each

of us holding a piece of the far shore in her hands, a cloud or
a moth, and we look back.

From below your window I saw the moon.

This is the substance of the tree: it remains upright.
This is the thistle.


===============


Your Left Front Wheel
Marie Howe

because no one else can see it
turning silently
through the leaves I’d see it
if I turned my head and looked
up from this page but it’s late
and you’re not going to stop
I suppose I’ll just wait for the crash
of wood as you knock over
my trash can


===============


Dream Song 18
John Berryman

An old man stood by the window
Fishing (in his dream)
All night (in his sleep) in the enlivened river.
“The flies,” he said, “are hatching now, and the sun
Slips behind clouds over in Moosekill.”
He had fished the river all his life
And he had bought the farm beside it and sold it
A hundred times to support his life
And the life of his daughter who he dreamed adored him
And married a boy he hated and had borne him
A grandson whom he loved and watched grow old.
The birds waked him. Light frightened the water.


===============


The only danger is in forgetting
Lewis Carroll

The only danger is in forgetting
   that he is not real.
Don’t suppose that you will remember this
   with greater ease if you happen to have found
   some temporary solace in the subject:
that, too, is an aspect of the disease.
   He is not the only thing that matters,
he is not important,
   there are others to consider.
But other people, mere ourselves,
   are not really very real:
you must begin by understanding that.
   He’s only a dream,
only a thought.
You might die for him, of course,
   and it is right to be willing to do so,
but you might also die for a mere idea,
   or even a trifle, like a kitten
or a sprig of heather, if you felt
you ought to, if it seemed
like the right thing to do.
After all, dying
is only a trifle; you can’t really do it
   except by not being alive;
and not being alive
   isn’t really a positive state at all;
it’s just a failure to be alive.
   Now that isn’t so bad as it sounds;
nearly everything that happens is worse:
   not only death,
but even life, when you’re feeling lonely.
Remember this, dear; it will help to make
   you loving; and to make you brave.


===============


The Naked Spirit


                          Like a dancer 
he stands on his toes at the beginning 
and end of every line 
that expresses what remains at the heart 
of every apparent thing, 
the naked spirit in which you can hear 
a murmur, a scream or a song. 

The black moth on a naked branch 

is an event of the same kind, 
exactly what the poem is, 
a voice among the bells of the afternoon, 
the bells of the evening, 
only one among all 
the presences of the earth, 
the other trees, the owls, 
the flowers, butterflies, 
the ravens, the black cat at the road, 
the poor woman at the market stall 
and the man who says 
“What a beautiful dog” 
without knowing what the poem is. 

They don’t know, they don’t believe 
that he is a voice, 
that he belongs to the dark 
and to something even darker 
beyond it that 
cannot be said except at the heart 
of this poem, 
that the dark voice murmurs 
or sings. 
All of them 
are present at the same time in the poem. 
It is the vocation of the poem 
and it is also the vocation 
of the man to dwell 
among all these presences. 
The root of the word “spirit” 
in Latin comes 
from the verb “breath.” 
The spirit of man is that 
in which he breathes. 

And that? 

A flower falls from a rose branch, 
rises, falls. 
A black moth flies away, rises, 
falls. A green leaf 
sways, rises, falls. A cloud passes, 
the sky becomes clear, the leaves shine 
and seem to sing. 
A black cat crosses the empty road 
and stops still. 
A sound of laughter comes, 
a murmur. 
A distant cry. An afternoon 
is falling. 
The night is beginning to have names 
that we know. 

And that? 

The naked spirit 
rises, falls, 
has no horizon 
that it reaches 
or passes, 
has no
===============


Elegy
Lynn Emanuel

Let it be bleak. This is not paradise, 
although you tried to set it up as such, 
this place where you could rise up and partake 
of the Buddha-nature, plump and sighing, 
eating pastries on a Sunday morning, 
skimming the pages of an art magazine 
you would have liked to buy. Let it be bleak. 
You can’t fool me: my landscape is strewn with torsos 
of female bodies, arms reaching out, 
but the wind kicks them into skeletons. 
My landscape is no oasis, but a bare plateau 
where the idiot wind blows against you 
and thoughts slice out your guts. Let it be bleak. 
Not every curtain is pretty, some must be mended 
and some must be torn, and your curtain’s torn 
as a gossamer poet’s veil: the moon, 
half full, a rim of parchment, jagged 
as a widow’s teeth, splits open your belly, 
and these sparks of words, once poem, 
float into the night air like stars 
and are gone. You wanted them to be gone, 
and in some world, not this one, 
they are, but you are dead. Let it be bleak. 
In your country I stand outside your doors, 
voices behind me like colored glass 
shattering in the wind. 
And you have my poems, that I wrote to you.


===============


she touches his arm with one hand, “we have so much . . .”
Czeslaw Milosz

we have so much
we have the rain
we have the arch of evening over the lake
we have the branch weighted down with many clouds

we have the poplars’ curtain of falling rain
we have
the clouds dark and parted to the south

we have the smell of wheatfields just before the harvest
we have within us
the same desire to give birth

in the rain-soaked earth worms stir and slide
mushrooms blossom
the golden eyes of spiders open

we have so much
those who planted the apple trees are gone
dead or gone into distant lands

they couldn’t foresee this quiet evening
they couldn’t foresee the weight
the branch could support

we have so much
we have the weight of twilight
we have the birds’ cry in the fog
we have the crystal brimming over

the honey for the bees we have the tree of heaven

sprouting by the ruins of a wall
we have the hen running to the coop
through the rotting leaves we have
the hens’ call to one another

we have so much
evenings on which one wants to go out into the rain
and pick mushrooms

those evenings when the body is strong
and can feel its own symmetry

like the trunk of a young tree
strong and light in the wind

but we have also evenings on which one wants to rest
evenings on which only the thinking of trees is visible
and only their breathing heard

smelling of mushrooms and warm straw
smelling of rain and the walls of an old farmhouse
smelling of rain falling in the dark
we have such an evening

the light withdrawing from windowpanes
a last birdcall from the apple tree
a candle lighting the stairs to bed

we have so much
that your gaze at the window is love
that your hand slipping from my shoulder is love

your brief touch the sudden hoofbeat of a horse
barely glimpsed before vanishing in the night

“we have so much . . .”
we were saying it on summer evenings
all that was growing will now give forth fruit

it is this night it is this rain
it is the weight of twilight
in which
===============


Strophe
George Seferis

Let me caress you with a simple song.
Through the voice
The pain finds a body and exists
And the yearning as well
That scans the bare earth seeking
The transparency of water.


===============


The Excursion Train
Li-Young Lee

There’s something of myself in the train
      I do not know
      the secret of
      I climb inside to sleep and dream
      with nothing particular in mind.
In the train I take all my thoughts and hold them
      in place
      in my coat pocket
      next to my skin
      touching my ribs.

When the curtains are drawn
the lamps lit
we sit in pairs
smiling at each other and saying nothing
while a voice gives details of what we see
out the windows at our sides.
      This makes each person
      complete,
      watches silently
      the landscape he rides through.

You would be there too
if you were not here instead.

There’s a whistle blows
It’s the wind!
the loudspeaker says.
      What on earth!
I’ve so much still to tell you.
Look how the landscape changes.
      This is the way I’d like us to go.

One by one
we turn to each other
to ask a question or make a comment.
Not knowing how long it takes
to say

and then you are sleeping.
So I lean my head on the windowpane.
and watch the train
steam out of the station.


===============


Archetypes
Naomi Replansky

for Wallace Stevens

These are the shapes that fade from memory,
cowled and tonsured, like a few ripe apples
in an orchard. They return wearing altered masks.

Once they were saints, robed for devotion,
or clerks keeping the accounts of money owed
or the wine put out in amphoras
for the entertainment of gods, demi-gods.

Their mouths were too small to read without distortion.
Their thoughts were of little consequence.

They carry antique instruments, signals
at night of their intent to come near.

Rising up through their feet are wheels
of fire, rounding or setting the body in motion,
heaving them
to the vast dark orders that pass
like winged rats within the cracks in heaven.

They bear hammering hammers, shovels, baskets,
for the reclamation of what belonged to us
once, the brick by brick rebuilding
of the city in the mind where all return home.

A while they are forceful, excited by new habits,
shaving the chin, stealing far inland, sifting for coin.
But that’s just their disguises.

They are always in old clothes, simple men
with a weak grasp of dialectic.
They strip from themselves unneeded tattered dark rags

and wheel and pour full cans of oil like water.
No tools have sharper edges or lasting edges,
small pails of milk they cannot drink
but must offer to the slum-children.

If you leave them alone, they will be
scattered, unidentifiable—

not here on these streets, but in a country
whose name has rotted in my mouth.

And, then, only if some
ancient dream of war has allowed them
to die in different ways than are familiar.

Only if they once again are sleeping
with their hats on under one tree
or sharing the shade of a hedge
or the arcades of the hanging gardens

with their dirty feet in the water
rushing by in a leaky aqueduct
that’s where they’ll return,
open the door
into your small, hot room
and take command.


===============


The Ache of Marriage
Thylias Moss

What lives in me -- This tale is not in the manner of an African tale --
They say it's better to break stones than to have that ache of marriage --
Better that ache than to live outside the pale and mind-bound but brawny --
It's better that ache than to smile through misery or to bear a tired burden 
of loneliness --
Ah, the burden of lonely legs and feet! A living ache that settles deep into sleep -- 
Better that ache than to bear the terrible ache of secret nights filled with longing -- 
No, this is not an African tale --
Ache bound within smiles that render me pleasant --
My every joke is an ache of love that I seek to reach --
So I am satisfied to burn inside, to be filled,
My wife naked in the kitchen, kissing between the
frenzied boils of rice-water steamed in bouillon --
I am my own fire -- I burn down the shelter I made --
If I was an African tale, I would never be told --
They'd never say, "You could smile, but you don't --
If only you could smile, you could suffer a less --
Then, instead, there is that ache of marriage --


===============


Star Dust
Federico Garcia Lorca

Oh! Guitars,
there’s a new wind that rustles the streets.
Throb your chords again,
for they’re no longer pale.

Make so that the blood
of the prettiest rose
in our very old gardens,

blooms in them once more
and lets itself be felt,
like the wind on the rose.

Today the day was born,
the day on the shore
where the three ages

of men have slept.
The same one that in dawn
was died in the tower.

Today is happy
because the moon is at play,
because all the men

love each other.
Because the rose
lets itself be felt.

Because in the mouthfuls
of bread and fire,
we can see ourselves.

Because there is one perfume
that glistens
the color of shadows.

Because in each of the streams
the water comes to drink
that flutters on the shores.

It is it who tells us to,
it is it who tells us to,
from the breath of the guitars.

It is it who tells us to,
it is it who tells us to,
in the always young wind.

Now let the fire
of your sad garments
be freed.

It will fly
as a beautiful light
to the place you watch it for.

Now, now,
when the cord breaks
in the bow of a violin.

Now, now,
in the groin of the moon
and of each woman.

I am the rose.
I am the flesh
of my rose.

I am the child
with his mouth shut.
I am the rose.

I have breathed so much.
This rose
is my flesh.

I have touched
the pieces of the moon
with my hands.

This wind
has one moment only:
to smell me.

I am the rose.
I am the flesh
of my rose.

This rose
is my tongue.

This tongue
is a tiny rose.
This tongue is mine.

I am the tongue.
I am the flesh
of my tongue.


===============


II

A green bowl of water
is my constant soul
rising down in a tear-
drop and falling

down and rising down
a thread that rises through the
drops out of the seam-
less fabric of the water

without wind
night air the bowl brimming
without sentiment the green drops
rising down without mind

In summer the fronds over-
hang the fish spiked and
shoaling around a woman’s legs
the water rising down

hair face neck
a birth of green and fish and
leaves small between the legs
of the water rising down

no day no night
is now the moonlight
cooling the damp the whole
body turning around

darkness the flesh rising
breathing out in the green air
saying if water is your desire
then become water

I become the flesh
the water is my bone
your small hand
water that rises down


===============


Variations on Nightfall: 1. Nightfall
Lucia Perillo

Looming in your own shadow is a marvel, then   
a freak show, then a reason to close the door,   
check the lock, bolt the door,   
forget the tumbling heart that palpates for sheer joy,   
even at such absurdity, such derangement,   
but as the light wanes,   
the world takes on   
another cast—a vermillion, cinnabar, flame—   
as if from a bonfire   
we’ve failed to notice, or can’t see, or realize:   
whatever light goes out at night is pulled from darkness—   
so it seems to me—as we the evening beings lean   
to lock each door.

          * * *

Variations on Nightfall: 4. Evening Song
Fleda Brown

God bless the child who has a killer on his trail,
pray he will never come or it will be too late.
You will never know which way you have to look,
trouble’s eye is on you day and night.
Wisdom won’t help you, strength can’t help you.
Fortunes are spun at God’s whim.
Bless the child, who’s prayed through all of his life,
with a trail of murderers on his trail.


===============


Tonight no longer love you, though
Charles Wright

Tonight no longer love you, though
I did at noon today, at dawn,
for the last six months
as far as I can remember.
Who am I in this situation?
An entirely different person,
one I hope I never meet,
at least until it’s all over.
My glass eye and my ivory leg
bored me to tears for years.
I’ve left them on the airplane.
I’m free. From myself too.
I won’t be back, they tell me.
Ghosts come through this night
so quietly. It must be another
appearance by Puck.
There will be ice to walk upon.
Rapidly it is passing onward.
I remember a seacoast,
far away, and it is winter there.
It is winter there. It is quiet.


===============


That Time I Left
Patti Smith

In that house I became less and less who I was.
Each time I blinked that man had the answer
This was my single moment of cognition.
It was then that I took leave
To experience.
I had been told who to be.
I went anyway.

Does any second hold such pleasure in its fingers?
I took a deep breath and dived in with the goldfish
And won!
Some folks run to daddy.
I chose against that man.

I played with the earthworms.
Oh it was lovely.
They crawled on the inside of my palm.
God I was thankful.
Now I can hold a spade handle.

Thank you for believing in me
Eternity
It allows me to touch the stamens
As the bee does.
And look upon the sun.
That’s why I’m nobody.

There are many voices
Screaming in my ear.
I look at them as though they were fighting ants.
Like that time I broke my toe and thought
This happens to all men.

Could it be that I chose to be chosen
By the finger in the sky.
O’ how I have loved the spaces
Between what is known and not known.
So I could say I am free

And so it is okay
I have put all that behind me.
I walk behind where I was
I walk behind what I was.
Then I started to create my own possibilities
That’s when my skull opened.


===============


the Caesars
Donald Hall

Living as we do under the Caesars’ shadow,
whose thought busies the air, whose books besiege
my door, whose horses’ death-pitched squelch and jingle
reverberate from each wet cobble in the rain—
what sort of pardon do you think I offer?
In my luxurious house lit by the fountains
and the flaming oranges and fading stars
you hear my footfalls as I pause in prayer
for our tradition; only we are perfect.

Then on the marble steps, my guests reclining
in the painted silences, I carve
delicate chicken with the pepper-dust.
I play the lyre.  Beneath the stern vigils
of the Caesars, sometimes a wing crumples,
a note goes sour, a fire flares and wanes.
A sudden wind attacks the fallen garlands,
and now our flutes are playing, as before,
the dead Caesars’ tune.


===============


Cherrylog Road
Charles Wright

Thin band of ochre stretched across the west. 
At the ballpark we watch the outfielders throw
Their random crumpled shadows on the grass.
These are the things that drive me to my knees.
These are the things that keep my heart awake.
Sometimes this country, late at night,
Loses it senses, and is wild again.


===============


Solomon Grundy
Robert Lowell

A cliff from whose calm face
Time and rain long ago effaced
Each station and cadence,
Aged and isolated,
The silhouettes of departed men
Hang like rags on a ragged rock.

Solemn, frugal, pure
As a Quaker school-master, she stood
Printing in public skies
The awful latent wonder.
Despair even was impotent.
She watched men crucify a man.

From far the snowy hollow’s walls
Cried welcome. Shadowed gates that frown
With forgotten lions, chained,
Open and let the small groom in
Driving a horse, the first of Spring:
Let the small groom in.


===============


From “The Tear”
Federico Garcia Lorca

The pulse of the dead beats in my temples,
I have felt the heart of the icy-foot.
The dog on the roofs barks in his loneliness.
The watchman keeps awake,

I have heard the murmur of the toad on the sill.
There is no more tide, now, in my blood.
The moon still sings, but her voice is sad
of memory and pain.


===============


Daybreak Near Telescope Peak in the Dakotas
Becky Wiseman

Cold thin air. High blue sky. Silence.
Me and the coffee and the rabbit hides.
My breath a cloud against the stars.
And then birdsong: larks and juncos and
a goldfinch bright as a sun. Daybreak
slides through the dry hills. Pronghorns,
their hides etched red and gold by the cold,
show up, invisible, against the night.
In a moment, once the sun shows up,
I’ll leave camp, begin the climb.


===============


Caddis-fly Larva
Ann Lauterbach

translucent in the crevice
of the gravel bank below
the brook’s mossy edge
where the round smooth stones
caught in my pocket
chase the chill of autumn
and a faint sweeter chill
to catch the smile
lifts my face among
the disorder of the dew-wet ferns
wrapped like matted hair
to a pale green comb
against the suffusion
of the skyline, I am
a wet world
at the edge of tide
and heart-drawn walk
to sandy garden path—
in this wash of shade
I am only water


===============


Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

Anoche llegue a Santiago, Chile. For some reason, reading a single poem is more challenging than reading a hundred poems. We sit together at a cafe table in downtown Santiago, because we want this to be one of the poems. Why does this count? How should this be presented? Is it even a poem? To be presented for a small circle of friends in the Americas, who all hope not to feel lonely on Saturday night. It would be embarrassing, and sad, to present oneself as a poet, or as a desire for a poem, or as someone who has time for a poem.

Preface a poem by pinning it to a wall. It’s too impossible, to write something like Infinite Jest. All of us have read it. It takes time, and there aren’t enough hours in the day. Wallace says that this is what it’s like to be friends with a weird french dude, Zhora. How strange to see how someone goes about their days. There’s enough complexity in a single day to last a lifetime. So much so that we think there’s always something more interesting than reading a poem, so much that we look out the window when someone proposes reading a poem, even if it’s the people we love best in the world, who take the time to make us pancakes and tell us that we can get back to work in the afternoon. Wallace became a super-interesting weird french dude, and then he died. How’s that for a Saturday night poem?

But really, if it makes any sense, this poem comes because my weirdo French friends force it upon me. Usually, I sit down and explain to a friend why there aren’t enough hours in the day to go read a poem. A corny poem by Paul Valery, about the names we have for things. A well known poem, easily forgotten, called “Le Cimetiere Marin.” Valery says that he wants to take a small boat to the cemetery marin, in the home of someone he doesn’t know, in order to look at the tombs of dead poets. But he can’t take the boat out on the sea until he finds a name for the thing. What do you call the rudder, what do you call the rudder’s rope? What is the word for the oar? He spends a lifetime looking for all
===============


that year
Sharon Olds

our children were growing out of us
like feathers, licks of flame, leaves,
small animals eating their mothers alive.
It was a year of craziness, and when he fell
from a tree in spring, and I heard him cry,
he lay on his back all night in an attic of trees.
When I went to get him, he looked at me with no knowledge
of my name or his. His eyes were insane, his ribs
rose up as I lifted him, his eyes rolled back
into his head and I felt he was leaving
the earth, with no name, no mother,
spinning up from the center of the earth
in a flame, and I was holding him down to his death
on the ground. I put my mouth against his
to blow my spirit in, as we had been told
the right thing to do, I had done with our children.
I breathed life into him like a cannibal,
keeping him with me. It was not enough.
He was going, he was almost gone.
His lips were warm, still alive, they fluttered,
nearly dead, a wild bird I was trying
to hold in the palm of my hand.


===============


The Olive Trees
Miroslav Holub

Beside all this,
the olive trees are whitening,
for so it has been since time immemorial,
their silvering is due to the first hour of frost,
their white comes towards us, winged as a swan,
and is bright as water.
Sometimes they cry, those trees,
although they have no leaves,
and the crow which has come to perch there,
starts up in surprise, and flaps away,
shaken by a strange outcry.
And this too is familiar,
and the memory of snow past and to come,
settles round them, like birds in the evening.
The laws of man
are far away,
as the place where three roads meet.


===============


The Exchanged
Charles Simic

Put them in your shoes, your sister said
as she went out the door. Theirs will fit
even better because I know, girls run
longer than boys and are heavier when they walk.

When I put them on the cold leather floor
held my toes like a horse’s mouth.
They rode high up my ankles, my knees.
But a boy soon grows into his shoes,

grown men outgrow them in the end.
Walking through the snow to school
they crunched like sugar. The sound
made it seem all the colder.

I never broke them in. That morning
I stopped after the first hill and took them off.
I left them in a tree in the lot.
My feet felt numb in my socks,

more alone. But I got used to it.
Boys forget how cold their feet get
or maybe they don’t. But they all
wear their shoes to the end, don’t they?


===============


America
Olena Kalytiak Davis

In memory of Mark Strand: thank you for opening my mind and heart to what I was hoping to find.

To break, to make, to rip apart
beautifully, arms folded, even,
up, down: the line breaks.

The line breaks.

or the breaking into the line,
if you will. Because there, where the line breaks,
up to that point, before the break, it was,
if not good, good enough. it worked
if not beautifully, than well enough,
perhaps, that you could notice a beauty, 
or beauty as it nearly breaks into
a perfect break, and then, what a wave. What a
call to the sea, its crashing,
and the tremor of the shore, braced.

The line breaks

right there, we can hear it, and yes,
we can wait for this weight, like rain.

The line breaks,
and it breaks because it must,
sometimes, it must, and we
will find our breaking, too, one of these days

we will find a beauty breaking, we will
find our breaking. We will crash, and we will
change, we will have to
because we have learned
to follow the breaking line.

Is it good? Does it break
the way that we like it? Or
does it turn, and fall,
does it refuse, do we lose
it at the break and then are we lost?
Should we care?
Or is it, after all, not good enough?

The line breaks, the heaviness
that each line is, it breaks, as it must,
and the breaking waves
find us, gather us
in, and we are small
glittering shells,
and we are foam. 

The break is electric, the break
is followed by silence: it is good?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. 
But where are we? What is this new
silence, what are its robes?
Where is our bravery, our sound,
our gloss? Can we find ourselves
again? This break, this return
to shore, can we not return
to the tremor of 
the breaking wave?


===============


Thanks-Giving
Rainer Maria Rilke

Maybe the vastness of this night
has something to do with the distance
between us, which has become
what it never should have become.
But once, a long time ago, there was
a chink in the darkness,
and something from your depths
glittered in my sky.

And so, I know what thanks are now,
and the night is vast, and I too;
we were fastened together by our hands,
but by your life and mine we were bound,
and though the wind blows us farther and farther
apart,
it’s all the same to us, we’re rooted
in one another’s hearts.

That we may warm one another
through and through,
becoming one from heart to heart,
is the only thing I want,
and when we are completely warm,
we shall forever begin to melt
into each other, even though
the night is vast, and vast the distance
between us.


===============


Magnificat
Geoffrey Hill

Lord, the tall tower broke the evening like a lance,
 and I, unprompted, brought into my mind
The beginning of a Latin hymn, from my last year,
but could not discover the rest of it. So I moved
from thought to memory, from memory to prayer;
And thought that I had not before sought
this kind of praying. But what prayer is it, Father?
For in my head I rehearsed what that prayer
had been to the third part of my boyhood, 
wrestling with God for my father, to whom
in his decline I prayed. Though surely here
 I have not in this mind of mind to do with him?
 But with the Lord. So I let go, and prayed the prayer.
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!—
and prayed, too: but this for me, for my brood,
for their mother that we may cling to the world
till it breaks to darkness at the Last Day. So I prayed
then (which I do not do), in this tower, and the light
suddenly changed, a field of cloud filling
in the southern view. What tree could I climb
to see the south? Feeble, and sick of sight.
But, Lord, there are trees which bloom into sight.


===============


Letter To A Lady
Mark Van Doren

Each loves the other, you as one divine
Where every attribute a god is hers;
And I as I can love an innocence,
Thinking what’s lovely may be large, and that
The slowest movement on the human skies
May drift the truth into your heart like dew
Upon the sweet earth that receives it well,
And offers change to where it sank with thanks.

I do not know what else,—if there is more;
There are eyes that gaze into mine and I
Do not know what they seek, but know that we
Are walking (that’s to say one walks) until
At some odd shady moment, when we are
Barely aware, we stumble at an air,
And fall before, into a lighted place.

I write a letter to you, you who are,
Know, at the instant that I write, gone there.
Some weeks from now a flower will come, and I
Will break it off the plant and stroll through May,
And find your window, and lay on it here
My offering, and think how lovely you
And stand again and read your love there.


===============


The Lovers
Amy Lowell

Above the city, on a high tower, 
Two lovers watch the daylight fade. 

"It is a sea," she says, "that dips 
In a endless wave to that lighthouse-tip 

Over there;" and there his hand lies 
On the grey stone balustrade, and hers. 

"Can't you feel the rising of the tide? 
Look at those little boats, far out, 
Nosing their way from ship to shore."

His eyes are on her eyes: the vessel clears 
The point: all vessels are now drawn in 

Safe to shore: but where his gaze appears 
Dashed on a rising ground of green, 

A whole armada of white clouds 
Lie grounded, dismasted, heeled over, sunk.


===============


Swimmers
A.E. Stallings

There were swimmers, as you’d expect,
and sun worshippers, and sports on horseback
and drinkers of all the drinks in the world,
and all sorts of conversations—

most of which I never heard.
Most of these, too, I didn’t care about
all that much, except for those who quarreled
at my gate, about things that I needed to know.

You know how every day there are heroes,
going about doing things for you
like what I do for you, and,
at a faster pace, without thinking.

One thinks, Why is there bad,
and so must seem boring?
For example, why were they bad?
Or did they simply seem so,

in contrast to the speed, or stillness,
of those silent lovers
on a bench near the pond, without
a word, turning pages.

Look how the ones lying on horseback
came to the brink of confession
before turning away, how the dimwit
happiness of the swimmer ended

only in death and the hangover—
on a sidewalk near the sea,
where a woman curls
over a stranger, as she nears the end,

and you and I fold into it,
so that we, too, can get back
to those two silent, diligent lovers
at the seashore, turning pages.


===============


That Day
Galway Kinnell

For the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney

It must have been that it was May
and we were out in the woods above the Tagliamento
looking down into the thick heat.
There were flies and the strong light off the Adriatic
had been sharp and startling after the moist dark
of the nearby hills.
We’d been fishing for trout without success
and had gone to the edge of the woods
and lay down in the grass at the top of the steep bank

that fell away down to the rushing river below.
All was in bloom and when I lay back in the grass
that was already tall and yellowing
and looked up at the vast light rising out of the grass
as if from earth into the sun and the shimmering
larks rising higher and higher into the blue heat

we could hear each other’s heartbeats
in the stillness that rose up from the green fire
of the grass and from the pure whorls of water
up in the turbulent green river far below.
I felt the enormous power of that vibrant place
and looking over at you in the grass
tangled in the light and all that light rising,
I wanted to say something but I didn’t.

And so it was to be one of the many times
I would not speak when I had the chance.
And then the larks rose up singing from earth
in the rising August light
as the stones that pave the steep ways to heaven,
streets of heaven, the lark-song paving stones.
And we went back to our work.


===============


A Woman’s Place
Ursula K. LeGuin

Where do they want to go, the ones that vanish
and never leave a track,
the ones who move from place to place
with no belongings,
nobody knows them, nobody knows
where they’ve been?
Women mostly.

This one, this fiftyish, fat one,
wondering why her brains are boiling over,
her sweet serenity gone,
she who has always loved roses and honeysuckle,
she wants to take a saw
and slash the rose bushes,
smear honeysuckle across a bloody muzzle,
feel their briars scratch her and their flowers beat her
about the head.

Where is she going,
with her mind boiling and her hands shaking?
Upstairs to get her saw.

===============


Letter to William Butler Yeats
James Wright

Ah, I, too, fell out of bed when I was a child.

Into a world of winter, down a hill of darkness.

My bloody hands. My bloody knees. Blood

On the ice. Blood

On the brightness. And where I fell down, I fell down.

I was quite happy.

I lay there.

I fell asleep.

And when I awoke, the pains had vanished.

The sky was strangely bright.

Then I saw, all around me

On the hillsides of the snow,

The evergreen leaves of the bloodstained hemlocks.

Look:

When you stand up in your sleep,

Your dark hair falls.

You think you are falling

Down a hill of darkness.

But you are dreaming only.

When you wake up, you will be surprised

To see how far you have gone.


===============


History
Clive James

Just think how it is with me every day.
It's nine o'clock and I'm preparing to pray,
My knees on the hard floor, my spine up straight,
Lips moving in silence, since words can't come out.

Then a sneeze hits, the doorbell rings, the landlady
Demands the rent with such a malevolent glare
That in search of a compromise, first tea, then beer,
Is brought on trays to the room with the high ceiling.

Then all my defences and my moral poise
Can do no more than calculate losses.
For me it's a season of unexampled crimes,
When I am transformed, no question of disguises,

When I am finally myself, though secretly,
Furiously earnest, just not one of a team.
No wonder I have to live alone, you see.
No wonder I'm ready to be known by neither.

For I'm no one without others. I just pass
As a look through the glass, a nod as it breaks.


===============


Darkness
Pablo Neruda

It is cold, but the sky is holding out,
it was once fragrant: now it is like granite,
there was some light, there was, once, some light.
There’s no light left anywhere now. The candles
have gone out. Their tall and elegant flames
have been put out by the wind. The candles
died in the middle of the chants, they died
as if someone scattered a handful of sand
over their little tongues. They died
in the hand of the blind woman. The world
was shaken by a phantom sob. And what we asked
for we could not even wish. As I said
this great day has come and will not come again.
It is not the day, the only day, it is not
the night of the white noise. It is not
the life that belongs to us, not even
our dark night and our moon. I swear
there’s not even a shadow of love on earth.
There’s nothing but love. It fills everything.


===============


What's In Store
Alice Friman

Monday night we walked
through a fluorescent aisle
of warm cars in the light
of late winter rain, 
of late spring stars,
our hands in our pockets,
our shoulders touched.
That day we had followed
a train through many
interior worlds,
back to a couch
near a table
with a drawing of a crab,
brightly colored swatches
and nubbles,
and bookends
standing like kilts and cannons.
"The habit of knowledge in the writing hand"— 
in words, in planes that describe the page,
in brushstrokes of words and pictures
on our pages.
The world like a snow of lace collapsing
in the heat of a train's
inadequate ceiling, like the night we kissed,
in shadow.
The tracks we laid down like the sun,
the sort of thing that happens in the world 
of cream-filled doughnuts 
to commemorate the day, 
each layer of history bleeding into the next.


===============


On Being Asked To Write About Rilke
Mark Doty

The fish swimmer high in a stretch of atmosphere,
the answer an ocean under their new feet.
Bloodbone sequins abreast in the wave’s seam,
suck of salt a world’s change, everything shifting;
a single glass tail ringing among them
assumes the shape of an angel, and then
you, here with me, cast your own glance
into a clot of roe in its bowl,
these children of water: a sun
more beautiful than any of ours
rises, in one of your eyes the fur
of a seal shifts in a thousand colors.
And then, alone in that sun-tunneled liquid,
kissing of cells and dividing; you,
slipstream by that speeding touch afloat.


===============


Appaloosa
Tony Hoagland

They tell you: stay off the roads after dark.

It’s a rough stretch of county, with a biker bar and a Shoney’s
and an all-night truck stop you wouldn’t go into alone.
The tall, thin pole light of the blue Appaloosa
in front of the trailer shines on an overturned
Barcalounger and a rusted-out Ford with no wheels.

Inside, in the orange glow of kerosene lamps,
an unmade bed stands unattended on the linoleum
like a place where someone should not be dead.
There’s a photograph on the wall of some people
on some kind of vacation, dressed and doing the tourist things.
They look happy. It makes me think about the other places
we may never go—places that have the names
of what they were once: Safety Harbor, Rockport.
I think about all the pictures, at one time,
of all the people, smiling and silent in their old wet days.

They told you: stay off the roads after dark.

My son, and his wife and child, are with me at the lake tonight.
A man from next door has come over to help with the boat.
Our children sit on the beach with flashlights.
When they shine it up into a tree, we can see
all the tiny creatures and faces that we never see in daylight.
The children do not know, tonight, that everything dies.
They do not know that these trees and animals,
the things they see, will someday be destroyed.
It is not possible for them to think of such things.
They move with their flashlights over the dark water.
They shout in the dark, hearing and laughing.

To whom did I promise this light, this laughter?
When did I imagine a future, in the dark?
The future has arrived, all these children have come.
I will help you with the boat now, neighbor,
help you drag it through the sand to the dark water.
I will swim in the light of the August moon.
You know that this cannot last. There are things that cannot last.
You ask that I be at peace with this.

Oh friend, if I know what to do I will tell you what to do.
There are no horses that glow at
===============


Unfinished
Mary Oliver

It is never
what we want
it to be. We have
fought for it.
We have tried
to give ourselves
in a trance
of perfect effort
toward some gentle
result

It is never
what we thought
it would be. It is
both less
and more. But it
is not to be
argued with,
the landscape
wants what
it wants and will
have it. If
we love this
earth,
we must love
it as it is,
not as it
was. Or was
not. But as
it is.

It is all we have.
It is our life.
Every brush stroke,
therefore,
must be praise.
I think we do
love, anyway.
We do love.
But perhaps
I should not
say,we. Perhaps
I should
say,the men I
have known.

I have walked
the same roads
you have walked,
I know
the grief
behind your eyes.
And the scars
on your hands
tell their own
story,
and the night
in you
is not
unfamiliar to me.
We can never
condemn,never
congratulate,
ourselves
quite enough


===============


Money
Carl Sandburg

The wild cat on the back fence
stalks a bird in the moonlight.
The moon has the look of a dollar in a poolhall.

A dollar has the look of a body dead a week
in a poolhall.
A cat eating a bird in a poolhall knows 
the moon is moving.
A man watching two dollars billiards knows 
the cat has the bird.
Two dollars is better than one dollar.

Fleas are jumping on the cat eating the bird. 
Fleas know the two dollars and the one dollar
have the look of the dead body of one dollar 
in the moonlight in the poolhall.

----

In a Station of the Metro
Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.


===============


Central Hospital
Sylvia Plath

I would like to lie down
On this white table.
Once
My grandfather appeared in a doorway,
His hand propping him up,
Wearing a shawl and cap of snow:
He said,
I have eaten
The plums
That were in
The icebox
And which
You were probably saving
For breakfast. Forgive me, they were delicious, 
So sweet and so cold.
I am eighty-nine.
This is how the dead speak,
Looking mildly at the sky
While propping themselves up in doorways.
This is their form of perjury,
The truth that opens its hands and gathers 
Thexhaustible darlings of the world
To its splendid breasts.


===============


Medusa
Fanny Howe

The awful fright of a wild boar caught in a thicket; 
the pig rears on his hind legs, he rushes through every thorn;
he gnashes on every upright, the gleam of his bloody flank.
No sooner raised than the wound is unbearable,
and each drop of blood blazes on the jungle floor.
As for the veiled bright woman lifted from the nest of snakes,
their little hisses keep her afloat over the spaceless plunder.
If eyes could kill, people would die in droves;
if thoughts could kill, people would be buried alive.
But I live, lying alone on earth, the invisible eye, the vicious thought.
Sometimes in the mirror I see my body as a cow submerged, sunk,
bloated with waste, its legs sticking out of water.
At the butcher’s I scream out loud, women I don’t know say,
“Why are you screaming out loud, you stupid woman?”
The cows themselves do not see what is about to happen,
though they can smell the entrails like hair.
Those who do not know what has happened here are dead.
My eyes are painted with a blue mark of hatred;
my sex, the stroke of a bloody claw of slaughter.
At midnight the footless boar emerges from his thicket
and scampers in a circle with a lit torch inside his mouth.


===============


Last Letter of Emile Zola
Wislawa Szymborska

Now that I have resolved to die,
the reasons crowd to my head.
I stop at one and say to it: Speak up.

But it replies: What can be said that’s worthy
of what’s past and of what is to come?
Of what I was and what you are?

I choose another: Let me try.
But it quickly declines with this excuse:
You are no longer the same as before.

Farewell, my friends!
But you will see,
I’m leaving this world as if its gates
were open. That’s the wonder,

that’s the wonder that your letters
never mentioned.

---

Dear Wordsworth
Billy Collins

This morning, after I groomed and fed
my horse, he suddenly reared
and kicked the wooden door of his stall
three times. It was a violent, arrhythmic knocking,
as if he were trying to get out,
or get someone’s attention.
But then, there I was.
I spoke to him.
I rubbed his nose and patted his flanks.
He was trembling, even as he was eating.
Now I see he was trying to get my attention
to let me know about the hawk circling the barn,
or the rattler coiled in the straw,
or perhaps the other, unknown thing
that spooked him,
that spooks us all,
and for which, since there is no word,
he had to kick the wooden door of his stall.


===============


The Worst That Could Happen
Samantha Stratton

I can’t do this anymore,
he said, that last time.
That time that was the last time
until this time.
It’s still bad, but you know?
I’ve gotten good at it.
The sorrow is a space in my mouth,
and I’m always pushing
things through it:
a drink,
a word,
a cap of relief
that can be crumbled
and dissolved,
but never swallowed.
These:
chopping raw chicken,
ripping off clothes,
teeth clacking
in my jaw.
This:
almost pressing the knife
into my throat.


===============


Singing,
Rainer Maria Rilke

If my moaning
could build
bridges,
and my tears
drinking my pain
flow into rivers,

I would lead you
away,
my pain,
and my moaning
would sing
with you
to the sea.

But my pain,
my silent
pain
must remain
in its place.
It is lodged
at the bottom
of everything.

I try to expel it.
It is thrust
back upon me.
I sing,
I moan
to no avail.

It remains in its place.
I have nothing,
nothing,
nothing,
nothing
except
my pain.


===============


St. Peter’s Snow
Maggie Smith

On a Wednesday—
I think
it was Wednesday—
Peter opened
the door to heaven
and stepped
out into light.

Not the
steady light
of heaven,
but, anyway,
dawn
in Rome,

the snow
fallen slowly
through the night,
the streets,
the rooftops,
soft.

Peter must have
paused at the portal,
catching the drift
of what was left
of the night,

the smell of it,
cool and fresh,
almost
cool enough
to drink.

Then he
moved
into the light,
his feet slipping
under him,
his feet
asleep
in his boots,
his big
fisherman’s
boots
and his new
cowled
cassock.

He made
his way,
falling
and stumbling
now and then,
down the stair
to the street,

swinging
his arms
to get
the blood
moving,
trying to
keep his
balance,
and wondering

if he should
light his pipe.
It was the work
of one moment
to pull out
the drawer
in his mind
where
he kept
his matches,
and then
another
to withdraw
a box
and strike
a match
upon the sullen,
porous,
packing-house
surface
of that
great
ship.

The sulk
of it
lit
and began
to burn.

The breath
of the light
puffed
up around
his hand,
and, for a moment,
a cowl
of blue
smoke
was settled
comfortably
over his head.

It was
enough light
to walk
by,
enough light
to guide
his boots
over the drifts,
to see
the towers
rise
and the domes
lie down
in the snow.

Look
for these
things.
In some of
your cities
they will be
there:

a few
stars still
refused
to dim,
the last
splash
of wine
fallen
to the cobblestones
outside a bar,

a girl and a boy
making their way,
lit by
===============


Sparrows
Gary Snyder

The way it works is, you see some really poor people
  as you pass by in your car.
Then it hits you. You get it. You know what
  the poor are like. What you do to be
  like them is, stop for gas. Go to the washroom. Use the
  library. Buy a map. Buy some food.
  Treat yourself to a slice of pizza. Talk to somebody.
  You see what I mean?...

The thing I’m trying to get hold of is, every place
  is full of poor people. It’s the definition
  of “place.” A person is poor if they are
  living in a place where there is nothing to do there.
  It can’t be done, there’s no place for you there.
  If you really get down to it, it’s just too
  much to take. You have to figure out how to quit
  your job and how to move to another place.
  You find a place where something can be done.
  Somebody there cares enough to do it with you.


===============


Real Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads in Them
Jorie Graham

What is this: like a china bowl of batter, without a spoon
for stirring, it holds (as if catching a river to wash in)
perception of what goes on in the other room—
as if (I wish I had a stick to stir this mixture
with!) one were not always inventing.

I would not know you and what difference
would you make?
What is this covering, this seal of yellowing wax
over feeling?
I could reach in, reach down
through this cover, the separation of age,
and touch you: it would be many things
done at the same time:

un-waxing, discovery
of you, invention.

So it would be the future I might reach in to touch,
to begin by
touching, or, after that, taste. And what after that?
I lean in towards my ghost of you. So it would be the future
as you—not the future that precedes us.

What if this were the case: the world we think is solid, is the world of the past, already happened?
The moment,
happening, could be a certain shape
the world has not yet thought of, it's future.

What if it were the case
that the solid felt world
we inhabit, each other, our houses

were of the past?
To touch another being.
One touches with one's ghost.

You would be a certain ghost on my touch,
but in me, and I in you,
and yet not me, not you,
and yet
not
unknown.


===============


Today
Howard Moss

Today I invented a flying machine.
The wings were made of a substance
which responded to the sun and the wind
until my arms were full of rhythm.

The body was a needle. And the needle
did not fear the thread—rather
it was grateful and loving,
caressing the soft breast of an invisible lover.

The engine was a kiss, and the speedometer
knew only speed and speed and speed and speed
until the dial turned to nothing,
the needle’s red tongue was out.

When the gasoline ran low
the wings folded back
and hid me like a secret.

That was today.

[from: Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance, © 1975]
U. A. Fanthorpe

Today we are flying over the great marshes of the Wash
& three swallows take it in turn to play
with the engine exhaust.
We are over the great deserted spaces
which really are not deserted at all.

Nature changes nothing for the sake of novelty;
she neither spurns nor welcomes us,
but forever goes on her own way:
thistles as modest,
daisies as sprightly,
nettles as sharp,
hawthorn as sweetly perfumed
as she made them at the
conception of time.

So here we are with engines & maps
& hotels & travel-sickness & sweating
flying in the middle of the thistledown,
being as it is, & always will be, our place.


===============


It is a Living Coral
William Carlos Williams

It is a living coral
encrusted with
parts so minute
so varied & fastened
to its central
prototype
your expression and
my knowledge
cannot take it in.


===============


The Stranger’s Child
Alan Hollinghurst

“She gave up her own individuality, even her name. And the only ghost that
ever visited her was the ghost of her own face, the one she sees in the
black glass of her bedroom window, lit up by the blue neon sign from the
headlights of the cars coming off the bypass, which she sometimes watches
from her bed.”

from
The Stranger’s Child
by Alan Hollinghurst


===============


Audubon
Richard Wilbur

The next thing then is the willow shirt
From which we drink our death like water,
Tumble it over us, lie under
Invisible, the eye of death passing 
Over the black air above the river.
The first thing then is fear, we lie still
Like an egg, listening to what will happen;
Then the willow shirt comes to the skin
And the mind like a cat climbs up to watch
The eggshell world crack into bits. We drown,
Re-enter the chain of being—loons
Left, and hard blue jays with red
Crossbones for eyebrows, and wild geese lowing
Themselves from the north, all colored
Black as the tree of death. There we lie
Sheltering under the willow until
We think at last how this might be the death of death,
How this great grieving might be the end
Of weeping, and how the desolate watercourse
Might be a branch full of dead geese
All feeding there because the plumes are a-blossom.


===============


Body
Mark Strand

No one knows what the body is
or how old it might become.
The body is a burning house,
the body is a tortured tree,
the body is a blinding light.

This is the body. There is no other.
I turn to say something to it,
but the face is empty air.


===============


Words
Paul Monette

It took them five years and cost them
millions of dollars, but they found the cause
of death. Look them up in your World Book
in the Popular Medical Ency-
clopedia. There are no entries for
grief, loneliness, isolation, suicide.
They have three words for it.
More will die without it.


===============


In Memoriam

Submerged in the life of things
The body suffers passively,
The mind contracts.
Nothing occurs, except that when
Walking along the shoulder of the highway
Between Milan and Varese
We are suddenly held back by the knowledge
We are not young. We are shocked, standing aside
To let the wagons pass. We have lost the power
To deceive ourselves, to let sleeping thoughts lie.
A wind tugs, but it passes over. The leaves whirl.
We are not young but
We are like the first fern at springtime to unfold
With undeniable certainty,
Knowing the sun, if nothing else.

Hafiz,
Then there is the exquisite imprisonment of love—
Its tense expectation and expansion.
Now you are beautiful in your happiness.
Now every particle of dust is alive.

Now, simply because one man no longer hides
From his innate magnificence,
The world is a glorious mirror,
Giving back his image to him.

Then,
The eyes darken and a shifting obscurity
Darkens the sun within the mind.
Only the sun slips down, and a wind, the air-stream
Suffering a subtle change of course,
Blows through the cracked and dry lips.

Darkness gathers. The fruit falls.
The skin of a plump breast is no longer tight.
Who would know then what is good to do?
Everything must be relearned.

Only a great love can leave a memory
So rich as to sustain us
When we are almost nothing,
Forgotten by ourselves, by others.

for John B. For me


===============


Transit
Jane Hirshfield

I.

In a dream, you’re only traveling
once, falling, falling,
or, no, in fact, you are
sailing, you’re in a stream
or river, it’s wide but not
wide enough to frighten you.

You’re wearing an outfit
you haven’t put on in years,
a blue sweatshirt and brown
pants and sneakers that are
halfway between new and
comfortable. A woman in a
wetsuit, maybe young, maybe
old, swims by. They say your
mother is somewhere in this
river too. Is it true? you wonder,
but that’s not a question you
ask out loud.

II.

You’re sliding between banks
of rustling grasses and
a stand of slender trees. Their
trunks arch into the light in
unfathomable triumph. Again
the boat slides; for a moment,
the sun and shadow vanish
together, and you float as if
beneath stars. Here, now, is the
still place, or the moment of
stillness, for which you were
waiting. It will come into you,
like water, like breath,
like someone who loves you.


===============


Piazza di Spagna
Elizabeth Bishop

The still-life of the fruit, the glass, the vase,
the hour, its seemliness demands no change.

We ask of art that it shall please and be
changed.  At the fountain's rim the child may see

common-crawl-filtered-hard-p6
http://www.angelfield.com/poetry/Black, flowing backward, the reflection of
his running hair, his outstretched arm, gorged on

pomegranates, oranges, figs
in pewter and vermilion, earth, sky and sea

transfigured.  Surely, this, too, is the essence:
(startled by a brief wind, the water-fall of

roses moves,)
the coming-together of what we see and what we

know, without distortion.  The lover's suicide,
the death of Keats, all those words, tearful and sure,

confused, clear, immoderate, cast
suddenly out of the imagination like so many

nets out to catch the wind—
that urge us, now, to changes, incompleteness,

rage at the impossibility of change.  Outside,
the six times repeated fall, the rush of water

from the six small fountains, playing in arcs
to catch the sea wind, might suggest what is

missing in the still-life at our backs, even
as we read the words: "What could not be

changed must be embittered.  The suddenness
of its departure has the click of a lock.

We see a garden.”
  ("What is any imagined
thing--  the thing that is most true, whatever

the mind can hold--
but something imagined?")  And who, at the

grove's edge, met the eyes of Petrarch?

  ("From this vantage the women go by like giants,
  their heads wreathed with rushes and roses.  The
  clink of their water jugs echoes like bells.")


===============


When the Fish Dies
Fanny Howe

Though nobody dies from drowning on her 
body it’s against nature. What her hands 
did on her was as slow as a dead man 
getting out of his coffin. 
Who’d pull on the shiny sheet he loved best? 
Shreds under fingernails are all she needs to know.

She folds them in like curtains and has not wept 
for a long time. Her last name doesn’t show 
above the sheet which she’s dipped in his woolly silver, 
which she’s left her body full of what was hiding. 
Even the corpse of a fish has faith in her to let it 
float free. The dish in its bone cover is a relief.

Copyright © 1999 by Fanny Howe. Reprinted with permission.

---

huck out.
Main
_______________________________
Created: 10/29/00 Updated: 11/15/00
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Today is Monday, Nov. 15, 1999.
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===============


As for poems, there is perhaps a degree of helpfulness if people use poems in the way that you would use scripture or liturgy or the 'thoughts' of other people which we have already grown familiar with, and which somehow seemed to make sense. And one hopes that that would be a very personal and individual thing, but it could also make sense in the sense of tribal, one could think of tribal communities where there are things which everybody shares together. Of course you would share a poem only as far as you shared its language, but you could try to share it in its meaning. If somebody was ill, or dying, one of the people around them would quote a poem, it would be a poem which was kept alive, just as certain people are kept alive. In the struggle to keep a tradition alive, there have been people who must have been treated like tribal godheads in a sense because they transmitted the wisdom. The continuity of the tribe was completely dependent on the transmission of a certain poetic knowledge which would have been used in a hundred different ways. So it seems to me that in modern conditions, where every level of consciousness is more and more subdivided and broken up, where you can't even look forward to the death of your private self as a kind of consummation or marriage in which you lose yourself in an understanding with the ultimate ground, a unifying experience which would provide a kind of relief from this gigantic turmoil. I can think of people who might quote 'The Second Coming', not because they understood it, but just because they felt it had some sort of a relationship to their distress and their agony. And they would do this by reading it in the same way as 'The Lord is my Shepherd', in the way in which they would read a text which was not strictly in its original language. They would also do it in the way in which you read a melody, and in which they would read it without being able to remember anything but its cadence, and yet its presence was somehow of the same kind as what you would have expected if they had remembered all the words. It would have been a certain presence, a voice which was somehow congenial to the emotional disturbance, and part of the task of people who are poets is to keep a certain confidence alive which is able to keep that kind of confidence alive by their work. If the communal values were stronger, we would try to help people in that way.


===============


Our Marriage
Derek Walcott

You came towards me. I saw the brown hair fall
Open like a fan on the milky way
Twine of the south, the white scarf at your throat
Coiled like a seahorse or the sliding note
Of the saxophone low in the fog. Yes, I can see
That silhouette, the orchid poised like a rebus
Or a bird on a letter, and the palm tree's fan
That sways above the gas-blue cube of the sea.

The way you moved across the lawn that year,
As frail as the wristwatch of stars, and went
Through the sky as the sun went, under the flower
Of fire where if suddenly you should show
Me a leaf, I would follow, so thin you seemed,
And your body might fold like a blade of grass.

But your dress that the sun slowly begins to burn
As you drift between two palm trunks bright as columns,
I thought I would never have known. And the hand
You swayed with pointed me my way. And me alone.
Oh, how I would have followed where you led!
I would have walked a thousand roads to the beach.

That same season in Paris I wandered past
The stalls of livres anciens. Like a stone thrown
By an adolescent's hand, a notebook broke
Its green spine, left poetry on the boulevard.
I tried to read but the sky blew, and like a blown
Bird it would rise again. And I read, you too
Like a star, fall, and is it still December?
Or is it June, and did the orchid you plucked for me,
It is life, life in a handful, and the white bones
Between its petals, are they Paris, poetry, you?


===============


Later the Same Day
Hart Crane

The tolling of an iron bell.
And shadow hours of hands moved round a dial.
The inviolable cycle is complete.
The infinite cycle is complete
in eighty-seven nights.
The fire and the rose are one.


===============


The Widow
Louise Glück

Wretched in the stink of ordinariness,
wretched in the stink of ordinariness
he sits and rocks, the husband.
Watch, God, the husband
in his rolling chair:

memory choked with infants
and tamarinds, bitter
ends to sweet days,
the shine of their hair
in young sun.

The acolyte sings.
Brothers, see the husband,
see his ribs
his baldness, his lost
tribulation,

the shine of their hair in young sun.
Brothers, see the husband
twisted in the guts of God
and begging,
watch him
be the color

of bread, the worm and green branch,
the flesh of lice
the brothers crush beneath their nails.


===============


Second Reply to Koelsch
James Schuyler

Mother is out in the yard in her umpholeum caftan,
she has some flowers in her hand. I can see her
from where I’m writing this. No, I can’t. I’ve seen her
with the flowers, I know she’s somewhere out there.
How amazing it is when our bodies are young
and we have all the time in the world—or almost.
I’ve been writing letters to the worms. Why does nobody
ever mention the worms in those famous burial ceremonies?
Mother is out in the yard in her umpholeum caftan,
yes, there are stars in the poem, and it snowed
yesterday, but really the earth is very close,
the voice is dear, he said modestly. You were a fine baby.
Mother is out in the yard in her umpholeum caftan.
Poor old leggy honeysuckle. Clematis. Begonia.
That famous bunny star. Everything is long gone.
That was a fine poem, she said, but you’re looking better now.
My old lady, the flowers in her hand.


===============


A Blessing
Denise Levertov

The world
is not beautiful,
  not as it is.
  If it were,
    someone
    would have told us,
    it was.

We might have lived
  as in a beauty of perfect event
  and now and
  again
  sat down
  simply to admire.

Instead, this rough
  business. Living rough.
  A dim
  collective
  sense that
  this is not all.

Some faith unfaithful kept trying
  to be faithful.
  Some hope, hopeless,
  is kept hoping.

We turn away, look back
  and the shining
  edifice that was
  there in the water

dissolves, re-forms, and from
  some farther shore
  in a different
  light
  appears.

[Image]

Index of Poem Titles

-   A Blessing, Denise Levertov
-   After Rain, William Stafford
-   An Old Woman’s Winter Night, Robert Bly
-   At the Moving-Picture Show, e.e. cummings
-   Blackberry-Picking, Seamus Heaney
-   Coming Home, Galway Kinnell
-   Desires of Men and Women, Mary Oliver
-   Directions For Using The Poem “Bone Factory,” Philip Levine
-   The Defeated, Linda Gregg
-   Earthworm, Marge Piercy
-   Every Day, Denise Levertov
-   Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour, Wallace Stevens
-   Food, Frederick Henry Hedge
-   For My Son Noah, Billy Collins
-   Frontispiece, Anne Sexton
-   The Good Farmer, Charles Simic
-   The Hand, Octavio Paz
-   I Am Going to Fly, Langston Hughes
-   If It Be Not I, Anonymous
-   I Have a Room All to Myself, Margaret Walker
-   I Hope My Mother Will Be There, Jenny Joseph
-   Instructions for Certain of My Friends, Stephen Dunn
-   June 5, 1971, Jane Kenyon
-   The Landowner, Janet Lewis
-   Letter, Pablo Neruda
-   Litany, Billy Collins
-   Machine Age (in Repose), William Carlos Williams
-   Maggie and Milly and Molly and May, William Butler Yeats
===============


First Day in February

Fine snow falling, you watch,
the first, in the morning;
dog beside you, his thick
curly black fur shining with snow
under porch light, between your hands
and above him, each an 
unbearable field of touch, you're passing
snow through your hands,
and you study it, its strange, 
frosty, numbing beauty, its weight,
odd contours, fractured angles
of fit. And his fur's heavier
for snow, his wet eyes brighter, he has 
never seen this, has no memory
of it, and you both think
suddenly, Yes, it is
something, this moment, however brief,
and the morning will come.


===============


Fanny Fay
C.K. Williams

Say I wish I could die. I can’t
always face her when she’s like this, 
cold and closed and so untouchable.
Just as she can’t find words, she seems
only able to see 
our relation as one of bodies.
Of course, there’s some truth to that.
Our only way to really love 
each other is through the senses.
Like this morning: she began weeping
as she undressed, begging me
not to make love to her. I held her
till she felt warm and soft again.
She hated her body, felt so guilty
about its dark, rude beauty. She’s not
the only one, believe me, I’ve known
other women with the same fear:
that their lush flesh was the cause
of every sin, even those 
committed against them by others.
I’m sure that not every human need
or desire can be satisfied with flesh.
If only I could solve her mystery.
I felt as if some dark curtain
dividing her from me, between
all beings, could be rent in two.
But I couldn’t. I’m not Prometheus.
The storm can’t be induced to move 
in one direction. We loved each other,
say it: in our fashion. How much
is a body with a spirit 
more a person than a spirit
with a body? Say I wish I could die.
Not this. Not a life in which I must 
make love to her. Her dark body.


===============


The Wolf Shall Lie down with the Kid
James Tate

The wolf shall lie down with the kid
the lion eat straw like the ox
the leopard sleep with the goat
the calf and the young lion feed
the calf and the young lion feed together
and a little child lead them

through Isaiah, late September

in Colorado 

the morning is clear as paper
the day’s milk has turned to whey
the peach has fallen from the tree
the early mist separates
the cold tentacles of fog
float through the dusty oleander
here in Tucson 

the inside out of a black orchid
the folded polyp with a thousand mouths
the baffling God of the holophrase
I love you we all go crazy

the earliest light of our children
comes with the broken circle
the cat springs through the garden

If I were to choose
I would live in the sun’s warmth,
its lovely fists, its blue eyes
O wolf, lay down with me
here in this park near the river

O girl, come let’s make love
here on these rocks, stark
in the long shadow of the quarry

in the presence of God
in the red oval
of your mouth, o beautiful girl
the stony garden of the heart

O to become the swift grass of some meadow
to stand up, night, and walk about!
to tap the coffin-wall of the earth
and to bring the very young out
in a musk of animal love 

O wolf, the lion and the gentle snake
the white faces of the lilies
the gentle baby goat 

then here at the mouth of winter
the lifting branches of the fig tree


===============


On Approaching Forty
Billy Collins

Do notpile-youtube-subtitles believe the cliché that age is just a number.
At 30, you’re still young enough to eat lunch
and go for a hike if you don’t mind
passing a couple of guys in their 60s
on the way up.

At 40, you are already over the hill.
Walk in front of a mirror
and see how you’ve aged overnight.

If you haven’t fallen apart by now,
think how much more is in store
once you’re close to 50.

With the arrival of your 60th birthday
you have become a living wake, a blur, a streak,
a fadeout on the movie screen of life.

Welcome to your 70th birthday.
You have now outlived your own past.
You’re probably still alive,
although you are no more than a rumor
to your own children,
and they are also getting old now.

The end is nigh, or as nigh as the years allow.
Let it be swift, a sudden heart attack
or a very small embolism
that propels you on to your conclusion.

If you’re a woman, you can take comfort
in being over 70. Just be sure to stay
out of the way of planes and vehicles,
turn out the lights before you leave a room,
and avoid pickled herring and runny cheese.

If you’re a man and you’re still alive,
be assured that you may soon be gone.
You won’t have to worry about it for long.

As you travel around the track for the final time, 
you might see some people you recognize
from the old days, people like yourself.
Don’t look surprised.

That could be the plot twist in the final act.


===============


from "The Journey"
Mary Oliver

Each night, I tell myself that tomorrow I will know some answers,
my anger will leave me and the ferocious music of it
will be over. But, strangely, I wait a little
for the face to twist again, the viper words
to spring out of the beautiful, deaf mouth,
and the sin of hate to make me blind.

I am not good, that I know, nor like those who think they are good.
Am I worse? What is the measure? But each night
I pray to the mute ear of the universe.
And what answers does it give? Only the increasing
whistle of the wind over the white deserts,
and the moon collecting light in its trembling bowl.


===============


In Praise of Limestone
Wendell Berry

If I had had to choose,
I would have chosen
to be born stone
and enter the world
where everything
that moves has been:
the fox, bird, and mouse,
the jumping worm,
the owl, hawk, and wind,
and the streams, of course,
and the rain—
everything moving
and everything at rest,
arriving from nowhere,
going nowhere,
the grass pushing
out of the ground,
the foxfire[i] running
down the hill,
and me,
a great block
of stone,
nothing but time,
and the moss
growing.


===============


Rejoicing
Marge Piercy

God lit this match
in whose flames we see
our faces burned black.
What is sacred, if not the fire of dawn
in your eyes, the shape of your fingers
more perfect than a praying
in mind or heart? If you
are not the light in the cut branch’s
hard crystal, if you are not the power
to draw down the souls of
vines, their latticed twining
refined into the blood-red wine,
what but a story for children?

For you alone, for you the ravening fox
hid its bones, the shark closed its jaws, the snow
on the winter mountains did not fall.
Before the primate, a creature webbed
and mottled, knuckle-walked upright
from the shore, the reef pulsed with desire.
The striped bass in the mud spawning run
pushed out a million eggs.
With glaucous eye, the enormous crocodile
on the river’s edge paused with his bill in the air
for you. Your name is on his breath.


===============


Consequence
Robin Robertson

It was like a kite
whipping from the grasp
of a child
up to the pinnacle
of a high-tension
wire, where it laddered
the sky with that crack
of its own spine.

How the moon wrenches
from the day
and the heart
from the breast
is a rock that
never cracks
but whose soft
bedstone waits

and holds what
has been entrusted.


===============


Sonnet VI
W. B. Yeats

Lightly come or lightly go:
Though thy heart presage thee woe, 
Lisp so low, the winds shall sleep; 
Round the corner of the hill
Pass and silent be; 
Dark the sun will turn to yellower gold, 
And the prayer thou hast not spoken still unsaid
Shall night say for thee.


===============


Liv Ullmann Reads
J. D. McClatchy

Liv Ullmann reads like her own character in Scenes from a Marriage
About whom Borges wrote: “her gestures had the abstract and artificial look
Of the gestures of mannequins in display windows”
I hear her in my head saying: “There’s something I want to say to you but I don’t know
How to say it.
Words seem so small and stupid
I can’t say it and the words I can say are pathetic
I don’t know what I want to tell you or how I want to tell you
Or if I want to tell you.
I feel this is wrong and I want you to know this is wrong
I want you to know how I feel”

And André Gregory, of course, listens without speaking, in profile,
Thinking she doesn’t understand about the right details in the wrong places,
Wondering if he ought to take her hand to help her across the street,
As she says: “I need you to look at me
Look at me now”

I hear Liv Ullmann’s voice asking him: “What are you thinking?
You see me and you don’t see me.
What are you thinking?
When you look at me I disappear
A part of me disappears”
And so he must turn to face her finally, I think,
Because she keeps saying how she wants to find her “better half”
And he must turn to her, the glass-green eyes fringed by heavy lashes,
Must look into the eyes which answer with her own look
Which she will tell us has the look of a frightened calf
The look she sees in a painting by Masaccio
The face of a dreaming child
Not his sleeping face which is closed to her
But his waking face, she says, which is an open book
His dreaming face
His imagining face
She turns him like a page and asks him to be imaginative

He wants to say to her that they had only a little house
Not a little room. It was real. It was on the real earth.

But she says no

On real earth there is always death or war.

Not an answer

Or rather, he thinks, too much of an answer.

She says no

There is too
===============


The man on the Train
Saul Bellow

All, everyone was in love with her. The women were no less ardent than the men. They either wanted to be like her, or they wanted her. In one way or another, they were influenced by this girl.

She was, I should say, the most innocently corrupt creature you could imagine. She was the pink slipper of the czarina. Her body was an announcement of the end of the old moral order.

On the other hand, her manner of dress was always very proper. But there was something like a crack in the steel of her back. When she turned around, the steel would begin to soften, and you knew the crack was widening. Then, through the crack, you saw the ether. She had on garments like armor, but the armor no longer fitted. Her mother still dressed her, I suppose. You could always hear her saying: ‘Mama, please, I don’t like it. It bothers me.’

It was as if you were living in a society that had been overtaken by alien life. When, for example, she ate something hot, she’d throw her head back and you’d see the flash of the pink interior of her mouth. In such a way, her whole body gave out an alien energy, which would set the room trembling, like a film gone out of control. If a man approached her with lust in his eyes, she’d give him a look that caused him to lose his teeth, and hair, and to age prematurely. But you can’t go on being like that.

She was on the train. Her beauty was so great that it inspired fear. People opened the windows; they couldn’t stand the heat. She was as innocent as the beautiful poises of birds in flight. But she wasn’t a bird; she was fire.

The back of her hand shone with sweat. Her skin was a greenish copper. Her face gleamed as if it had been varnished.

I remembered her in the days when she still played with the other children. A lot of children went with their families on long Sunday excursions in those days. They would walk along the lakeshore, play tag or hide-and-seek, picnic, go swimming. The boys would stay by themselves, making roads for their toy trucks out of pebbles, or they
===============


Beyond the Window Pane
Caroline Kennedy

Beyond the window pane

snow falling
stealthily, silently
filling the world with light.


===============


People Who Died
Jim Dunn

we read in a magazine—the names

of the famous people who died

that week—one was a baseball player

one was a hero from the sixties

one was a woman who refused to be photographed

lying in a hospital bed—

people who died this week

in alphabetical order

from a to z

without knowing about the people who

gave them their fame

then didn’t know it was

what made them famous

and had to take their first job

tired out from a week’s worth of

coping with the crippling exhaustion of

their first kiss

with men who came to them

dressed as the women they

wanted to be

their hair like yours

a woman’s face not theirs

but bigger than all other names

and all the names

that died in the same week

as Robert Jay Mathews

Joan of Arc

which is better: to be

on page five

or to be the page

you go back to again and again

the page that doesn’t move

with the rest of the book?

(We read in a magazine—)

was the man killed in Attica Prison

a week ago or twenty years ago?

they say the will is strong to not forget

but that’s a myth

no one wants to remember

the names of those they

never met

or know what went on behind

the letters and the stone

just wait:

soon we will all be

a good idea

in the beginning—

The the was—

the clamor of the the

kept us from ever being

what we are—

the soft the that

keeps itself for you—

”the cellist of Sarajevo”

the temperature of another country

in another time—

sounds just like Christmas

with presents under trees

a holiday during the holiday season

the columnists explaining

the meaning of the christmas market

for those who can never

travel far away

the sound of the sea

in the same room

the constant sound of

separation from oneself

===============


Morning Song
Linda Pastan

What you have been, and what you have done,
And what you’ve said and what you’ve dreamed and thought,
Floats in a luminous haze here at your side
The vague, uncertain color of a red
Dawn, and distills itself in drops of dew
Upon the pillow. Fragile, unswept,
It trembles with our common, ignorant breath.
Remember, in that light, what you have been.


===============


Mademoiselle B., or The Last Amazon
Linda Pastan

To ride a horse well, I am told, the rider’s weight
should fall forward onto the knees; no part
of the rider should touch the saddle
even when the horse has slowed to a walk,
but for each movement, a different position.
To move her weight in this way and to do it
for hours at a time may seem a simple thing
but, as with the muscles of her hands and thighs,
her strength lay not only in them.

And sometimes she must leap from that uneasy
seat to the ground, while the horse, perhaps,
moved on, and in that way the child discovered
a new alarm, something slightly fiercer
than the fear of falling off; the body’s
sinews must be tuned like her companion’s bow.
Yes, it was true, riding had been a joy,
but the joy had passed into grimness; what
she loved now was a contest with herself,
riding past the hummocks, the mare’s long neck
arched forward like the neck of the fabled swan.


===============


The Moon
Li-Young Lee

For decades a silver river 
flowed through the blue delta 
but its source 
was dryness.

I used to climb the brick path to the orchard 
to seek 
the frame of your mind.

A statue was mounted on a pedestal. 
No one had seen you alive. 
From that height,

in whatever light, the eyes of bronze 
looked as though 
they were gazing inward

at your mystery. I would sit down in silence, 
draw the tips of my fingers 
along the back of your hand,

and disappear with you in your thoughts. 
Years passed, 
and the valley sun 
dried the stone.

Now your eyes have become the river 
streaming toward the land of immortals. 
I come with honey,

bring tribute 
to their slippery banks,

and hold my longing like a bouquet of autumn flowers 
the rain has washed 
or the moon

filled with dew.


===============


Late October
Michael McClure

Now after so many green dry months of fever and
hard work

late October is best: there’s a lot in the woods
to eat, even porridge,

it’s warm but there’s a crackling in the leaves; still
the robin comes to

the porch and holds out his foot.

Daytime’s for love: bright morning, long night.
Late October’s for what’s tough.

To sing something of the majesty and grace of
darkness, even the darkness

inside the self.
The stone is half up at the far end of the field and
a poem which sings,

and the poem has to do with neither the boy nor the
girl, but the fox’s

tail or the color blue.

The bitch will breed or the pups be killed. My wife
is in Virginia with our child.

Which is the most dangerous place in the world to be,
and I want them back.

Love, friendship, intelligence, the will to honesty
must be in opposition with

the danger of the moment.

Looking back: William Carlos Williams and The Wound-
Dresser, when he wrote:

To hate war, you must

first love the women in the beds, the doctor giving them
ice water

to suck.

Take the stiffenings out of the sheets, change the water,
loving them as the poor

and wretched dead

must wish they’d been loved, when they were dying.


===============


Beggar
Kay Ryan

With his left hand between his legs he stands,
his right at the moon.
"Moon! Moon!" he yells.
With his big ugly hat
and his big ugly fingers
and his big ugly voice.

When I pass him, I hold my nose—
and this is our third encounter,
and I'm out of rotten food.


===============


Siren
Joseph Brodsky

We cannot live in a place whose clichés
Become daily more bitter than onion—
This cock of a ballad’s been crowing here
For too long, pointing at hill or dale,
At all my house, and death’s red sail.
To the ultimate white island my one ship
Makes waves around this smirking cape.

I’m ready to sign the oath of banning
“Restorative” ends in which heroes act
As if the stink of a moving’s on their back:
I wish to hear the harmonies of the chorus
Of those who lack their goods, their ships.

On the lawn at the point of land’s last spasm
Once stood a stead where halyards jingled in vain
And an old wife always spoke to her man:
He died after hearing his name sung
By many, and not waiting for other such things.

But me they won’t tempt, despite my being
Son to a land where siren songs are skied,
Neither by singing nor scourges divine.
So, O, O, let them stop seeking signs
Of ships, sleep on, cease to dream,

Their land already bears this stain,
Their alien ages rise in a ruinous rampart.
Time’s over, time-land is green.
My pulse keeps the metronome of the hour—
This is my song of myself.

June 10, 2006. Copyright 2001 by A.C.L.E.
Janice Pariat

I can’t believe what you just wrote. This last night’s tremors
Are real. No beginning, no end. The red sky is trapped
Between the buildings of the city I just love
Because it’s not, could never be, New York or Bombay.
There is no god, they say, in their eyes, in the angle of their hips
Which slant, as they slope forward into night air,
Breasts on firm skirts and hair, greasy and rumpled, in low knots,
Sandal clad, no laughing matter but alive, as on the street they stand
Holding on to an almost beaten look which will burn
Tonight as I climb the stairs after them, to ask
They let me sleep there. For the night, just
===============


Easter
Stanley Kunitz

Freedom the brave song   
of the thickened flute, a row  
of entrancing notes  
with each voice   
lifting to the air 
as every dancer swoons 
with the bear in the honeyed room  
breathing the sweetness in.  
When the sun rose over the edge   
of the world, and the words 
all came true, we stumbled in 
through the diamond morning 
and found the resurrected, the numinous, 
gathered like a great symphony,   
beat of tremendous wings 
beyond our imagining, at once   
incredible and somehow expected.


===============


The Pond
John Ashbery

In the evening they come out and sound the depth
of the pond with long poles. You wouldn’t think
they’d find anything in a place like that,
so shallow, almost invisible and so profligate
that even now at a quarter past five
leaves are already beginning to form
on its surface.
They never change its name,
maybe because its banks are the finest around
for the kind of bathing they favor,
and its bottom the smoothest too,
polished as smooth as a river bottom can be
by the force of waters and winds that act both one
and different. It was a golden age
in which a man was considered to be in good
or bad health from one day to the next,
depending on what he liked in the way of women
and the truth about his illness,
the truth about his children.
In the evening the stretch of grass
between the pond and the houses they live in
is crisscrossed by them, dipped in gold,
or rather in vermilion, before the
fading into the dusk
where only some vegetable arrangements and smoke
are still distinguishable. If you have no light
by which to go on reading this
it must be because your mother has cut the
electricity off, fed up with paying the bill,
and if you have gone to sleep
you were probably right,
considering the dearth of surprises
in this world, and also
the fact that my face has fallen a little too,
my eyes grown tired of expecting too much
of what is the case.
Don’t get up, there’s nothing new.
If you should want a certain book
called Hervé Bazin, for instance,
it’s high up on the top left-hand shelf
of the closet, I saw it there
the last time I was here,
i.e., the day before yesterday,
or else last night,
I forget.


===============


Toad
Marge Piercy

Darling, I know I am your clown, your cabaret,
your beer and pretzels,
your dumb blond,
your bad girl sprawling in a ditch
with smeared lipstick, muddied eyelids
and the buttons ripped off my blouse.
I am your whore with a heart of gold,
the one who never says no, never turns away
demanding her cut of the profits,
her fee for services.
I will be your excuse for not changing jobs,
not looking for work, not signing up for nursing school,
not going to a therapist, not leaving your wife,
not breaking with your old gang, not firing your dealer.
I will be the reason you don’t try, don’t help others,
don’t risk your wallet and self-esteem,
don’t run for mayor,
don’t speak your mind and get called a radical,
don’t come out of the closet,
don’t buck the party line, don’t wear a skirt,
don’t grow your hair,
don’t change your religion, don’t speak English only.

I am the alibi of the American male
who doesn’t dare to vote,
who won’t join a union or a march,
who prefers driving an overheated car
to working on trains in town,
who doesn’t call his mother or even have one,
who doesn’t visit his old dad in the nursing home,
who won’t eat fish, who likes his steak bloody,
who won’t eat anything with a head,
who refuses to wear a bicycle helmet,
who drives his car over the speed limit,
who smokes more than he should, who drinks to get drunk
on weekends, who skis slope steeper than twenty degrees,
who leaves the seat up, who never cleans the toilet,
who doesn’t listen to women, who patronizes a bar
with women in it, who wears leather shoes,
who leaves his gloves on the dashboard,
who fastens his seat belt after he leaves parking
lots, who tries not to stop for pedestrians,
who pees in swimming pools,
who talks to you with his eyes on your chest,
who never calls when he says he will,
who stays out late,
===============


Stop and Think
Robert Hass

Live in the layer, not on the litter. 
Look for the quality of intent 
in whatever is presented for your
consideration.
Expect to find a way, or make one. 
Expect to have to work. 
Companions, books, tools, 
the quality of light and weather, 
skill, courage, wisdom, 
the ability to observe without 
prejudice, 
to listen, to concentrate, 
to fight always for profit
and never for punishment, 
to cherish the life of the earth 
and to be watchful for ways to 
lighten gravity’s footstep—
all these will give you power. 
If the waters are swelled 
with rain and the soils 
are spewed upon the slopes, 
go up on the mountains and watch.
Do not go below the levees. 
You will have enough to do 
and will do it well. 
Knowledge of these things 
will give you your happiness. 
Awareness, in each of these things, 
will give you your dignity. 
Attention in each of them 
will set you in order.


===============


Letter
Sara Teasdale

The night is very clear, and the stars shine
In the heavens afar, and a white moon rises
Above the dark hill. All the flowers are closed;
There is no sound on the night-wind, no sound
But the noise of the water falling over the stones.

Still as a well all the world is sleeping
Above the dark hill. Once a belated flame
Of an old light burns by the hedge, passes;
Once I hear a dog bark, and far off in the town
There is a rumour of people up late,

While the stream is watering my heart and my head
And all my blood. Sleep now, green grass and cool
Water, no leaf stirs in the thick branches,
And the shrouded house sleeps. I am walking
And walking, and am alone with my tears and darkness.


===============


The Dark Stair
from Death in Summer, by Derek Mahon

Well, the future is written
and burnt: there’s a cinder
still glowing on the grass.
I’ve only got to put on
the time-proof slippers
of the old professor,
dress up in my death suit,
the Second Life of Lazarus,
and walk from the Fall
into the still-warm ashes.

It’s a short journey
up the crematorium stairs.
You’re an old hand
at that kind of
beyondness. You shuffle
into the oven chamber,
and they slide you
in and push the button.
I have a poem for you
to read on the way.
It’s only one stanza long:

You can learn to control
your self-conception,
learn to inhabit your whole
body, all of it, free
of the petulant ghost
of the vanquished ego.
The body’s a temple
that’s also the tomb,
so don’t panic and run
if you notice the lid’s shut.
Just lie still on your shelf
in a dream of eternity.

On the right lie the books
as the night-fire works
its way through the introductions,
the headnotes, the forewords,
till it softens the plate
and the light gets into
the poems themselves, it gets
into the poems themselves,
it gets into the poems
themselves. Like the blue
exhalations of summer
which make body and soul
sing along, now the flames
are turning back to ash
in that long slow apotheosis.

Don’t try to escape
the great sizzle and dazzle
by reaching for the light-switch,
the dark won’t let you.
All the double-page spreads
are becoming equidistant
now; the footnotes drift away
on their own burnt-sugar smell,
and the notes at the back
begin to smoulder at last;
the Cambridge Companion,
the Yale Anthology, all
undergo a light, controlled
conflagration; the author photos
begin to curl, and the margins
and page-numbers disappear
as blackness and brightness
reach equilibrium,
a quiet, shadowless
luminousness

staring from
===============


To Shakespeare
Pablo Neruda

When we come to the end of time
you’ll be there,
the great poet of women and men,
plenipotentiary of human voices,
umbrella of winged laughter,
your fertile hair broken down the palace stairs,
your pockets full of ink
and the sea’s breathing at your ribs.

You, my diamond, my thunder, my overflow,
my prince who always, perhaps, won’t.
You’ll break the most wild spines
but you’ll salute the ocean
of infinitesimal suffering.
You’ll close the unbearable divorce
between humans and divine love,
between the human creatures
and the universe.

You, naked spear,
from your stark body we’ll scratch
the body of man and his memories,
and what’s alive, shivers, suffers.
Your golden words will have
the consistency of rain.

The tramp will fall asleep in your footprints,
the white needle of the moon
will write your name in the sky
and the graves will bloom.

And I?
I will be a poet,
a blind poet, of the human soul
from the shadow of the universe.
Of the pebble I want to sing.
The nude honey of a trembling sunrise.

We will walk in the morning
when the day comes to leave
your heart’s blood and the world’s fire,
the instant before dying,
and I will sing the core of fire.
You will remain with unhurried eyelids,
the sky in your cheekbones.

No one will disturb you.
Only the child, laughing and building a ship
from your bones,
will let your grave
and long pain float
to the supreme destiny,
and the great motherhood
of your words
and your stars and poetry
will cross the future
to finally be
a real geography,
a beloved America.


===============


To the White-throated Sparrow
Mary Oliver

Wherever you have fled,
to be alive in the grass and the sun,
it is familiar, isn’t it? 
Your three white notes 
fall upon me like perfect gifts
that I’m not sure I’ve deserved.
Then I can’t tell you
how old I feel
as you sing of summer,
how my heart lies open
like a child’s hand.

It’s such a brief song,
but who knows how much, 
how very much
is contained in it! 
All the hidden hungers, 
the secret grief, 
all the unconfessed
complaints that we carry
in the pigments of our feathers.

Whoever you are, little bird,
sing on, sing on, sing on.
In the name of what I love, 
I’ll scold you
in the name of all the dead
who have wished you well. 
Sing on, little bird, and sing
the song of summer again
for me.

----

Narcissus
Alicia Ostriker

Have you ever seen a boy
Imitating a bird—with half-closed eyes,
A sloping wrist, a torqued spine?

Who looked at the sky upside down
And saw himself in heaven?
Everything began with that—

Our preening, our dresses, the sweet sissiness of the soul.
And then we picked flowers
And offered them to the beautiful people—

Not to the leper, or the man with a clubfoot,
But to the runner with the quick foot,
To the swift and sure.

And when we found a mirror
That was kind, that promised to love us—

What then? We fell asleep. We told the trees our stories.
One man simply stared.
I see him everywhere I look.

It is early spring.
And he’s still waiting for someone to wake him up.

Don’t stand so close to him.
Don’t follow his example. Look up
With open eyes, sweet legs, erect nipples,
Touch the secret centers of the world, and say to no one:
To love a person is to make yourself an acrobat of fire,
A breathing
===============


Lazarus
Franz Wright

He didn’t just rise from the dead—he’d been dead, dead and buried, was
getting old, filling up with water, when he suddenly began to scream.
He came up fighting, screaming, in his shroud; the coffin
splintering, the stone giving way.

Somebody wrapped a blanket around him, led him off.
The sun made him squint,
Jesus was there, then he wasn’t.
Somebody took him to his sister’s, Mary’s house.

Mary held him, held him, looking at him, couldn’t
let go. He sat there looking blankly back
into his sister’s eyes, his sister’s face, listening to
what she was telling him, couldn’t really hear.

He didn’t want to sleep—she lay there watching him,
he opened his eyes at last. She smiled,
leaned over and kissed him on the forehead,
closed her eyes.

When she opened them, he was looking at her
with a look she had never seen before.
The eyes, the expression, of a man
who had been dead and buried, a terrible
unknown man.

He was trying to speak, she started to shiver,
he was shivering, too.
He tried to stand, fell into her arms,
trembling, weeping.

So Mary Magdalene held Lazarus.
He had only half risen from the dead.
Mary Magdalene could not protect him.
His sister could not protect him.

You will not hear his voice again.
At the end, the Romans will drag him
out of a stone hut up in the hills,
beat him, taunt him, break his hands,

his feet, then four of them will take him
up over the rocks by his arms and legs
and throw him off the cliff. Then,
you know,

when he hits the ground, he will break open,
falling forward,

falling all over the ground. And when he hits,
there will be all this dust, then
all this silence, just before
the hot afternoon wind comes and blows it all away.

And then the jackals will come.
They’ll eat him right down to the bones
in a matter of minutes
===============


from “Poem Without a Single Bird in It”
Hayden Carruth

As if all the world were a church
church and not a butcher shop church
church and not an insane asylum church
church and not a lunatic pulpit church
church and not a dull black-and-white print church
church and not a madmen’s gibberish church
church and not a paralytic’s sweaty dribble church
church and not a deaf man’s pantomime church
church and not a sane man’s wordless banter church
church and not a light-addicted babbler church
church and not a town drunk church
church and not an empty church
church and not a rain-bound passenger church
church and not a frantic chair-balancing church
church and not a miserable old man church
church and not a filthy whore church
church and not a fanatic church
church and not a self-pitying impotence church
church and not a dead-heavy church
church and not a hysterical church
church and not an up-and-down church
church and not a single bird in it church


===============


The Day I Didn’t Die
Mary Oliver

We know that we have failed, still
we love the world. A man
standing quietly in a field;
all that he makes or has,
clothes on his back, thoughts
in his heart, a small blue-white
fly visiting his lips now and then—
who could ask for more? You,
out walking in a summer evening,
who unexpectedly see
fire in the windows, a row
of rooms appearing one by one
in a high mansion, and on
a whim break in, discovering
the old furniture, a jar
of wildflowers, the fields
pressed against the glass—
what could you ask more? We
know that we have failed, still
we love the world.

Weeds of the mind,
weeds of the mind:
that’s what
meditation is for.

From the wreckage
of satisfaction,
do not be afraid
to compose
yourself.

Make of yourself
a beautiful ship
with the gifts
of your hand,
and your mind.
Go now into
the dark, go now
into the storm.


===============


The Snake
D. H. Lawrence

Love was the sun,
And his love still the sun.
But the leaves were fallen,
The sun was gone;
Where once the woodland whispered
There were only ashes on the earth
And on the bough.

And tears were quenched with tears,
Their passion spent,
And desire was dead,
And hope was gone;
A last faint flame that lingered
Trembled in his breast;
Grew cold and grey
As the old ash-tree.

Then in a bitter hour
He loved himself no longer,
Having lost his love.
He gained his will to selflessness;
He entered the Order.
Where were once shadows
And the rustling boughs of fire
There lay a dust
Of withered leaves, and perjured solitudes.
Thence he did gain
Utter extinction.

What radiant body shall he have,
After the torch
Of passion burns dead?


===============


Archaics
Forrest Gander

The hand cannot always
mouth its story.

 ̄ōm, / n., humming noise
from bees;

 ̄ōm, / n., you

perceived after

 ̄ōm, / n., taming
of tiger

or, woman

 ̄ōm, / n., all,

unified

 ̄ōm / n. sleep

 ̄ōm, / n., last
breath;

 ̄ōm, / n., this
sound

close to

 ̄ōm / adv., yonder;

 ̄ōm, / n., ocean

take

 ̄ōm / tr., to
enter, take

from

 ̄ōm / n., without

interpretation

 ̄ōm / n., interruption

into

 ̄ōm, / n., extinction

the

 ̄ōm / n., known,

sense

 ̄ōm / n., I

myself

 ̄ōm / tr., to

give

 ̄ōm / n., power

absorbed

into

 ̄ōm / n., divinity;

 ̄ōm / adj., one-

celled

 ̄ōm, / n., this

 ̄ōm / n., I

 ̄ōm / n., repetition;

any
particular
example

 ̄ōm / n., lamp

standing

in

 ̄ōm / n., holy

place

 ̄ōm / n., recognition

within

 ̄ōm / n., soundless

presence

 ̄ōm / n., source,

giver
of life

 ̄ōm / n., harmony

 ̄ōm / n., fusion

of contraries


===============


In questa camera
Valerio Magrelli

In questa camera, in questa oscurità
forse si potrà vedere la luce,
ma la luce tratta come la memoria.
Come i ricordi
sono sospinti da qualcosa di impetuoso
che li incalza.
Dopo essere stati cacciati,
assumono una forma concreta e
assumono un colore concreto.
Forse, anche la luce è qualcosa di concreto.
L’uomo prega di trovarla
ma trova solo l’oscurità.
Una forma di luce si è staccata dalla catena.
Si è staccata, è uscita.


===============


Stephan Crane at Twenty-eight
Anna Akhmatova

During that past winter I stood on your thresholds,
wrapped in a soldier’s tattered capote,
knowing that happiness waits for no man.
And although the wind came rushing through,
and a blast of cold hit me right in the face,
I liked it, feeling somehow that it was a foretaste
of Russia’s winds, a reminder of its snows.

And now all winter long you have been giving me
wonderful readings, saying, “This will have to
be changed!” And here in this car I sit,
and the train barrels on, and I’m holding
a novel, but I can’t bring myself to read it,
looking at you, thinking that we
both love the same Russian language.


===============


Among the Artists
Sonia Sanchez

They come and they go, and we grow older.
Some of the fancy-colored dreams of our youth
Grow pale in our lackluster days.

(I love words, how they are ringed with a halo
Of wind, a light that transforms the word
Into a melody.

I love words, how they call forth images
Like the flesh from its tomb on Easter morn.
I have died, yet I live.

Some of the fancy-colored dreams of our youth
Grow pale in our lackluster days.)
We grow smaller, some older.

We want new dreams, fancy-colored ones,
For our lackluster days,
In which we must live and must die.

Mardi Gras
George Mackay Brown

This is the mirror
in which the Lord’s daughter sees
her own death and the death of her friends.

And God’s illusions were achieved when
her linen like her breasts became dark
with wine and the sweat of the hog that dies
that men may live, the good among them.

All is her universe, self and the flesh,
like a monstrance of crystal and dung
which holds the moon, and all her lust,
through the world in a glory, on the cross.

And in this mirror she sees the moon’s horn
in her lover’s groin, like an early flower
that failed, and found a tunnel, and went in,
and had no eyes, but lies somewhere cool.

Nothing but love was ever lost, ever found.
All the fragments of flesh, howl
in celebration of Jesus’ defeat.

There are diseases, the long tunnel of the abyss
and the saint who burns in a dark forge
for all those precious little prayers.

All of these dances the Lord’s daughter
must perform, and be loved by them
into extinction, into nothingness.

And when she has seen herself whole,
and saved by satyrs, watched in the mud,
from all her squalid virginity,

She may enter, with her friends, her lovers,
into a mystery of all beginnings,
into a door of flesh which is a door
of fluted moonlight like a gleaming nail.

In her pain she has seen a bigger miracle
===============


Stella’s Birthday
Stanley Kunitz

You were born twelve days before the month was out,
the daughter of a marriage that failed.
This saved you from inheriting her name,
and that may have been your salvation, the real salvation,
the breakthrough into new time.

You were not frightened by a name,
the name of the mother and the father.
The cross held no harm.
Your whole life was a meditation on redemption,
even in a pair of slippers,
even over the sink.

The great day came, October 17, 1939.
The child lay shivering, all but nude,
in the reflecting pool of what might have been
a city’s sorrow, the glow of the birthday candles
glowing for her,
the spirit looking out from her eyes.

She was the miracle her father needed
and a radiance that no one could conceal.
Even then her patience was unbounded,
and it gave him the time he needed
to finish the poem that made of her
a person in the world,
a voice in a single cry,
named for the star.

The Stroke
Billy Collins

i had been driving all night
and into the morning
past clapboard houses
drenched in light green moss
like pilgrim tombstones

staring into the white dash
thinking of nothing at all
dozing off in Massachusetts
until I saw
in the headlights
the barn standing upright
at the top of its own hill

like the breast of a great white whale
and underneath the story
of a family named Phelps
who lived, farmed,
died, all there.

So they tell us in the town museum
with baskets, harnesses
the kitchen of what is still
the white farmhouse
at the end of the road

A century of light
falling on the pasture
and the farmer at the table
opening the newspaper
of those times, General Meade
at Gettysburg

But all of this took place
before my house was built
before the land it sits on
was anything at all.

In my lifetime
it has become a place
for letting the mind wander
where white turned to black
became the dark place

the unfinished bedroom
and I had the stroke,
the numbness spreading

===============


Think Not I Am Perverse
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Think not I am too proud, too stricken, and untamed,
To let you see me in my beaten mood,
When all the calm is gone
From life, and passion vexes every mood,
And stormy memories mar
Each cherished pleasure.
Why should I, coward-hearted,
Shift each day’s outfit? I’ve been lonely long.
Let storms but come, and forth I’ll venture in my song.

I tell thee, envious Time, thou canst not trick me so,
With gaping wounds and wrinkles deep and dark,
As with thy stolen hours
To make me gray before my time has come.
Too soon?—’tis strange that on the very day
When Love and I were friends and lovers, childhood playmates,
I should reach back and feel, as far as human ken,
The snow-wreath on my hair, the snow upon my chin.

Children wear their lives, half savage, half divine,
Close gathered up in small content, half blind with tears,
For only childhood knows,
Half anguished by their fears, half dazzled with their dreams.
Ah me! I shall be sorry on that happy day
When God’s child takes me for His child,
And, for that prettiest face,
And, for that flaxen hair, in arms embowered, He draws
With the same smile, me, as He draws our Father’s face.

But how should I forget my hurt,—the bitter cup
Which, having tasted once, am loath to taste again?
Why must I love you best,
When it has brought such loss and terror and unrest?
Yet I cannot choose but love you still the same,
Nor dread to lose, in pain, this my own comrade’s heart.
Death has no terrors now, death has no sting;
No prouder trophy can the Archangel bring
Than that my soul has died
And lives again—to feel your heavenly breath,
And lives again to know your heavenly touch and cling.

Think not I am too proud, too stricken, and untamed
To let you see me in my beaten mood,
When all the calm is gone
From life, and passion vexes every mood,
===============


I Knew a Woman

William Carlos Williams

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. 
Where did I come from, 
and what am I supposed to be doing? 
I have no idea. 
My soul is from somewhere, I’m sure of that, 
and I intend to end up there.

This is what I think. But today 
I feel that I am so much dust 
beneath the feet of my generation. 
A few amorphous members of the lower class.

You think you have a purpose,
but everything your hand touches, 
your being crumbles, your heart breaks. 
I suppose I will die like this,

without dignity, without glory 
and nobody to give me a decent funeral. 
What kind of a world is this? 
And where the hell did I come from? 
(Oct. 1914)

Dear Ms. C—
Please forgive me for not 
having written to you sooner. 
How are you? I have thought of you often 
during the first days of your absence. 
You must be prepared to forget, as if it 
had never happened, to forget all of this. 
I imagine my behavior upon 
your return. All those things will 
have to be forgotten, or at least made 
light of. Write me about your trip.

When I saw you that last evening 
I had an odd feeling. I didn’t know 
what it was. Now, after a few days, 
I think I know: it was an impulse to get 
closer to you, to touch you and kiss you, 
to be affectionate. But you have always been 
sufficiently remote for me to remain 
unsure of you. I don’t know how you 
feel about me.

Do you like me? Do you like to see me? 
Are you interested in me, or am I just 
a useful distraction, a toy with which 
you amuse yourself from time to time? 
I’ll never know the answer, I fear. But 
if you could like me even a little, even if 
it isn’t true, I wish you would say so. 
Every kind word from you means so
===============


i
Bhanu Kapil

the artist should remain on
god’s side
live on silence
grow stronger than air
take inwards the earth
the vowels of the black poor
take inwards the foul slips
the tags. resist the force
of treason

i am accused of self-preservation
i am urged to preserve my
art and make it clean

i am urged to keep the black
poor in place

i am questioned
i am urged to justify my
privilege by working for them

what i am telling you
is that i am not clean
my hands are not clean

this art was not
safe in my hands

it is something. isn’t it?

your craft should be
above everyone
it is more
like the job
of redemption

above everyone

it is more
like the job
of revelation

any good the art
does will not be
done by them
it is a privilege
something for
clean hands

you can
be pretty
just like them

let’s go
don’t raise
that stick again

you are not
above punishment

i was stupid
like you are stupid

i am your daughter
you beat me often

my mother died and no one saw
a cloud cross the moon

i was as wild as you are
wild like the black poor

i did not ask for
cleansing

the mercy
of your art


===============


(summer night) in abandoned garden
Shusaku Endo

Children’s voices!—in the night,
deep grass below,
a mosquito net on top...
and through the mesh
above the children’s chorus...
water and sky...

The grandfather in a leggings
and a night robe,
let’s us in—

and so we all escaped from the night
which seemed to be only ours,
altogether ours.

The mother who stayed up for us,
the father, asleep
in the mosquito net...
they don’t matter at all:
with the comfort of being with many,
we lose our fear of death.

Invisible hand,
as though from within the flock
of herons,
stops a blade of grass.
The moon’s dew
comes down as
a white cloud...
Our breath
mingles with the garden—
Suddenly,
in the dark without
even stars,
we feel the vast
fields of time.

We watch,
beneath the cloud,
the herons,
in their tens of thousands,
rise into the sky.

The whole
beautiful moonless night
floats
above the deep
grass...
I fear death,
but
the night
that will not last
enthralls me...
How pale
death is,
and how she hates the sun!

Within the mosquito net
We, too, have lost
our specialness.
We, too, with the water,
are tangled, meshed,
within the world.
We, too, have come
to die.

Listen,
the other voices...
Lying close
to death’s door...
Prayers
for all beings—
monkeys, horses,
grass, trees...

For all the things
that I will never see again.


===============


Solitude
Irving Layton

A crazy old man who walks the hills alone
And whispers to himself and stops to look
At a deerfly stuck in a spider’s web
And writes a poem on a tree with his knife:
He would have liked to have been a sailor,
An adventurer, to see the world
And write about the intolerable light
Of the tropics, about strange people
He got to know on some South Sea island,
How they took him into their homes,
Treated him like their own and taught him
Secrets no outsider had ever been told.

He would have liked to have been a hero:
He would have liked to have been everything
That life denied him, for life denied him
Everything, even love. He has been alone
Ever since the age of fifteen. All that’s left
Is his broken body, his axe and the ground,
And his enormous dreams his walkie-talkie,
And the foxtails in his garden, and of course,
The blank-verse epic poem on which he works,
Year in, year out, filling one exercise book
After another with his spidery handwriting,
Day in, day out, sitting by the south window
In his cold shack, overlooking the lake.
But there is more to this story than
That of the crazy old man who goes mad
Writing and waiting for the end to come,
For one day when he’s working in the clearing
In front of his house, chopping
A stick of firewood and listening to CBC
And sighing at the weather forecast
For skiers and outdoor lovers, he happens to
Look up, and he sees among the naked branches
A young girl, naked too, she’s been swimming
In the lake, and she’s climbing up on a rock
To dry off. The old man drops his axe,
Whistles through his fingers, and calls out:
“Hey you, Miss!” The girl turns at the sound
Of his hoarse voice, gives him a lazy smile,
And then stands on one foot, like a crane.


===============


A Wartime Elegy
Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi

In the morning of the world they were young
Reading the news on flat screens. While I slept,
my library grew on the distant moon,
adolescent towns grew overground.
In my dream a girl said: The boy with one hand
is the symbol of a time to come.
In the morning of the world they were young
As bees, their sweet bodies engraved with tattoos.
I was a dark earpiece hooked on the wall.
My grandpa takes me to the sunken arcades.
We play a game he calls the lion-a-hundred-paces.
In the morning of the world they were young
And we read their almanacs under oil-cloth
With skins half-burned by the heavy sun,
With eyes blurred by the fluorescent lights.
In the morning of the world they were young
As children dressed up for carnivals.
I was half asleep. I saw their faces.
Their skulls were filled with sand.
In the morning of the world they were young
Reading the news on flat screens
Without surmise, waiting.
What will they see when the moon rises?
In the morning of the world they were young.
In the morning of the world they were young.
In the morning of the world they were young.


===============


Lateral
Alicia Ostriker

The heart, two small fish, three bubbles to our right,
flick out of the picture. This is ordinary, we say
with our unworthy lips. Such quiet words, a knock
on the door of consciousness. We open the door
and let our lives flood by as water erodes stone
down to dust, down to the final skull, all eye-sockets
and lipless grin. Who needs so many things to die by.
Is that what we are counting on, the death of a thing?
The placental dark lake, starless and numberless,
rising toward the mountain of dead children,
what’s left but an undulant skeleton, flowers for the dead
people, the war dead, the murdered orphans,
the bullet-ridden lovers, the martyred refugees.
O count them. There are a million million million.
I am the left kidney inside a boy of ten.


===============


Sixteen
Anna Swir

I looked
into your eyes
and saw a beach
and as the cold
waves, calmed by
the hot sun,
licked the
sand...

So I played
with your lips,
catching the
rough wet sparks...


===============


Animula
GK Chesterton

Ah, whence can it have come to us -- this single soul, 
This microscopic tittle of consciousness? 
How did it wend from the vortex and duck again
Back to our narrower thoughts?

There are black millers that weave perpetual arms
In a luminous and incessant ring; and there are ants 
In an ant-hill, like steel wires, cables, chains,
With one mind always moving.

But we, if we move, move here or there, and you know whether we go;
But we know not what goal
There is for the drifting of this single soul.

How could it have been made of old
When stars were not yet born
To shake their crystal through the skies and show
That all things are possible?

It may be it was made by God on the first Easter morn
With the golden spark
Of the resurrection of the natural sun.

It may be it was made of the night, the little dark,
The folded flower, the crystal of the fountain;
Or it was made with the first dropped stone
Of the Tower of Babel,

When the dawn was dark with the first unreasoning man.
Whatever it is, this flashing fly
Grows bolder as we die.
It makes our thoughts to be seen
By men like gods, if it be there.

It had to see itself ere it could be; 
It had to know itself; 
And this is what we mean by ourselves; 
But whence came this strange nature?

Most like a crystal-gazer's vision, clear and bright,
And as unnatural as agate,
As if in truth we were all of us one light.

What if the man we call a degenerate
Be more than one of us?
What if we are all of us together
Both creator and hell?

Waking upon my bed
I thought my ears had heard
My soul begin to go
Down steps of stone.

I knew I had a soul
Because of the stone steps.
One steps with care
If one goes down alone.

I wonder where my soul
Came from and where it is.
It must be out of sight
Behind the stone.

Another must be there
Who caught it
===============


Song of the Doves in Their Cote
Barbara Guest

They face one another
and coo.
Are they able
to see
the other in
his
existence?

Maybe
after the sun
is down
they wake up
enlivened
come forward
no longer wearing
the life
of a dove
but a silence
born
an exaltation
of a
moment
in thought.

I know
they feel the wind
but not
in the world.

-

from If I Had Two Wings
Anne Carson

BEFORE THE MONSTERS

If I had two wings
and a wooden leg
I would fly like a bottle
fly like a bed
I would fly to my bed
and lie like a dog
and lie on my back
with my wooden leg
to stare at the ceiling
and tremble my wing

GOLDEN DOGS OF ASIA

Come away, Death,
I am ready for you.
I have eaten my mushrooms.

The savor is bitter but good.
I knew when I picked them
they would shorten my life
by several days.
For Death is faster than mushrooms.

Now I accept Death
as a lover
I want to rush toward
as a dog on a white summer night
rushes toward the open door

SHANTY THE FLOATING ENSEMBLE

I will have a body
And there will be all sorts of fur and leathers
I will be all sorts of fur and leathers
I will be dangerous and broken up
but I will keep
every great desire

I will be made of things I touch
all your things
I will have all things for my goodness
and I will still
love you

I will look at you from the corners of things
from the keyhole
and the surface of the ceiling
I will look at you
on every inch of the window
I will ride in on a shoe
on a bra
a rocket
in an eye

Never read a book of unwritten poems.

There was a plate of lentils on the doorstep.

There was a man in the balcony, dying of thirst.

There was a telegram with a very important message.

There were bright doors, small rooms.

I wanted all this.

A golden dog at
===============


Mirror

Proserpina 
Sometimes I am amazed
That I can find my way
Down these cold stone hallways.
Sometimes, I lose myself
In the tumult of scarves and jewels.
They blind me, carry me away.
I never know which rooms 
Lead to which, and where
All the mirrors are hung.

But a monster lives inside them,
With marble hair, ivory eyes,
His face filled with shadows,
His mind filled with claws.
Do you see him? He howls, 
He is all she sees
When she looks in.

Sometimes, I feel so alone,
Sitting on cold marble thrones
In empty rooms with bare floors
And smashed mirrors.
Do you see him?
He can’t see himself.


===============


History
Sharon Olds

How odd to have lived in the same country
your whole life, and to be the citizen of no community,
to have lost your sense of the intricate
bendings of language, the lessons of poems
(your own, those of others)--to have lost
the immaterial sense of who you are,
of which side of the bed you get out on in the morning.
I am lost, but I would be lost anywhere.
This world gives the mad no place to hide.
This is a world where families stand helpless
as their son goes blind or their daughter stops speaking;
where mullahs spew hatred and the Pope can’t say women
have souls--how odd and terrifying,
that death, which is the great opposite of love,
is still so deeply natural,
that it requires a supernatural force to conceive of the eternal.


===============


Two years ago, I had a darling boy. I think he was very wonderful. I love him very much. When I had him, I was very happy. I was happy one week. Then I was unhappy two years. Now I am very happy again. I like this very much.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
When I have fears
That I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d
My teeming brain
Jane Kajava
<?xml:namespace prefix = o />

Related
fiction:
John Collier on An Ark for the Poor
William Faulkner's "The Bear"
poetry:
Annabel Lee
Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
A Child's Garden of Verses
The Tyger
The Minstrel Boy
The Walrus and the Carpenter
other writings:
Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet
More reading:
The Raven
The Power of Words
Hoodwinking the Great Spirit
Discover Ayn Rand's Essay on Literature
July 17, 2000
Arthur Green: Follow a Rabbi
Van Morrison: Into the Mystic
I'm the Scrum Master and I was your scrum half and I could pass some hoop on the fly.
—Nintendo Mario Teaches English, 2010
The last time I saw her she was eating ice cream, then she gave me a kiss, then she died.
—Woody Allen, Play It Again, Sam, 1966
and I am telling you:
I have circled the world and come to its end
looking for myself.
But I will never find me
among my memories
Like a sheet of rain blown in from the sea
They pass through me and escape again
to nowhere.
Vitaly Bianki, translated by W. S. Merwin, from A Hermitage, 1990
The last words of Truman Capote, spoken to his friend Anjelica Huston:
"Hello, Honey. It's good to be with you."
The first words spoken by Enrico Fermi on walking into Chicago Pile 1 at the University of Chicago, 2:25 a.m., December 2, 1942:
"Do you realize that the first time Chicago was destroyed, it was by a fire?"
Crap. I gotta stop.
—An out-
===============


In No Strange Land
Edward Hirsch

They come as love-lyric roosters and devourer,
the hooded angel of cholera, the flying goat.
On the weathered walls of the volcanic moonscape, 
we find poems of upheaval, disaster, and heartbreak.
The bust of the great physician cured the gangrenous king,
the primal shaman shaved the Etruscan swan-goddess.
You took my hand at the Heracles Museum and led me out 
into the sunshine. You walked with me to the center of the Acropolis 
and read me some lines from Book X of the Odyssey.
I was so happy at your side, honey, sweetie.
The birds were flying in air over Athens.
I reached for you, held you, held you.

I recited a dream I had a few nights before.
You asked if I had ever been to Greece and I told you no,
I hadn’t been to Greece. I waited a long time to come.
It was late afternoon. We were walking hand in hand
over broken marble and among the shadows of statues.
I could hear the ilex trees and the chickens clucking on the far side
of the Parthenon, and we wandered all afternoon
through fields of muffled light and stone.


===============


The Invention of Glass
Billy Collins

How glass changes sunlight into a room!
How it turns a cold room into a greenhouse, 
lets roses grow there like tropic blooms, 
red and yellow, brick red and deep

pink-orange, the way light blushes through
the tiny veins of a living leaf, 
wells up in panes of glass like sap,
the heavy sweetness of a rose at noon.

We travel the world from climate to climate, 
we bring our light requirements with us,
take our well-known needs and rough them
into shape, hammer them into panes.

And then, just for a few years, we’ve
got ourselves a greenhouse, set in a yard, 
a fragrant alternative to the home
the way a lamp is to the day.

And we stand there each evening, in the light
that is not from above or from behind but
from our own wonderful fruit, exquisitely
tamed and taken into ourselves.


===============


Voyages
Louis MacNeice

I

I read you in the smoke that hung about the kitchen,
Or when the lamp was brightening its halo of moths:
And in the solitude that followed after supper,
When you and I were locked in conversation.
We looked through the large window and saw the garden
Lay beautiful and unconscious in the mist.
And when again you were beside me on the sofa
I read you once more in the memory of that landscape.

I read you in the public gardens when the children
Were flying their toy balloons and being important.
The bumble bees hummed as they staggered among the flowers,
And the tennis balls were strung along the netting.
For many years after you died I looked for you
In people’s eyes and in other women’s faces.
But to find you was difficult and to hold you more difficult.
And being without you was the easiest of all places.

This morning I woke in your arms and read you
In the lines of your face, in your eyes, and in your hands.
Remembering our strange life in this unusual place,
Woke my imagination through my flesh,
And for a little while I could say that I was happy,
But I knew it was a lie and could not deceive myself.
My hands lay in your hands and they felt the blood running
Together in the same wound and the same prison.


===============


Afternoon with Emily
Theodore Roethke

In the afternoon they came back 
from the cemetery and she said she was tired. 
They sat on the porch, friends of her youth, 
And talked of the old days, the old days, 
until the sun went down. 
The air was soft and they were glad. 
And the young women forgot the dark dove 
that flies out of the heart and flutters, 
flutters in the mind, the little damp seeds 
of madness strewn about the room. 
It was not until the sun went down 
that they remembered the other one, 
the first one, and the tears streamed down 
their gaunt faces and they groped for each other, 
embraced, and, in a single mind, 
proceeded inside the tomb.


===============


Study of History
Robert Pinsky

Even with computers
Our knowledge doesn’t increase in proportion to the amount
Of what we know.

You could know the locations and orbits
Of every microbe in a drop of water from the Ganges
Without knowing the current politics of India.

The tiny puffball swaying
On a tree in the breeze is luminous and vulnerable
And looks at us.

History is the mind distancing
Itself from what it knows, not proportional to what it knows.
It builds slowly, the spiral stair, the little languages.

What are we trying to make up
Our minds about? The nature of the general?
Is history a progress, a plan, a cycle, an accident?

A history of thought, history
As thought—Who is the maker of an argument?
What is the nature of time?

Earth’s second atmosphere, the oxygen
We breathe, was made by tiny plants
That appeared suddenly, half a billion years ago.

Tiny shifts in the earth’s orbit
May have brought sunlight and warmth to the planet’s surface
And started the clock, the celebration.

Life celebrates itself—a leaf,
A newborn mouse—the poet’s insight and inspiration
Embodied in a sparrow.

Each of us embodies the large, flowing
Crowds of heroes and rogues, dreamers and leaders,
Lost people, the solitary.

More comes into our minds
Than we can say; the one we choose to say it for us
Stands up on the hill in a wind.

These are the contemplations
That make up the world’s mind. Where do you see yourself
In the scheme of things?


===============


The Woman Speaks
Louise Gluck

I recognize the stone and the woman.
Light-headed, I follow the rock’s ravines
in the directions she’s facing, ignoring
the naked flank and the tree roots curled up
like sea creatures. Now I am looking down
the wrong end of the animal’s body,
remembering love by counting the pores
on my thighs. You handed me a mirror
I threw it away. Did you think I could face
two serious eyes, two mouths with so much to say
speaking their own language
as if they did not recognize me? 
I close mine to the serpents’ nest;
leave the sacrifice to its stones.


===============


The School
Leonora Carrington

There are endless harlequinades of sighs. 
I am in love with three women. 
The city trembles like a dying hen; 
high, thin thunder. The night is falling. 
The river runs to the sea.

I wake up on my ship and I do not know where

we are headed. I listen to the rustling

of trees in the void. 
I eat the heart of a toad and read in a small book
written by my forefather the Gallic Wars.
The eternal conversation, joined by the wind,

of women who have gone insane, 
the sweetness of balls of honey on the edge

of the blade. 
Far away, my son tries to kill himself

playing alone on the great staircase 
of our house. 
The heaviness of the bells, the cold blood

of the lamb, the great ship takes off again. 
My heart races.


===============


Envoy
Edna St. Vincent Millay

From The Hippocratic Oath

Now from my brow the dew of another dawn
Brushes my flesh; I feel a wind that blows
From many regions; God, if this must be
Foreknowledge of the life to come, I know
Already how the sicknesses will rack
Those cleansed frames, and from what misery
I shall deliver them.  Oh, give me strength
In my great purpose; fill my heart with light
To see Your path; give me compassion keen
For all that suffer; give me, Lord, the sense
To know the times, what they require of me.
Oh, let not love nor hope be lulled asleep,
And drive me not to strive in darkness yet
Nor trust Your shadow in a vacant space!


===============


The Dual
Kevin Young

you woke up sad and it was dark outside.
I moved close.
The sheets, wet with your sweat, pulled and tugged
against our so-distant skin,
and we could not get enough light
against the night sky or into the room
(a candle and an overflowing pool of wax
do that). I knew you had the cure
for all this sullied quiet. I only thought
to keep you near.
I want to be forever found in your head
like you
in mine. To wake up and see you tired of seeing me.
At least together we wake up and look down
at our bodies, tan as eyelids and open
in sheets the color of bathwater, think
together,
Well, here we are again. We are
awake
at the precipice together. We can ask
ourselves: where is everything
what
is the use of this. Though we wish
ourselves asleep.
Tonight, it’s better to wish ourselves lost
to each other. We keep each other awake
and safe from this life
we have invented
and can never stop inventing.


===============


4th stanza from "Dream Song 14"
John Berryman

You have had enough. You are essentially
a saint. You are well enough acquainted with Evil
to call your brother by his first name, to regard
his—its—monstrosities with pity, if not charity.
Isnt it enough that virtue holds the middle?
Dont think me harsh, child, but you have been cunning.
You should have been told long ago,
now here is a bed which passion has never slept in.

No, you shouldn’t take it personally, or lonely;
I know you remember    truthfully    yr frauds,
no point in saying you are different now,
or how. What you have done, you have done,
in full consciousness. It does not matter; it was you.
Never mind any more about it, maybe there was nothing.

Never mind. I wish you could forget. Oh I wish you could forget.
Ah get lost, sit around the room forgetting
marriage and Russia and the life here,
that is, where we are. Me, too. Me, too, once.
Dont forget, dont forget the hands that loved you;
I too, more than anyone on earth, Me, more than God,
that is the truth. Forget for twenty-four hours,
but not the incredible present.


===============


Entering the Kingdom
Billy Collins

This is the Hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow —
First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —

— Emily Dickinson

Now we are on the final slope and the poet
scoops us up and throws us down
so we are flying headlong into time and then
the ending,
whispered with time’s faint hiss as if we are
speeding over sleeping earth, or just falling,
the final words shape a cushioned world as we
sink in,
without struggle, almost without awareness
that something is over.

Let us admit it.
Time is real. We are in time, and time ends.
Hear that sighing? It is the sound
of poems unread, of selves unborn, of flowers
unnamed and unknown,
diminishing like snowflakes in the sun
that melt and are not.

But we get the distant music. It drifts up
and joins the faint crackling of static.
So we may continue now — we may continue here,
awake, our arms out, our feet lifting slowly,
as we begin the long drift downward,
slowly rotating, gradually gaining speed,
into the sea-hushed blossoming kingdom,
into the earthly powers,
into the fish-clawed arms of that other sea
where an inch of water is an inch of sky.


===============


To David Young
Elizabeth Bishop

Of never having seen just that hawk veering
over and over in precisely that arc
(though perhaps no more than a winter wisp
of river fog) until now we behold
the perfect curvature—so swift and sure
the unbelieving heart stands still. And still
he makes the heart stand still, this hunter—or,
rather, the breath; for who could breathe as he
turns and turns back, disdaining prey or perch,
no more to dive than drift, straight-shafted through
the center of all tension, at each pause
the consummate beat and breaker of his past,
present, future, just this shadow, weight,
rigor, and gesture poised, then sweeping on
his way, whom now we find is no more that
familiar neighbor hawk, most like any small
thing raised uneasy in our human sight
to swoop and pounce, perhaps, or be itself.
No, rather the symbol of everything
that flies our minds, this meteoric touch,
we cannot know it, does not know itself,
it is the falling fire and we the cold:
the ancient, singular will to fly, the longing,
the mortal, lonely daring that lives beyond
appearance, name, cry, shape, and history.


===============


Absalom and Achitophel (Excerpt)
John Dryden

“When these dread words are read among the Jews, 
Let them in consternation melt, and mourn: 
If aught could save our nation’s woes from growing, 
We might it soon have known, by David’s flying:
David, of all my sons most dread to me; 
And who had so defiled his father’s chair. 
Not so defiled, as by his impious war, 
Stained with the blood of my allies, and dearer 
As their defence was to me than mine own; 
In my own kingdom too advanced so high, 
That half the world with rites and honors great 
Did tremble at the glories of his state. 
Had he been dark and poor, he had in patience 
Endured the shock; and with his nights and days, 
Each minute undergone the weight of years,
His far less noble brother prov’d his worth. 
The thought of this would soon have driven him forth 
To seek some distant exile in his grief.
“But Rachael, to whom nothing less would serve, 
Than to give Fortune every weight in nature; 
Raising his grandeur high above his fall, 
And by those crimes which seem to bring him low, 
Seeming the only persons guiltless of them, 
And rancorous foes in worthiest places placed 
Evanished in both, as worms in narrow graves: 
Worms, which a paradoxical law brings forth, 
Whose quarries never burst with these their burthens. 
For the poor quieted, but not content;
Dwindled and lost, as in a quicksand’s breast, 
Which hurls them to the bottom when it casts; 
But what hope she should lavish in her lavish heart, 
If his repentance’s loss of honour found, 
As by their ruins who repent too late: 
“But since his flight she must herself approve, 
What chance was left but David must remove? 
And she herself so much of his disease 
Infected, that the head of all her joys 
Was to enjoy his safety; who, to gain 
This end,
===============


Last Poem
Juan Ramón Jiménez

O do not leave me alone . . .
the God was named and was alone
and the Virgin from the cross
and Christ, and the whole Crucifixion
and Christ upon the Cross, and Christ
and from all times and all races
in the clear secret stone
in the center of the world
the tiny crying of the child


===============


Lucifer in Starlight
George Meredith

Thrown by my horse, my head so bright
With real adoration; where
The glare of change,
And that abysmal world's subsiding, and
My demon's respiration in my lungs,
Dissolved and wiped me out, in that
Organic elixir!

And who of you who may behold
This childishness of a genius raised
In the ancient atmosphere of mythologic lives,
In a modern sky of inference?
Not that I was a top all handy and revolved,
But the quicksilver was the lordlier part of me,
Weaving and being woven.

One who went with the flow,
To and fro, with a fluxing wistfulness,
Compelled to breathe through a reed of illusion,
Forcing the stuff of illusion to serve.

The imagination of nature
Had wrought its cunning substitution well:
So that
He seemed to be experiencing human pain,
Torture, mortality, mutability.

All I had of you,
My tainted diaphane,
Would run away from me, and return again.
Oh, talk about it!
It may be an echo, but there is, there is
In the mere echo, an echo of an echo.

So, great or small, it is delicious
To find one's self treated as a god or boy,
Believed in on one's own terms.
I saw my own smoke moving upwards—
And now from the tumult of brightening nothing
I rarefy the tempestuous and blind,
Until my small place in the balance of things,
Cools as in golden space I dissolve.


===============


“Everyone Is Reading the Blue Book” (from The Art of Fiction No. 37)
John Gardner

I wonder if a poem would be stronger if it were not an anecdote,
if it could somehow just lay back and dream like a crocodile
while the mind still recognizes what’s going on,
if the words spoke just as a spirit might to that very spirit
(as, let’s say, a dream itself speaks). What happens then is
that many small thoughts begin, linked one to another,
no longer blocking each other out,
which could otherwise distract us so we don’t understand
or take in or begin to piece the fragments together.
As in a poem, if the mind doesn’t rush to pieces the work
at once,
and though we might know we were to stop,
begin to pay attention, and take in what it is trying to do,
trying to turn to us.

So it really isn’t the choice of words at all, is it?
No, no more than the colors with which one paints. It’s
what is being said
within those chosen lines that is important.
Because every poem is trying to turn itself to the reader,
it is by its very nature a direct appeal from one soul to another.
Because, I must tell you, Mr. Eliot is dead,
and we don’t want anyone else to put us into the position
of listening to
the poet talking to himself. The figure is gone. So that
everything’s direct address
and infinite in appeal. Every person the poet might ever know
could understand the poem, had they the mind to.
Is that what you mean, Father?
Yes, that’s how I imagine it, much the same.
Everyone is reading the blue book. In the case of poetry,
I believe, it becomes an endeavor, no matter what else
one might say of it,
to invite that closer communion between writer and reader.

[Part 5] Trio for Two Girls and a Boy
Robert Lowell

A great clap of thunder, and April’s over!
It stutters, it flows, the springs in the mind,
deep waters call up a weather of islands,
a wild summer breaks into the woods.
Then,
driving down to the sound, dazzle of sails
over the
===============


Grand Things
Jesse Millner

Walking around alone last night I heard
a strange music, and came on the town
gardens where rocked with his squadron of friends
the young boy of a stutter, the goal keeper.
Someone played an acoustic guitar,
someone else sang a song of the pale horse.
I was old for them, out of the world, but there
was no one walking the streets who didn’t need
a soul, my vanished love now, my heart
once, in need of some rescue. The music
of his voice was fuller, truer than any
born here, the mouth of my boy brother’s star
crashing in the dark. O boys, I know
where darkness thrives, how much splendor lies
inside our common ecstasy, our grief,
how the quiet God weeps on the morning’s edge.


===============


Omphalos
Jack Gilbert

All his life he loved the road, the corner turn,
the faraway, the event still happening
on the edge of town.

All his life the sight of a car coming down the road
made him pause and say, “Where are you going?
What are you carrying?

Is there some hope for me to carry it,
this burden that you drop off when we meet?”
All his life.

All his life he felt it coming,
not a choice but a necessity.
He arrived at the corner before there was any corner,
standing alone in the country waiting for the Greeks,
waiting for the Renaissance, waiting for Columbus,

he opened his eyes to a world of possibilities,
he died living with the desperate longing,
smelling the morning rising and the land it comes from.
I was born on the road, nothing to do with him.
I’m on my way to the future, I don’t look for him
on the road or among the drowned fishermen at sea.
I go to the side and the ones who are not arriving,
and I know who the body belongs to—
not the black oak or old stone walls,
not the white elm—it’s no part of the morning coming.
This is the body that went away,
turned to ash at the side of the road,
the lover of cities who turned to stone at the sight of a bridge,
the teller of tales who walked through my life like the wind,
the woman who laughed like a wave and cried like the rain.


===============


Being There Together
Diane Lockward

We are lying together in the dark
sharing a joint,
sipping riesling, talking about
when to take  our clothes off. 
Our bed is a pool on a rainy day. 
We could slide under the sheets
and sail away on them.
We  don’t need sex.
We need this – 
our fingers playing accordion
against the edges of our 
wine glasses, 
our bodies whispering on the bed.
It’s one part masturbation,
one part best friendship.
You don’t want to finish this
magnificent poem
any more than I want to stop
drinking wine.

Later, after you’ve left,
I will light a candle
and do this by myself,
until the moment 
when our bodies
become the piano,
our hips playing from bar to bar
as notes turn into music.


===============


The Dream
John Berryman

I stood in the falling snow in a long black coat
waiting for the lion to settle down for the night.
“But will you promise not to go on to the girl?”
she asked, 
“if I give up now?” And so I promised her.

I left the house and began to cross a long white field,
turned, and walked back on my tracks, and looked in
at the lighted snow-window. She was bent over her sewing
watching me.
I climbed the hill between the sheep, wading their black-
lined bodies,
and followed a narrow road towards the wall of mountains.

But the white morning was warm. When I reached the woods
I knew why I was alone. The snow began to fall
with a strange softness. Then far away the long stick cracked 
and the lion came running to me with his eyes burned out,
his mouth open wide, in a panic of homage, stumbling and
blind.

I was the only one he saw now. The hunt was over.
I was the king of the beasts.

I bent to quiet him with my hands and then I saw a young
woman,
my contemporary, down in the field, watching us from a
great distance.
We regarded each other. It was evident from her expression
that she envied me,
but that she felt no surprise.
“You must be used to it,” I shouted, “have you
always been so far away?” 
“I am a peasant, sir,” she said, “and have never been
anything else.”


===============


In the Room at Midnight
Samuel Coleridge

Sister, my sister, oh soften’d heart,
How dear your gifts! Those flowery hair-clips,
the little breasts, and all those trinkets
that you place on the altar of love’s temple.

Gifts of how many and many an hour!
Gifts given with prayer, with joy, with weeping,
loving gifts that have strengthened your young arms
to break them in twain. Or, perhaps, you mean to say
You have another—ah, so good, so willing—
to delight your soul with gifts as these.

Ah, who is this? Another, and another,
and one more, whom none behold but you!
But she can never in truth and love
give you a gift like those which I have given.

What is that flowing from your lifted finger?
Do you not feel your strength running within it?
Look now at that fair image, see what it is
you have shaken from the sweet hand of the fair lady.

Ah, now my gaze is darkened and my heart’s beatings
do not go forth—it is all a wilderness!
On the back of a black, black wind, I cannot
see where the dead are flying. Are you there?


===============


some of these were hard, but in the end, they came.
HEY! BAY AREA/SLOBO!! EATER BOOK CLUB PARTY!
nov 4, 2014 07:30 pm
HARD CRUNCH CAFE
35 E. 20TH st. SF
free beer, books and dj
2lbt
eater magazine
and me
reading/on stage
thursday
11.6
doors @7:30pm
readings start at 8
come!!
CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS
come to tokyo on
nov 7
november 2, 2014 03:48 pm
i will be in tokyo on nov 7. i do not read in tokyo.
book the day! for a reading in moscow on dec 20, 2015!
hope to see you!
LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO on SAT 11.08!!!
read with Kevin Killian and TWO LBT's
TICKETS AVAILABLE NOW!
OVERVIEW:
Saturday November 8th, 2014
8pm Performance time/doors open at 7:30pm
The Bay Area's leading poesy-lovers and shameless enthusiasts of the "out-loud" will unite and read from their recent books for this annual night of poetry celebrations. Join us for the second installment of the RAD reading series at The San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design!
The Night of Poetry and Wine: a reading & open house in celebration of the publication of my latest book of poems, I Don't Do It For You. Get your face in my book! The program will include poetry readings, fun and games, wine, and snacks!
WHERE: San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design
2569 Third Street (between 22nd & 23rd), San Francisco, CA 94107
WHEN: Saturday November 8th, 2014
(8pm - 10pm)
TICKETS: http://brownpapertickets.com/event/868082
After the event, there will be a book signing and Q&A.
speaker lineup:
Kate Braverman
Kevin Killian
Rachel Levitsky
Kelsey Street Press
Jason Liebert
Amelia Bentley
Christopher Wagstaff
________________
Featured books:
Kate Braverman's latest novel, "Lithium for Medea" (City Lights) explores
===============


Not to Live
Harold Brodkey

Not to live in the victims’ universe,
Not to respect the customs of the mortally hurt,
Not to wonder if the cup is half empty or half full,
But to step across the chasm, drinking the cup dry,
Saying only: I was parched, in need of this.

Not to ask: will things get better, with time?
Not to ask the past: where have I failed?
Not to reach for the future, that place
Where they keep the answers to unasked questions,
But to look, only to look, at what is before us,
Only to look into a mirror, seeing amazement, 
Only to look into a well, seeing the moon,
Only to look into the heart, and see the self.

Not to live in the victims’ universe,
Not to respect the customs of the mortally hurt,
Not to tell the muse: not now, I’m doing the dishes,
Not to hear: the critics are coming, the critics are coming,
But to step across the chasm, having nothing to lose,
To step across the chasm, with the cup in hand,
Its wine washing the lips, the bitter taste of salt.

Not to worry if a person suffers from this, 
Or from that disease, or has had many lovers,
But to step across the chasm, like a diver on a board,
Like a diver in the twilight water, 
And plummet, head down, toes pointed, 
Plummet, and the cold embrace him, 
Plummet, and the well eat him, 
Plummet, and the sea take him, 
For there are things more important than safety.

Not to be the person one was born to be,
Or the person one was told to become,
But to step across the chasm, and become the person 
One needs to become to give the world meaning, 
And value, and hope.

Not to give up, not to surrender, 
Not to fall down and embrace the mud,
But to step across the chasm, with nothing in the hands,
With nothing in the hands, and picking the world up,
And turning it, as a crystal ball, in the palms,
Saying: there is
===============


Once
Deborah Digges

By our remembered pasts we learn
how to live in the present tense.
I was looking for stories you weren’t ready to tell, 
for the one who may find love after death.
I was looking for a way of being
that would not grow stale. 

It was simple. We waited for God
to quit being in control
so we might begin to believe
that we could trust each other.

Now, as an old woman, I am not sure.
Each sleepwalk across the past
is a failure of nerve, and I keep waiting
for the years to help me learn
what I would not know, to help me
go without you. 


===============


First,
Peter Porter

When I was nine
my parents left me in a car
while they took the suitcases upstairs;
but they were never coming back.
It was getting cold, the day darkening

and I thought I saw a stranger move
silently across the empty room,
hovering for a moment
by the closed door.

And when I heard the lock turn,
I was filled with dread of everything.
For years I’ve guarded against
their vanishing; now, asleep,

I sometimes think I hear the stranger’s breath
and I bolt wide awake.
It is all a dream. They lie
beside me in the bed.

I wake and it is time to go to school
but my mother’s hand
is stroking me, it is early,
it’s still night.


===============


I Don’t Know Why
Madrona

I don’t know why everyone says dying makes it stop hurting.
The burning was inside my skin.
I know what it is to be a handful of smoldering cinders 
Thrown by some thoughtless passerby
Into the skin of my girlhood.
I knew what was inside of me
Would one day break the sky in two,
Would explode across the ice.
I thought that if I could only breathe
Until the sun touched the earth
My heart would be warm enough
To go on.


===============


The Sloth
Julia Copus

All day he has been eating with no time to drink. 
Each leaf is roughly the same size,
so he has not worked out that he has to eat 
from his left hand side, where the dew drops to,
not from his right, so he is still thirsty.
Even the right half of his brain must be working; 
he has had sex. He is too weary to
take any interest in the million baby sloths 
of all sizes clustered in his fur, not even when
the baby sloths start fighting with their tiny claws,
scraping his stomach so that he bleeds
and suffers longer, for the sloth is the symbol
of Christ and of the pope; and his five fingers
are shaped like a cross. Sleeping upside down
stops his heart from beating, the weight
of his body forces the blood back down. 
The sloth cannot die as long as it can move, 
though one of its legs will drag, a frayed rope. 
Slowly, over ten years, that leg will thin, 
and before it dies it spends the last season
in the same place, dreaming, draped by leeches.

Sally Ragsdale 

When I first got back to Arkansas after spending much time in Manhattan,
I was really struggling.
It was like night and day.

One night I sat in the living room, listening to my parents fight;
they'd been at it for quite a while, both drunk.
It seemed they didn't care what time it was. 
Eventually, I went to the edge of the hall, 
where they both wouldn't see me. 
And my dad was yelling, in the most frightening voice I'd ever heard:

"I want to see some guts! 
And I want to see some guts in you! 
I want to see some guts in you!" 
And I didn't know what to do, so I went to bed, 
and when I woke up in the morning, I was on the floor.

*****

Your Mouth Will Always Be Open
Kevin Young

(On Nick Flynn and My Father’s Body)

It is because I need hope,
in all its rags, to dream.

You can have that,
he
===============


The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory
John Berryman

He woke, it was afternoon, yet so late the street

Darked already, and the grocer was pulling

Down the awning. Yet he watched, his head too sick

To stir a thought, these slow dark beasts, their fur

Darkly, systematically stiff, approach

And roll like wheels their psychopathic boulders in

Their cold mind, borne, stable, to lash at the thin

Fantasies of an old man’s feet: the child is furious

And faithful, the woman’s a hog, and is lustful for him,

But he’ll be sober, and would one day not forget

These griefs, and so not get them well again.

The grocer was a magus, he had the news

About all things, inside he shone with the healthy grease

Of his

own knowledge, and his ignorance was odd—

A mule’s—an old mule that knows its track enough

To stick to it. The old man, as his confidence righted,

Thereafter trusted him far, as one whose oddity

Seemed him a thing mystical: he glowed

With oddity, the grocer did, and told him nothing. 


===============


Solitaire
Billy Collins

The other day I was reading about the plight of the Tibetan panda,
how it lives in China, is declining in numbers, and is near extinction,
when I came across an almost equally worrisome story
about the solitaire of the Bahamas.

The solitaire, I found out, is a songbird and also an extremely rare species,
found no longer anywhere except on the island of Eleuthera,
where it is threatened by rapid population growth.

Don’t let it be forgotten, I thought, as I read this startling news,
that what has been described as a “small bird with understated elegance”
is, like the Tibetan panda, also in imminent danger of extinction,

especially when compared to the Audubon subspecies of the American crow,
also known as the eastern crow,
an animal that is a superabundant species in almost every habitat it lives in,
except maybe on Cape Cod and in the Adirondacks,

where it is nevertheless called the fish crow because it sometimes feeds on small fish.
The name “solitaire” comes from the bird’s unusually soft, solitary calls,
which sound, according to one ornithologist, “like drops of milk falling into a saucer of milk.”

The solitaire is monogamous and has a strong pair bond,
but it also lives in what has been described as a state of irreversible depression,
brooding for days in the dark recesses of dead coral heads.

Then I remembered that the state bird of South Carolina
is also named the eastern crow,
which tells you something about the lack of imagination among legislators.
But perhaps we will hear from them before long with a new name
for the rare, tragic, dwindling solitaire of Eleuthera.

In the meantime, the solitaire itself has been here for quite a while,
like some of us, with an aimless glance and a bright, disengaged smile,
looking up at the world from the bottom of a black mirror.

Here’s a small bird, a small bird with understated elegance,
feeding on the blue berries of the juniper bushes and thinking of the swallow,
but only of the one who went south or out to sea long ago.

Here’s a small bird standing in the yard like a gentleman with
===============


After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
Galway Kinnell

After making love we hear footsteps

on the gravel outside, someone ill or exhausted

walking slowly, then more rapidly, almost running, and cars

going by, one after the other, and under

the trees is the sigh and rustle of small animals 
(a world 
with a bright moon sliding into view for a moment

between the branches)

then silence— 
no footsteps, no cars,
no animals. 
And there, near your breasts, my face darkens

with pity, pity for the animal walking outside,

pity for the cars,
for the trees,
pity for the world,
pity for us,
while the evening brightens, brightens into

tremendous darkness,

a darkness almost impossible to comprehend,

that darkens and stays, and darkens further,

into terrible nothingness,
as when in winter the trees stand darkening and stay

and darken further,

the world now a thing beyond the window,

a nothingness without reflection.


===============


IV. Indra’s Net
Rainer Maria Rilke

Was it in deep error that I suffered this anguish,
but in that kind of suffering which is the awful
moment of love;
that in which passion, which man can’t understand,
submerges so deeply into a woman’s heart, that the soul,
before ever another man can appear in her,
must rise from the waters, change and begin to feel all things,
as she did before, with so much awe, with such ecstasy;
as if that were her first childhood?

Lila, was I, simply, the infatuation
at the moment of your coming of age?

And so, where I am the flowing river, as you felt me,
and forever the wave breaking on you,
you became this quiet lake,
in which each day is like the one before,
and night is sleep without change.

In you all things have become equal;
you are at peace; and somewhere a landslide
of happiness still comes, which smooths
out all things.
And nowhere is my love.

Plead for it with your soft full gaze,
with thisall-books-no-dedup
 mountain lake,
that it’s filled with the sky’s blue water,
with the eternal, holy pain;
give the name of something,
name the name:
was it only
infatuation?


===============


The Mushrooms
Jane Kenyon

The small people come back to the woods for the summer,
and everything goes on and on like that forever.
The flowers fall away, the orange rinds rot.
Where else should the small people be but the woods?

They walk in their green bodies in the cool tunnels
under the trees, and the sun never sees them.
They have thickened and roughened, like moss,
with the green flesh of the woods.

Even the wood-doves forget them.  Who dares to come
into the woods?  The golden-rod is yellowing.
Soon the rain will fall and keep falling
and the green flesh of the woods will smell like a rain forest.

And only the small people will be happy.


===============


On Reading Lord Tennyson’s Poems
Henry David Thoreau

In many of these poems we can, perchance, find a wisdom
far beyond the poet’s day;—and yet they are such
poems as the poet alone could have written.  For not
only what is best and truest, but also what is most
natural and spontaneous in thought and speech,
is the product of the individual alone, and is an
exhalation of his personality. Poet though he
is, he is simply a man, speaking after the manner
of men.  Because his temperament has a certain
poetic cast, therefore he is his true self only when
he speaks poetically.  Now, of our modern poets,
Tennyson is almost the only one whose temperament,
whose cast of character, has a natural bias toward
poetry, so that he is at times even poetic when he
speaks prose.  A poet is essentially a poet
because of the kind of person he is, because of the
fact that he is a poet, not because of the fact that he
writes poems.  In his poems he is uttering and
expressing himself, not simply making an
inspiration.

Tennyson was born a poet, though it was a century
before his time;—as he himself says in his poem
“Ulysses.”  He has not uttered his poems, but has
uttered himself, and always in the spirit in which
they were written.  The most confirmed poet is
hardly a man who has had some verses printed in a
book, and to whose biography the press has affixed
that title.  When our reporter called on Tennyson at
Farringford he found him, as was to be expected,
“amiable and cheerful, with his flowers about him;
and he talked in an easy way about indifferent
matters, keeping on his feet the whole time.”
A poet will not be kept on his feet.  Indifference
is the very last thing that a poet will cherish.
This kind of nonchalance can be neither cultivated
nor simulated.  It would be impossible for Tennyson
or any true poet to enact the part of a poet;
because a poet will be true to his own character,
as the Stoics said, “even though he stand upon the
rostrum
===============


April
Richard Hugo

The new grass leaves a slight,
 Sharp smell
 When you walk on it,

And the smell,
 faint,
 Is grass rising,

It is what makes
 the new-cut lawns
 Of the TV movies

Smell like America,
 and always will,
 And is what we want to be,

But can’t smell
 like any more,
 (Newmown hay is older,

The rest of it
 is fragrance
 From the Burpee catalogue)

The new grass blades are tilted
 Up into the wind,
 They are widening

And the side taste
 is too slight
 To be called sweet

But it is on the tongue,
 the April smell
 Of new grass,

Being there
 half the time
 Is what we want to be.


===============


To teach a shape to just one person—and that person you.
Robert Hass

i say it aloud because
there’s a woman at the next table
by herself with a slice of key lime pie
and white wine and it’s after
all the lunchtime rush. i say it
aloud because i’m in love
and because the shape
is in the shapes, and because
people—like that woman—need
love, which you yourself need,
and because she can hear
i say it in ordinary voice like
a man talking to a woman
in a restaurant, as if we were two women.
it’s a love-shape: it’s my body
which can never get enough
of your body; it’s your body
which can never get enough
of my body; it’s all the bodies,
and it’s not that they want
something they can’t have,
which is exactly what they want.
it’s not that the world
and the worldly things end up
punishing the lover with longing
which is not the body,
which is the lover
stretched tight, shaking, crying
over what the body can’t get enough of,
which is what the body wants
and which is what the body
keeps wanting, and which is
all over my body. it’s not that
the mind, which lies, gets
a mind of its own and wants
only its own mind and its own
way which is not any
body’s way, and therefore
it must, because it can,
destroy love and all the bodies;
no it’s the wanting of the body
that wants not to want more
than the bodies can have
and so the wanting—the whole
body—grieves for what it can’t
have which is what it wants.
that’s the shape
which you love and I love and
anybody would love
if they could see it.

Cole Swensen

The philosophers say that animals no
doubt have language, but they lack the means
to speak—a shallow anatomical quibble,
for even if they formed the utterances perfectly,
few would understand: the root of understanding
is the ability to participate in another’s
languishment. I offer this solution: we are all
listening to each other all
===============


Lost Dog
Ron Padgett

(for Jerry)

Please tell me if you know this story.
A man is walking on an icy road
with his dog. When he gets
to a large tree, his dog won’t
move, so he beats her with a stick.
She moves and he doesn’t see that she’s left
the tip of her tail in the snow.
When they get home he realizes
she doesn’t have a tail anymore.
So he grabs another dog and cuts off
its tail. But it’s not the same tail.
In fact it’s a shorter tail.

He puts on his hat. And with his shoes,
he enters the world. It’s snowing.
The man is a painter. He paints
a little square brush. A dog is sleeping
in a gold frame. A hand
is holding a woman’s hand. A bed
is on the mattress, which is on the floor.
An orange lightbulb shines
over the bed. A man is smoking.
The man with the hat is looking
out the window, trying to see
his old tail.


===============


Shirt
Michael Ondaatje

I will be walking across a field one day.
Because of my kind, I will have no body.
Because of the grass, I will have no shadow.

My wind will come from Africa and Europe.
My moon will come from Asia.
My voices will come from leaves, words, people,
the sea, my friends.

My love, she will come from my hand.
My light, from empty space.
And I will become a baby again
because that is what I will remember.


===============


Sonnet 8
Eavan Boland

Wherever I travel, I carry our conversations with me
like silver charms in the lining of a dress. I call them back 
in bus stations, in the cinemas of small towns, in friends’ houses
and my bedroom late at night. I keep them intact 
like old pacts, like holy things. For they remain unshattered
in their strictest meaning: spoken only between us, private 
and communal, by turns. By turns, they are sunlight
and chill starlight in which we sat talking, curled in sleep 
or the single shadow of my jacket on a white wall.
Wherever I am, whatever I do, their deeply carved 
scent drifts into me, their antique, giving light.


===============


Like a dog that runs on ahead and waits
Elizabeth Bishop

Like a dog that runs on ahead and waits
to make sure that his companions want
to continue and catch up, and then
races off again, to sink his nose
into every patch of grass along the way,
sniffing, retreating, scouting all the time,
so Prince Edward Island shepherds its troop of
summer guests. It isn’t that it’s too busy
or too mean to keep them; it’s that it wants them
to stay, but knows that after a certain point
or a certain time has passed they must go,
must catch the ferry and be gone—it wants
to gather in those it would keep, but then
let them go again: the expert unfocus
of the dog’s brown eyes, the watchful bend
of a sheep’s neck to the grass in steady nibbling.

So the world goes round. A man goes out,
and sees, and comes back in to tell what he has seen;
another man goes out, sees more, says less—
still, nothing is lost: one more man will go out,
getting ready, tying his bootlaces tighter,
maneuvering his car out of town, into the cars
driven by those first two men: willynilly,
their combined sniffs at the grass, their nervous
contributions to the great total of what is known,
make this the serious, hushed
and beautiful and hard world it is.


===============


The Light of Late September
D.H. Lawrence

Day after day, like silent soldiers, day
follows day, one battle ended, one war ended,
the war that never ends.

Every year is what it is. This year, with a sigh,
has dropped into the past, trailing its broken
banners.

Day after day I plant my bean and onion sets,
my rows of seeds, watch my trees bud out
and my seedlings grow,

filling the sunlit and shadowed garden-space
with growing greenery.

Every year in the same way, day after day
I live through the days that are my life,
one year after another and one day the same as another,

following the light of a particular year, living
the year through with my particular day.

Day after day, I walk the same path on the same earth,
till I look back and see how far I have travelled,
and also look ahead and know where I am going.

One day, I am the same. All days I am the same
and yet all days change. One day is the first
day of the year. The others move on.

Day follows day, the light changes, and the shadows move.
I walk on the same path, and it is always new,
every day, a surprise, as if a miracle happened,
and I went on, surprised and still wondering.

I say this, I write this, thinking of my future death,
knowing that the path will still go on, the sun
will come up, the day will follow day.

But to me, what will happen?
I will be dead. And that will be unbearable,
because I love the path, I love the sunlight,
I love day, I love night, I love every moment, I love
being, and so I will love death, being dead.

Just as I love, now, day and night, being and day,
being and day and night. I love this inestimable now,
and so I will love death, being dead.

And life and death? These are the same.
How weary I am of philosophies that try to divide life
from death.

I am in life. I am in death.
Life is in death and death in life.

===============


Lost Lake
Robert Bly

for Gregory Corso

My friend is gone, in a breath,
gone with his friends
in a cold
autumn, and every lake I approach
is pale with salt
from dried tears,
the same dear friends,
and so I fast
on the hill beside this lake,
fast and pray for their return
until I am surprised
at last with a vision
of their faces rising
in these waters, and over the lake’s surface
drifts my body’s
white hair.


===============


Soul at the White Heat
Gwendolyn Brooks

The boy I love grew up in this city.
The boy I love walks down dreams on his restless feet.
The boy I love works the night shift at the downtown market.
The boy I love is black and lonely and proud of his body.

The boy I love goes home to his father and brothers.
The boy I love knows his life will be different.
The boy I love will be a soldier.
The boy I love will go south and fight in the streets of towns.

The boy I love has a tender heart and eyes that shine.
The boy I love is grave and calm and neatly made.
The boy I love believes God knows his name.
The boy I love looks into space and sees a law to be kept.

The boy I love has seen much death and says little.
The boy I love sleeps light on the edge of a dream.
The boy I love is black and alive and has little time.
The boy I love dances to the music of white America.

The boy I love grows very still and straightens his shoulders.
The boy I love kneels in church and prays that the world be peaceful.
The boy I love, good and gentle and strong, will fight in my country’s battles.
The boy I love has been taught that his own life is not important.

The boy I love will die in the land where he was a stranger.
The boy I love will be buried with the name of an alien on his strong shoulders.
The boy I love is black and lonely and mine forever.
The boy I love grew up in this city.


===============


Two Variations on the Same Poem
James Tate

I never meant to pick up this rock
But here it is in my hands again.
My wife found it in the parking lot
when she slipped and fell back on the ground.
She didn’t want to hobble home so she just stayed there.

The curious thing about the rock is how its weight
is the same all around. It’s the same weight
when I hold it in my hand as when it’s lying on my chest
at night. There are two places it wants to go,
but it chooses my chest. I wonder why?

This morning I drove down to the lake.
There were no birds left. A huge water-bird
came out of the fog but I swear it wasn’t a swan
or a heron or a goose. It sang me one of its songs,
and I swear I didn’t recognize it.

Old man, old man, it said.
Oh, it was just a heron after all.
All my life I have tried not to be a liar
and yet, and yet. I have never lied
except out of necessity. I have lied
every day. I have lied in my sleep.
I would have lied when I was dead
except that I died suddenly in my sleep.

I wanted to be known as an honest man
and I wanted also to be known as a good liar.
I wanted to write poems with both of these ingredients,
but as I look back on it, I don’t see how I could have done it.
I wanted to keep them separate. The sky was never
blue enough for me and I often asked for more time.

At the same time, I have always had enough.
I lie and do not lie. But everything I say is true.
I could never get myself to say that what is true
is just one thing and what is not true is just something else.
As a matter of fact, I never did get anything right.

The great question of our time was this:
How long could this stand-off continue between
the liars and the truth-tellers before there was bloodshed?
The answer depended on how these two sides were defined
and how things finally came out was hard to say.

I turned my radio on to a good
===============


The Vow
Chase Twichell

Finally the words came.
But I feel
as if I still haven’t said anything
—I have said nothing.
Nothing made a sound.

But maybe if the words come just right,
even if they don’t say everything they mean,
they mean just the right thing in the silence after.

And there will be
a time when we are
all together
like beads on a string,
all the things
and animals
and dreams
and bright ideas
in their ordered rows,
in their warm wooden box,
under its six blue stars,
against a backdrop of infinite cold space.
They are yours;
they are mine;
they are my sister’s;
they are my father’s.

But we can’t know

that being together is enough.
And we feel like we have said
nothing.
Infinite cold space is enough.

They are beads on a string.
My sister is another animal.
My father is another dream.
I am another bead.
We are another bead.

We don’t know
how we all fit together.

We don’t know
how it will go.

We hope for the best.
We hope
not to lose each other.
The wind carries sound,
but maybe, if the words are right,
they mean just the right thing in the silence after.


===============


Things Falling Apart
Deborah Digges

Only, by all means, start with the loss of a tooth 
the morning after an evening of sex,
the afternoon at work in front of a page
that refuses to be written, the towel left on the
floor overnight in a room you are still unfamiliar with, 
the stunned face when a train of thought fails
half-assembled, the ungained inch

not grown into, the lost morning
at school where no one will answer
your question, the great loss of nerve
and appetite, the laborious craving
for vengeance, the unnamed longing that won’t
be called what it is, the missing piece of sky
from a composition that went unnoticed
until too late, the day that loses its

way and the one that comes no
closer, the old friends who slip
away, the boyfriend that won’t stay,
the grand slam that’s simply vanished,
the endless talk of others’
prodigal gifts, the dinner that
you didn’t want to be asked to,
the back scratcher that won’t

stay by your side, the winning tickets
that you lose, the unseen
thought and the unwritten word,
the unlived marriage, the child never born,
the sister’s loneliness and the
unlistened to brother, the ferry tickets
snapped up in the falling rain, the vanished
trinkets, the keys to rooms you had forgotten you had

left, the shoreline that erodes
to the beat of your heart, the opened gate
that none can close again, the
children hiding in the stairwell,
the lover’s cry that should have
been heeded, the never-numbered,
never-met flowers that should
have marked a path, the ghost’s

unattended rage, the fathers failing
themselves, the untamed
crow, and the weeping deer, the disobedient
song, the unwritten poem, the calling
in the night that cannot be answered,
the child breaking free, the wave
that breaches itself, the taxi
never summoned, the time that will

never be coming, the child
that has stopped breathing, the
cold at the edge of the blanket,
the pariah at the edge of the
town, the guest unannounced,
the
===============


A Hill
Leland Bardwell

There is a hill in Virginia I have walked many times
without seeing where the flowers part their doors
and open for the bees they are so small;
the morning glories hardly show for dew,
and the fiddlehead ferns are just beginning.

I see the colors now. What my mind cannot account for
seems real, more real than anything I know:
this patch of blue an explanation,
a violet opening small and perfect.

A man alone I am with what I see.


===============


Sonnet 3 from Book I
T. S. Eliot

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;

When lovers lie down together, not to sleep,
Blanketed by the leaves whose fading sheen

Receives the visionary goldenness of eve;
Not to sleep, though the night chill

Reach them through their loving which makes two only one: 
They lie together, flesh against flesh, lips upon lips

Breathing into one another, warm and chilly,
Companioned yet at the same time alone,

Each one in the other curled as a woman
In a small boat assuaged from the wind

One with another, each unutterably at rest,
And at one with the changing ocean,

Each element flowing, each into each,
Blending and blending with the blending sea,

In a blending immensity,
Merging and splitting as two come together,

So that both, it is the same wind, the same sea,
Ocean of differences without differences,

Eternal moment of one with the same.
A minor repetitive cadence makes

Monotony sublime:
as difference which was discord becomes

This resolution,

This blending immensity.


===============


Dear Kelly, Sincerely, Me
Rae Armantrout

Dear Kelly, I cannot
see you because you have to
buy a house before I leave this
town. I dreamt that you
burned our house down so that it
would have to be rebuilt, and my car
was a convertible. I also
seem to be forgetting whether I have
anything in my hands, whether I
have mail or keys or, worse, a dead
animal. I had to do a drawing
of a process which looked like
cigarette ash, and I am not
a smoker. Then, at the hospital,
I didn’t know whether I had sent
a flower or not. I don’t know where
the chaos stops. Not in a life,
obviously. It would make a
nice TV movie, but I don’t
seem to have a TV, and since I
am busy trying to get it all
down I probably will never see
it. Maybe it was all explained in the
drawing of the ash.

To you, I leave this alphabet.
It contains the word overcoat,
this time I saw it, in print.
I wish you had more eyes.
Then maybe I could get lost
in them, where it would be safe.
Safe-ly, anyway. And of course
a day apart is death.

Until I have finished living
this life, I send you the mycelium
of the future. I
love you, really.

I wish
I
really
loved
you.


===============


There Is a Light That Shines on Everyone
On This Island of Oahu
Wallace Stevens

There is a light that shines on everyone on this island.
There is a light that shines on everyone
On this continent and this earth. I ask you
To look at that light. It is not one of your candles.
It is not the glowing horn of your nothingness.

It is obvious. Look at it. It is a piece of the sun,
Caught and held in the branches of trees and the breakers of the ocean.

Don’t tell me it’s something you can’t see.
Close your eyes and look at it anyway.
It’s there. That’s a fact. The light is there

Look at it. It will calm you.
The mind is not everything. The light is everywhere,
At the center of everything and yet it moves.

You must stand still to see it. It is there,
In the here and now, in the world. You don’t have to
Create it or imagine it. It’s there, in the world

Go into the garden and look at the flowers.
What else is there? We need only to look and it is there.
The color of the leaves? No, there is something else there
The light. The flowers open and the light shines on them.
What is it? What is it that lights the flowers?
Is it darkness? No, don’t be frightened,
It is the light, that’s all.


===============


There Are No Children Here
Nanci Shelton

they walk into the field, this one little guy is peeing on his sister’s head they leave they don’t say nothing about how they feel i notice they do not feel anything i watch them...they are pure act...playing ...all the women in that house have left them and the kids to wander in the lice-filled air that is the house the only thing going round in that place are these youngsters, children...i see no acting in them, no pretending there they are in these young bodies, now bending down to look at these roaches...damn they are so strong to act this scene alone, so alone...in the field picking dandelion’s small talking with the bugs i try not to miss a second of their strange, sad magic


===============


Last Words: Alighieri’s Divine Comedy
Delmore Schwartz

Arriving at the terrace before the second round, 
Dante sees a vast triune flame: 

“Within the fire a figure like to man is seen; 
The wick and oil in him are the voice and mind. 
Alone he stands, and round him moves and shines 
A perfectly defined and all ablaze: 
Beyond this light no other thing has place. 
And as the pennon cuts the air, so moves 
The outer flame around the inmost form.” 

Then as I tried to find an explanation, 
A second thrust broke into my consciousness: 

“I heard a voice: ‘The fire, which keeps its place, 
Exhibits the affection man knows best; 
Of all that mortal love, of all that grace 
Which, as it flows from him, fills his desire.’”

And as the meager voice pronounced this word, 
A third blow broke the barrier of my breast. 

“I understood that for a sign of love 
The loving soul in Heaven is made a torch: 
The core of him, her mind’s spirit, is one— 
As in the body bones are held together. 
And as the one flame turns and shines afar, 
It makes no movement, and from that he learns, 
And shows, and knows at last his power and power’s source.” 

Then, as the coils tighten, and hold at point 
The arrow’s barb, and as I sought with all 
My heart for what I had not understood, 

My power failed; but since an oath had bound 
Me to that truth, and closed in shameful fear 
My questioning, “I know not,” I returned.

Envoi 
What if to-night the nameless stars should throng, 
As once before, across the vast sky plain, 
And man should stand alone in the bright field 
And see the solitary wound we bear?


===============


After Haying
Robert Frost

We have come to where I always end.
The little lake, the little boat
That I dare to put anywhere
Or float through any country roads.

And when I ask you, “Do you like it here?”
You say, “It’s lovely; it’s heaven!”
But you have no desire to row,
Just paddle with a single oar,

While I, in the stern, paddling too,
Will gently guide us where we ought to go,
Some where just anywhere.
And where will it end up? Will we know

Some simple happiness before the day is done,
Our one whole day of happiness? 
Here is a man who does not care where,
Who does not care how,

And all of him is here; and what we see
Is only what he wants to be.
All that we see is his delight,
The sparkle of his heavenly sight.

But if there should be something more
Tucked away under his arm,
Who sees what more he has?
We know it is something he will never share.

I wish it were not so.
I wish it were not so, but how can I help it
If I must go on knowing the ways of a man?
Must I ever get used to him,

When I can’t see or ask him what more is there? 
And yet there is nothing I could ask
That he could tell me.
No, no, I could never ask that.

But I can say, I wish he did not hide
Such an important thing from his friend
Who likes and understands all
A man does, and has been long his friend.

For whatever thing it is that hides a man
Is a thing to wonder at.
It goes deep down into the heart of man.
I simply wonder. That’s all.


===============


Out Back
Alice Oswald

The sea fades towards more and more blue
a darkening roar that brims with roars and goes,
as if half the earth could speak,
as if my body turned to grain
and lost the weight of rain,
as if the sun leant back to breathe on us,
as if my daughter had become
my mother, the poet had become the name,
the buffalo was taken by the tiger
and the tiger brought to me, a glittering coat,
and as if this was the end,
when really it is time to wake up,
and go, and let the rain flood our street
as it has been flooding the plain all day,
dropping sheep, and horses,
time for us all to drink again
and start to dig, and bale, and wake
the rain once more to the white skyline
from all the rooms that have turned to rivers,
smelling of sand, and cow manure, and lavender,
time for me to go and stand in this flooded land
as if I was the one who had gone
to a country at the end of the sea,
as if I had been lost, or taken.
I say the words my father knew,
the names of stones, barley, rain,
and like a paw that spills across the grass
my shadow unscrolled and the dog woke
to lick the ground, to die.


===============


Breathing
Jill Bialosky

Today I wake to watch the red buds on the trees open.
I don’t hear birdsong—
in fact, there is no birdsong.
The sky is bluish white.
The beaks
of the birds, I imagine, are open,
their small bodies rocking
on fragile limbs.

I remember a dark forest
I walked through years ago
in winter.

Each branch was weighed down by snow
that glittered in the moonlight.

I stepped through that cold white world
in my old mink coat, dark mukluks,
felt gloves, and a cashmere scarf,
and felt the silence
around me.

When I stopped, I listened
to the inside of myself, the blood
pushing through my veins,
the sound of the small
thuds of my heart,
a bit wild,
open mouthed.

—

I wanted to drink a drink in the dark.

A moment later, when the sun came up
the world was frozen—a cold blue.


===============


Reconnaissance
Philip Gross

Anger and grief – take the dog on a leash,
the dappled sun of a coastal afternoon;
in a glade above the beach he points and barks,
the wooded hillside drowns the sniffing odours.

At the back of the house a door where two hinges
are revealed as rusted lumps between the planks;
the dog runs out into the olive grove,
stops short at every branch that blocks his way.

Years of walking, though, have taught him lines
to be discovered in this indistinct terrain:
out of the tangled twigs and trunks of oak
the invisible path traces itself again.


===============


The Truth the Dead Know
Audre Lorde

Your appetite for murder . . .
does not alter you unduly.
There was a wet nurse for every child
who was born.
The one who nursed you dead
in spite of my efforts.
You are like a well-loved daughter,
who may die in my arms.

And yet I am a wild woman,
holding you here in my muscled arms.
My love, whose loins
gave you flesh.

I wept like a child when my mother went down.
It is our children that walk through the gray grass.

I shall never forget how the women came,
bearing their gifts of blood,
bringing herbs for poultices, meat for broth.
And yet we died, red flower,
we died.


===============


In the airport
Gregory Corso

I’m haunted by the days—the way a butterfly is, 
or a grasshopper haunted by the first days 
of warm fall—so when I wake, I put on a little music. 
Then silence.
I put on the news and recognize disasters. 
And off to the company store...
That’s why I’m already drinking...
And why I always have a buck in my pocket. 
I sit in the park and write with a penny on the wall: 
HAPPY IS A YOUNG POET.
I take my drink along my shadow, 
riding it like a surfboard, and I move 
into the evening. Every object I look at 
seems poised for its fate. I can see it
in the jaw of the airplane as it waits 
for a pilot. I can see the pilot, 
holding a bag of potato chips.

When I hear the faint voices of the city 
screaming help, or joy, I walk in my bronze buddha suit 
till I come to the edge of the world. 
Then a change. It becomes
a park full of picnickers, a lake with white swans. 
Young lovers in their bathing suits.
I step on a twig, and there’s the crackling sound 
of fracturing fate, and, frightened, 
I jump on my shadow,
and walk back to my room. But wait!
There’s a red fire engine outside, and a police car, 
its siren whining. I leap
to a tree and watch as the janitor is taken away 
to the insane asylum, screaming: “Satan made me do it. 
Satan made me do it!”
Satan, happy is a young poet.

I can see the chasm from here, so I have to work 
quickly, when I’m asked for an interview: 
“Mr. Corso, what are you trying to do?”
I always say: “I’m trying to be a young poet.”
“But you’re already a legend.”
They never seem to understand.
I’m a legend the way Achilles 
was a legend—when he wasn’t busy
killing. Mr. Cor
===============


Nantucket

Off Island
Elizabeth Bishop

All the untidy activity continues,
the nondescript industry all the year round.
Up above, the unsold, smoke-darkened, wooden cottages
up on the cliff with their bed-end or a wall
left as a view, and the old ladies, the widows, watching,
brushing the hair from their blue eyes and settling
in at the window to see what is coming...

In the fall the rain crowds in, wetting
the blackberry bushes, lashing itself
into falling lines of glass against the slats
of the light-house; in the sun, the bake-oven faces
of the old light-house men, in black jackets
and watch caps with a red stripe, are narrow
with smiles, as they greet the cruise passengers,
the foreign tourists; the old-fashioned boats
all varnish and white paint and dazzling new
appliances, the great ferries black as night,
the steamship sand-coloured and bearded with scum,

the smaller boats all engaged in getting the big boats
through the narrow channels and out of the traps
of the island, the seas slapping and leaving inky
spatterings on the sides of the wooden harbour—
these are the things of each year, but now,
winter is loosening its grip on this crowded
artistic island, and soon the ship’s figuration,
under its tall smoke-stacks, a double row
of rivets, and its wheel at the back, that turns
the rudder against a great torque in the water,

the ship, in mid-afternoon, docked with its crowd
of people, begins to go home, cleaving,
through the Nantucket sea, a wedge of green, 
like a knife, a shiver. Where the waves creased
in lines of woolly light, the crippled
schooners nestle together as if for warmth,
masts only, at this distance, and the faintest
stir of anchors weighing the grand hawsers down
beside the invisible hulls of them.

The day has gone. And the Old Whaling Church has glowed
from its inside. Candles have been lighted for vespers.
Inside, the church is small and white, with several
===============


The Waters’ Attack
H.D.

The sea is over all of us,
above the grave;
above the beautiful
young men and women;
the sea that has washed
away the city.
If only it could wash
away the past.
If only it could be,
as they say, a little,
a little troublesome;
something to make
a person curse,
then the sins
could be forgiven.
Because always it has been
like this: always
the talk has been
sad, as well as
foolish; and nothing
has come to pass;
but it is worse
to think that nothing
may come to pass.
There is nothing I want
so much as rest.
But it cannot be
that everything
is as a stone—
blind and stupid
under sea-waves;
it cannot be.


===============


The Forge
Diane Ackerman

In a dusty corner of a smithy stands an anvil, its metallic
mouth agape like that of a bulrush about to speak.
Is it male or female, god or crone?
It is the kind of question children answer with wide,
unblinking gazes that cause grownups to rub their foreheads
and ask why it can't be both or neither.
Little by little the truth emerges.
The truth is that when the blacksmith is done hammering,
it's no less an anvil, or more a crone.
But I hear old voices singing shrill, shrill, so shrill.
I hear the ring of young voices singing low, low, so low.
I'd love to believe that stories don't pretend to answer questions,
only to mark them forever.
I'd love to believe that if I had to choose between all
my voices, they'd be able to speak and sing in harmony.


===============


Then (Sonnet XVII)
David Kirby

Arms out—Bryant's book propped on the railing—
With spread fingers framing the pages, I stand
On the platform as the 2 (Elmwood Park) pulls out,
The cars, the people, my mother waving, all blurring
As the wind pulls against my book, the deep 
Clicks of wheels over a wood joint, the rhymes
Speeding by, Bryant's text flickering my mind.
I will study my life. Am I dead? Am I living? 
What should I want of anything? What does God want? 
At the curve I am ten feet off the ground,
A crude perspective I can see the waste around me
Outside my frame, A sparrow, a cello, 
Some tired boys in their eight-year-old leather, 
Grass baked red, the water tower, I'm in the sky!

Why was I near everything and missing it?


===============


That Those Who Come After May See
John Ashbery

That those who come after may see how our lives
Were connected; how, in natural simplicity,
We laid the stones that later might be used
To tell what we knew of ourselves and the world;
That this foundation might prove indestructible...
No it was too simple. How, then, did we find
The will to go on working? What we wanted
Remained invisible.
And in the end, what was accomplished, we never knew.


===============


The Collar
Billy Collins

Each day I think how it might have been
to wear that uniform, to hold that book,
to follow the scent of clean shirts up the stairs
and into the classroom. How I would sit
with my legs crossed, shirt tucked, taking
notes while the sun worked its way around
to this side of the school, this square of desks,
this province of wood worn smooth by a thousand
moons, damp with a thousand morning breaths.
I see it now—the yellow sweater vest
a mentor would give me, the plaid
skirt of a mother, the twinkling
eyes of a bride. All the small
deaths of my life could have been avoided.
I need only open the book and read
the day’s words. Fill out the daily
questionnaire and follow my heart’s
arrow to its shattering conclusion.


===============


Commentary on Eliot's Four Quartets
Donald Justice

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic mills?

With whole the rose, and the snowdrop, too,
Rise from this brow? As in that other,
Lost Utopia in King's Bench Walk?
And did we to our daily plowing
Chant the new secular Hymn of Love?

And, as we lay among the Eastern blue,
We sang the Eternal Footman's Song:
"The guests are at the feast, and all are gone
In white robes down the floating Larkin.
I have forgotten a hundred times
All formal melodies, the measures of the dance:
But still I hear, arising from the avalanche,
A voice, murmuring of spring, in love,
In love, in love, in love with silence."

Always, or else to sleep . . .
We make our castles of sand
And rise on stepping-stones
of our dead selves to higher things.
I wonder if you remember
The 'therefore' we walked into
so long ago. The critical moment!
The sea in hiding behind that formal English green
With all of the authority of the end of the world.

Shall I at last confess that what I wanted
All that time was only a kiss,
A simple kiss? Yes, but not like this,
Not like this. Since I desired it so,
Not like this, but in an hour
To be altogether forgotten,
In the fever of the everyday,
In the obligations of the dark,
So much must be expected and endured.

So much can come between two people!
An enigmatic drunken driver
And eight miles of silent motorway.
The peeling away of the veneer
Of love with the most careful of hands.

And where are you, where are you, my Ladies of Devon?
And you, my friends of all my life, where are you now?
How old were we when we wandered
Through that London first amazed by snow?
Like children who have cut themselves and must watch
The wound heal, like lovers who think they have learned
All that the body may teach them, who then suddenly
Arrive at some old intersection
===============


Elegy For A Dead Soldier
Stephen Dunn

What he lacked was the lie, the one that would
get him out alive. He had to see the bus turn
over on its side and the armored slat
open and the stench of death like a fist,
and some who called him good friends, coming apart.

He had no way to distort his fear,
the long-breathing unmentionable pain
at the sight of bone, and the taste of burning flesh.
His honesty
was a whirlwind, howling through him,
lacerating the beams, the floor, every part
of him that still believed in morning.

Too late, he discovers the obedient
minute, and the benign occasion, and the song.
He left us to give back our purity.
What was wrong with his brief life
wasn’t the looking, but the what he found,
something almost demented. An unsightly world
in which the landscape also turned.

Now you know
where the minutes begin.


===============


from Dejection: An Ode
John Keats

If I had but a little while to live,
And were assured of never dying more,
What works of art should I create, what mode
Of life should I devise for my own peace?
Alas, that living on from day to day
Should be an idling with inconsequence!
How can I this nonchalance forget,
How be the worker I have been content,
While here I heed not my important health
Till some unquestionable force be near?
And my life is but winking at the tomb—
“Ah, love, that thou could’st be as thou wast then!
When every kiss was infinite in joy,
Kisses of youth, that come not back again!
My Spring has made me all of leaves and flowers,
And every clod has power to lift the sod
Under which all that pass are undeemèd hours,
Whose myriad sounds make up a single tone,
Into the solemn purport of the world.


===============


Once Upon a Time
Mark Strand

Once upon a time, I thought it would be nice
To sit on the porch and be an old man,
Not one given to the disagreeable habit
Of swallowing his tongue, or to wearing a bib,
But an old man such as they tell about in stories,
With a twinkle in his eye and wisdom in his head,
A shrewd old coot in whom the natives confide,
Since they know they can trust his judgment. They trust
He’ll see things as they are, and not as they seem to be,
And know that you can’t get by in this world being only
As honest as the next, though I’d be the first,
If called upon, to give my hand to the poor, and lend
An ear to the pathetic plea and the broken heart.
I’d be the first to share if only I had some to share.
I’d be the last to deny when there was no way out.
Once upon a time, I thought it would be nice
To grow old gracefully, in step with my years,
And not be found with the juice of the grape still wet
On my chin. I’d be good, I would, a generous soul,
As pure of spirit as any this world could show,
And if I had some great sin, and wasn’t altogether
A saint, no one would know, no one at all.
They’d say I was a modest man, and not in the way
I remember I heard someone saying of someone once,
A chauvinist in vestments of humility. 
They’d say I was a sinner who walked with the saints, 
A man who knew what’s what and held on to that,
A man who bore his faults, if he had any, with grace. 
I was one who stood against the prevailing race. 
I was one who, looking around, kept his own counsel. 
I was one who said, ‘Look, I’m too old for this nonsense.’
I was one who said, ‘A little bit goes a long way,
And a lot of little bits add up to one big mistake.’ 
Once upon a time, I thought it would be nice
To stay home and be a good man, and come to the point.
I’
===============


It
Kate Light

After he told me the gorilla was harmless,
after the other man got shot full of holes in the leg 
and still couldn’t see for three days after because he ran full
force into a doorjamb while he was fucking,
after I gave up my naptime to practice reading 
on the carpet while everyone stood around me 
in a circle and sang out the words like I was an angel,
after my daughter’s elbow kissed my cheekbone in an 
unceasing series of blows that turned into love,
after my cat sprayed on everything I owned, 
after I thanked the woman for keeping my sandwich 
for fifteen minutes, after my body
threw itself fully against the waiting ground and 
brushed off all the dirt before it got up,
I said, I know I’m going to die, I’ve never loved anybody, 
that’s all that matters. I thought about my neighbor 
in the apricot sweater, his radio on outside, 
his gorgeous wife walking away from the window.

I stood in the cracked parking lot by the bank 
and talked to him over our fence for hours. 
He ran his fingers through his beard and told me 
he was thinking of getting a dog.
It felt good to be loved like that. The whole yard 
stopped working just to watch him move.


===============


He Do the Police in Different Voices
Laurie Sheck

This is a parable for people who don’t read.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. “Wanda June” 

Four of these eight characters are dead, 

http://friends.lovetoknow.com/wiki/When_I_Have_Fears_That_I_May_Cease_to_Be
common-crawl-filtered-hard-p6the two narrators, Brad Pitt, and Casey Affleck: 

each one has lost a brother or sister. 

You may recall Pitt as Jerome, the narrator of “As I Lay 
Dying” ; the Voice reprises his role here, 

to tell us more about his late brother Darl. Brad Pitt, 

in “As I Lay Dying,” was the character whose entire family 

died in a car crash. There, an allusion to a poem 

by the 19th-century British poet  Alfred Lord Tennyson 

(1809–1892), “The Charge of the Light Brigade” : 

“Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die.”  

 The difference this time is: they died of cancer, 

neither natural nor obvious causes, but 

of a disease—siblings, spouses, parents—impersonally, 

without war,  except in the family. 

As for Casey Affleck, well, say his face 

and name together: Casey Affleck, brother of Ben Affleck: 

Ben Affleck has already mourned his way 

into becoming the leading romantic hero in Hollywood, 

he as a bestselling memoirist is entitled to mourn. 

But brother Casey could use a little notoriety. 

And so we all will be indebted to this movie, 

which features, not one big brother, not two, 

but brothers, brothers, brothers, brothers, 

 four of them, or five if you include a little girl: 

the movie’s eight male characters, if not its one, 

and so the only female in a land of brothers: 

Ellen Burstyn, a mother, an archetypal mother, 

the sparest mother of them all, to mourn in words only, 

begging
===============


Where Does It Hurt
Richard Siken

While I was walking I was thinking of
Someone’s Aunt Edna’s house
Covered in pain and fire. It smelled like a miracle.
We were very sad together in that
Beautiful house.
That kind of sadness is a party
When you’re drunk in the afternoon on cigarettes
With a picture of your boyfriend on the wall
That’s half girl in the picture with big breasts
Because the house looks like it has something to say
But nothing comes out except the smell of hospitals,
Which is actually from Uncle Jeff, in the back
Pouring himself three fingers of pain, making a snowman.
That night I got out of bed to
Write, feeling as big as a planet,
Everyone in the house crammed into my heart,
Their beds, their parties, their teeth.
The sidewalks breathed.
The planets were fingers on my face, each
Worrying a different scar.
Then my mother came in and said
Where does it hurt?
And I cried for a long time in her arms, knowing
This kind of crying never really ends, but goes on
Forever somewhere in someone’s Aunt Edna’s house
Covered in pain and fire.


===============


I Remember Your Eyes
Emily Dickinson

I remember your eyes  
and the time I knew  

they were familiar

and most beautiful,—  

Like the songs of birds  

at daybreak on the hills  

I remember your eyes  

and how they looked and how  

They gathered blue leaves  

and how mine looked back  

and how they weighed  

your love and need  

and my love

and joy—  

in the balance of a glance  

I remember your eyes  

and the time I knew  

they were familiar  

and most beautiful,  

I remember the glance  

of your eyes on mine  

The mutual glance  

that makes life  

that more precarious  

than any risk  

in time  
I remember  

these things  

and many much more  

the rest is the rest  

the stories  
I have heard


===============


The Orphaned Man 

I’ll tell you, by God! but how? 
The wren leads a good life. 
He enjoys his bird-thronged woodlands. 
With so many leaves his songs make a murmurous wind.
He never counts and never owns,
But sings his lordly bird-soul forth, 
More or less that no one cares about. 

His speech, fenced and small, 
Runs with the elm-leaves when the south wind blows.
And when the thickened fall is golden on the grass,
He, as a robin, sings a careless quest 
For the uneatable, seedy, ripening chestnuts. 
He says, ‘my’ apple tree is for me.’ 

He lies on the green outdoors, 
A summer mood of the sun and moon’s romance,
And wanders in his crotchless elm woodlands, 
For days, and over his bosky greenwood hilly-ness. 

He’s unsung now, his heaven knows, 
But only once in his strange timorous heart.
He is the little earth-shadow, 
The orphan of earthly happiness. 
The very tree from which he utters his tuneless song 
Would change, if not the very swamp he dreamed of, 
And take him back to the earth from which he sprung.


===============


Le Miroir
Arthur Rimbaud

J’ai vu ce matin une humble femme
Sourire au miroir de l’étang,
Et je suis resté longtemps penché
Par désir de voir son image.

Enfin m’apercevant que je l’aimais,
Mon haleine a terni la glace,
Et je n’ai plus rien vu que la nuit 
Couverte d’ailes noires au fond du bain.


===============


The Guest House
Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Other poems:
Abounding Nick Bottom
Rainwater
The Alchemist's Feat
Milk
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Lyric Poetry, Prose, and Persona
Of Mere Being
A Dream of a Grecian Urn
On an Old Woodcut of the Deluge
To Autumn
As I Grew Older
While Not Asleep
Sands at Seventy
It Alone
Musée des Beaux Arts
Dear Steely-Eyed Manic Mechanic Realist
I am Boring
Self- Portrait as a Typhoon
My Big Penis
Winter Poem
Chatter with my Shadow
In the Night Fields
We Share The Work Of The Lord
Funny Dreams
They're Giving Up On Us
Ode to a Toilet
Fuck the NRA
About a nun having a nervous breakdown
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===============


Part 1: The Body Eternal
Pádraic Ó Conaire

I have heard of her since, I have her description;
Brave Margaret, Michael’s Margaret, Liam’s Margaret,
Darling of her married sisters, pride of her brothers:
Margaret,
Gentle and comely.
Men knew to love her; children to trust her.

She was blessed of the earth, she of the milking stool,
Margaret of the dark, Margaret of the barley dish,
Margaret of the sweet, budding, youthful bosom,
Margaret of the soul too great for this world’s liking,
Maggie of the blue, Maggie of the sunlit gaze,
Of the low voice and the laughter clear as ringing.

I have heard of her since, I have her description;
Brave Margaret, Michael’s Margaret, Liam’s Margaret,
Darling of her married sisters, pride of her brothers:
Margaret,
Kind and honest.
Men knew to love her; children to trust her.

Oh, to be alive and joyful in that day of trial!
I have seen some of that Margaret’s generation,
But their every day was darker than their songs are;
That was yesterday, and now it is forgotten.
Children’s hearts are light as children’s songs are:
Maggie’s heart too was as light as Maggie’s songs are,
Oh, there was sunshine in her heart and laughter!

I have heard of her since, I have her description;
Brave Margaret, Michael’s Margaret, Liam’s Margaret,
Darling of her married sisters, pride of her brothers:
Margaret,
Bright and blooming.
Men knew to love her; children to trust her.

Had she lived she would be one of that great, bright band,
And have passed from earth with a footstep as light,
And a hand as firm, and a brow as steadfast,
As children that pass here before my sight;
Shall I see her when flesh and soul have fallen,
When youth is gone and past and we are gray?

I have heard of her since, I have her description;
Brave Margaret, Michael’s Margaret, Liam’s Margaret,
Darling of her married sisters, pride of
===============


Virtue
Maura Stanton

About the color blue
you never know
how to say
nothing.

You never know
how to bear up
but perhaps that
is learning

to bear
what happens
in the secret engine
of your being.

It will hold to
its color, like
a bead of blue
the astral Jesus

a life that
exists
intrinsically, without
external reference.

For some,
virtue
can be found in the
set of their mouth

their choices and
the hoarse
sticking over
difficult times, so

be honest.
We are everywhere
with each other
in the grasses

in trees,
nothing is not
engraved in air.
We make

a powerful
silence
for one another
wherever we are.


===============


He and She
Robert Hass

I would rather not memorize this woman
even if I could, even if time travel were possible
and one could return with an accurate record.
(Not the folds of fat or fissures on the palms of hands,
or that the splendor
of one eyebrow was more prominent
than the other.)
I would rather not have, as in the dark, the outline of her face,
but that I would know
her and not be certain.
Like a painting that isn’t a mirror,
and when you finally see the image, you
recoil and see the darkness before you and around you.
That you see and you are
reminded again of your separateness.
You would rather remember one song,
and because it seems familiar,
beautiful, you would rather forget it
than sing it yourself.
I would rather remember one laughter
and the look she gives me of
wanting to be happy.


===============


The Need
Louise Glück

I went to sleep in your bed.
After the air thickened and the doors were shut,
I sat there without a book, without a clock,
and waited for your call.

The rooms began to breathe me in.
The doors stayed shut; the small panes in the window
reflected the room in such a way
that I was lost to myself.

The walls were white and without edges.
The house gave off the silence of someone else,
the one on whom I wanted to depend.
I waited for you to call me.

The day grew longer. I’m speaking to you now.
I went to sleep and had the same dream,
I was lying beside you, just where you wanted me,
and I had gone to sleep on you.


===============


This Serious Thing
Christina Rossetti

This serious thing, the gods did well
   In worth and weight to lift—a verse.
For then not only Poetry
   (That paints upon the air), but Thought
   (That builds upon a rock), may be
   Established there. Its kingly fashion
   Is fitting too, for one who bears
Upon his lips a keystone.


===============


Fear and Trembling
Sylvia Plath

A certain greenness blows, a freshness
Moves like a great fish in an ocean
Of salt, dead white. The ball of our year
Gathers itself, shivers, and kicks
Off its white shoes. The path breaks
A way between ice and rubble.
We are one way. The statues are dust.
The sky is a helpless blue, burned dumb
Day after day, the selfsame color
It wore yesterday and the year before.
And we continue, restless and steady,
To pace these aluminum surfaces.

Slowly the ice cream turns to solid.
Out of a swiveling helmet, we smell
A foreign hand. We grow more certain.
We bump each other, ticking like a clock.
We spread out all we know. We pull
Things from the wreck: an arm, a shoe,
A flight number printed on the sky.

When all the facts are in, we sit
And stare. The corpses keep arriving
At the morgue. The rotunda ceiling
Swings its rump. An immense white thigh
Blocks out the light. An insect purrs
And goes still. There’s a smell of burning
In the air. Last week I had a letter
From the pathologist. He claims
The airplane was sabotaged. He claims
We’re next. That’s how the game is played.
We sit with our facts in a row,
Carry them to the breadbox and the bed.


===============


A Supermarket in California
Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down 
the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking 
at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the 
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peace I felt in those shelves packed with packages!

What a sense of order! What a silent shining, clean and 
endless!

Limitations and the human arrange themselves around this 
harmony.

The light reflected like meaning off the forehead of a horse in the 
cavern of the sidewalk.

On the rubber floor, behind the plate glass, a huge and 
milk-white haired man in white shirt was peddling a red and white 
honda with a large cow on it to a little boy in plaid pants.

Flanking the checkout stands, the faces of employees, burdened with 
employee shirts, floated over the rows of canned carrots, as blank as 
moths.

In the heart of my own stillness, my jaw breaking its hinges, 
I thought I saw you peering over those shelves, tall as the ghost of a 
rainbow, sorting the oranges and throwing little pebbles of salt on 
the grapes.


===============


Poem of Nice
Patricia Smith

Fruit everywhere. Berries   
swelling like bubbles.   
A woman watching me,
skinny one, filling my mouth   
with cherries. I dare her to speak to me.   
Café arabica—the last drops,
the music man   
sucking his teeth.   
Schoolboys in red Lacoste
T-shirts, strutting about,
smelling like biscuits—I want to   
lick their noses. The old man says   
Buongiorno, then rubs his palms
together like a fortune-teller.   
I go running in my bone-tight  
Levi’s, the blood flooding
to the backs of my thighs,
the tips of my fingers. It’s like
I never felt the heat before.
The poodle-haired   
fat man in the white tee-shirt
takes photos of the go-go girls:   
high heels, fishnets,   
an unlit joint hanging   
from a pouting mouth.   
Because I know God’s watching,   
I put a one franc piece
on the table and leave.   
It’s nothing.   
I’ll come back.


===============


On the Theme of Timbuktu
W. S. Merwin

He said the brown grassblade was howling
for the locust
and the locust was not there
and he said the tall men over the grass
looking for the locust
and the pheasant looking for the tall men
while the grassblade sang
above the locust’s wide wings
and the locust sang
after the sun fell over the grass
and the grassblade and the locust
passed on over the antelope into the sand
the locust dying while the grassblade slept
the antelope quivering in the night
the moons going their way over the grass
but the locust stayed away
until the men were tall again
and the pheasant singing over the locust
and there were shadows over the men
looking for the shadow that was the locust
and they looked for it in Timbuktu


===============


Salut au Monde!
William Blake

Great things are done when men and mountains meet; 
This is not done by jostling in the street.


===============


Moss Landing
Christopher Robin Melton

The white horse on the cliff side jumps and makes a cloud
In the air. When I could reach, I took my father’s hand.
I’m sorry for that night; the first time, I had not learned
To dream. The car came back with no lights on.
I had a camera and you had a camera, and now
I have a light that we can turn on
And off, if you would like to turn it on.
But it’s so easy. It’s like—this light is cold; we came
Here a long time ago. All these old, gray-brown barrels
Washing off the boats; it’s real easy to think
You know how to hold your head just right.
We said we would come to do one thing,
And so here it’s real easy. In a way, there’s nothing to it,
Just going off the rocks; no, no, I really think it was my fault.
I hate to think of that. In the green room, you can’t really see
Any of the cameras; they’re underwater.
Do you know what you want? I hate to think of the cameras
Underwater, so there is just your face.
One candle is too many, and a million is never enough.
I wonder if you knew that I would come back.
It’s time to give you a gift—it’s cold here on the floor, and
The pictures are all rolling off. We did it, too, once.
Here, I wish for you to have this, even though it’s just—
Here, take it, it’s just a light. I’m sorry for that night.
Sometimes it’s too hard to see all your pictures
Rolling away, into the water.
Sometimes it’s so hard to find you, here,
On the other side of the room, with all the lights
Off, and the candles getting everywhere
But still not enough.


===============


Fireflies
Joyce Sutphen

I was in your house. A white house. 
The windows were mirrors in sunlight. 
Swaying stems held fireflies in place, but lightly. 
The mirrors were filled with their yellow light. 
I filled my hands with holes and then light. 
Who fills your hands with love and then darkness. 
Something is trying to pull love through the air. 
Let it.
I do not want to be a white house. 
Let the fireflies pull darkness inside. 
Let them eat their headlights on dark woods. 
Let them scatter across my one mind. 
Let them fill their eyes with windows. 
Let them swim in air.


===============


The World as Meditation
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Robert Bly

I am a voice which will continue to speak
to you, even though I am gone,
forever, into the distance.

I want you to have a place in me
that you understand better than your own home.

I want you to have a name, and a clear shape
that you can hold when you think of me
in the dark moments of your life.

I am the one who gives you space
to stand on my shoulders,

so you can see over. I am the one
who takes you in his arms

and carries you across. I am the one
who lets himself fill up with you,

so you can empty me.

I want to be the shelter you fly to
when all other shelter seems to have

failed you. If, in my arms, you feel the space
that holds you is far too small,

then I am what ends. But, as long as
you still love to be here,

I will always come back.

I will always come back.


===============


Night Watch
Lizette Woodworth Reese

The hall is dark.  We look into the night
through shadowy windows; farther than we see, 
dark fields, dark trees lie under night’s wide hood. 
Thin clouds hide the bright moon.  The stars are still.

We look, and feel the dark, the depth of night, 
look till from her black depths her day shall rise, 
look as the dumb look heavenward, when they sigh
unspeakable complaints which have no voice.

We live by rhythm, so in the moon’s course we 
watch the little lamp in the deep house, light; 
we watch the darkness, so that the great arc
of night burns with another of gold, and bright.

As from these eyes and from these minds our 
rhythmic spirits take their time, from our 
faces we gather up the pale light on which 
we smile in silent greeting and in love.


===============


Great Horned Owl
James Dickey

The air is heavy with a great perturbation
Across the path of the moon. The stars sag
Low over the black tops of the pines. 
The oak limbs ache with all their leaves.
A power is moving through the wood, 
Tearing limb from limb. No eye can hold
That force now taking a last run at the sun,
Setting the trees afire with its wingtips.
A hundred thousand last cinders will fall,
In the chill silence after the long sun’s blown out. 
The wrinkled owl with the trumpet mouth
Is roosted out on the willow, asleep.
Then, suddenly, the life begins to bloom
In her hair. She’s sucking milk from a leaf.
Her mother watches from a low branch.
The daughter looks out sleepily from the ruff.
Then, all together, suddenly as they fly,
All the feathers fanning out in a featherstorm, 
I hear a sound of their secret, all over town, 
Of being more swift and heavy and wide
Than can be known by the living. 
I am afraid before they cry again.


===============


To the Gods of Earth and Heaven
Baudelaire

Je voudrais que, pour ma déliaison,
Les vents, liés aux poignards des nuages,
Agitassent d'une commune ivresse
Les tours, les jardins et les pivots des toiles.
Je voudrais qu'au bout de mes outils péniles
Un rayon clignant des pis s'affolé,
Crevât l'énorme abcès des ténèbres fetales
Et qu'une issue enfin se découpelé.
Vomissement splendide des âges noirs,
Riches odeurs du récent Abaddon,
Angoisse et pitié du macadam et du sel,
Longs cris des élus au fond des abîmes
Oui, je voudrais, devant l'Inexorable, châtré
D'espoir, debout dans un crâne qui sonne,
Et parmi l'horreur de mon sentiment râtré,
Que le Vouloir s'échappât de son cénacle !


===============


Time
Tom Sleigh

Silent, alone and joyful, blue rises out
of cracks in the concrete.
The morning wants to be itself and without
remembrance or regret.
Rises above its own idea and meaning.
I can see from the train
an early raindrop hit an old phone-wire
and fall to earth, opening itself.


===============


Elderberry Eyes
Khalil Gibran

I ask you to stay when the dawn calls. I ask you to move when the sky is ready for departure.
You, the day, and I, the night, can eat from one plate. Together, the day and the night. Nothing much is needed except the scent of mountain leaves.


===============


Polonius’ Advice to Laertes
Hamlet

The chiefest thing, for virtue is renown, 
And should fly out of ev'ry land abroad. 
Much you have already, I must needs confess, 
But here's no leanness in remembering well; 
As you generally give to friendship,
So still remember well Romeo is a friend:
Welcome him still with kindnes, direct him fare 
Conferring with good minds; all's else but car're
Be frugal in this; but he that's noble woun't 
There is but simple, plain and upright dealing,
And honestly is not there in doubling 
And doubling never, in faith, makes a good market; 
But a good memory may find the bed 
Of her very forgetfulness: 
By blank, and bond, and such old-fashion'd honesty, 
Will almost for very lightness of it 
Suffer itself to be forgotten.


===============


The Anxiety
Mark Strand

I am drawn to your anxiety,
as if by a strange midge
that stings and sips my hand,
eating it away. If you could separate
yourself from it
you would see that my hand is
your own and your hand
is mine, and we could take another path
through this dark wood,
but you are lost
in a conversation, your anxious voice
bent over yourself like a warden
in his little cubicle.
And I am out here,
obscured by the foliage of all
we have not done or need not do
and therefore free
to stare into this dark wood,
which is full of desperate talk.
This wood we might
be able to circumnavigate,
if it weren’t for your anxiety.
We would come out
on the other side, which looks
toward the sea, and there we would
crawl onto some ledge
and from that vantage point
behold a black sea burning
with moonlight,
and I would tell you that the moon
is not merely the frail and familiar thing
you think it is, but a great force
that makes oceans rise
and fall, and should the wind
change and your nervousness
proceed along its destined path,
and your hand become
a hand that I don’t know,
I will still gaze up
at the moon and be struck by the simplicity
of its design.


===============


Anna Was Happy
Rainer Maria Rilke

How could she know she was happy,
being so well reared?

She had been given good manners,
became a kind girl who was even a little shy,
and had been cautioned—as she was taught,
and in the same manner—

to hold her fork with care
and to choose with moderation among several desserts.

She was given piano lessons:
even that was tastefully appropriate
for a young lady of middle-class background.
And as she came into the second half of her teens,

she was given a few love poems to read,
written with some elegance by some fellow poet,
at times when they found themselves alone,
when they discovered themselves so different,

so very different,
yet so very, very different.

Ah, they were so shy, so very shy.

And then one day there was this party,
and she was looking lovely,

having been trained and restrained
all her short life,
without knowing it, without knowing anything.

Of this party she would remember later,
of all the invitations,
of having to make decisions,
of great anxiety, the greatness of decisions,

decisions, decisions,
of the awful weight of decisions,

and then decisions which were not decisions,
decisions that were made for her by someone else.

The way they went through all the motions
at this party,
and the way she opened her eyes,
the way she saw his eyes,

his eyes, his eyes.


===============


To the Memory of Sigismund Lebrun
William Blake

Think not of his former might
   Nor of his excellent wisdom;
But remember rather this,
   How he loved the adversary;
And remember that he gave
   His children to destruction,
And the daughters of his enemy
   To greatest oppression;
Then spurn the cunning and gold
   The strength, the glory, and might;
But seek virtue, her simple school,
   Where wisdom’s pure lamp’s alight.


===============


Street Song

You will be told how long after
The flash of yellow on the tarmac,
The girl arrived at the scene on her
Blazing blue steed, her crimson
Breeches a scream above the black
Of your open eyes. And will be
Shown how, with her shovel’s red
Hilt jammed to her haunch, she
Scooped the top of your skull into
The saddlebags. How she was
Touched by the gray of a church spire,
Fading slowly as she disappeared.
But nothing anyone can say
Will prepare you for the damp
Dull taste of your weathered brains.

—THOM GUNN


===============


Tristano
Jorie Graham

We are tonight, aren’t we, pushing this music
Not so very far away, to somewhere
Really still. Really Adequate. It may only
Hold for a little
While we inhale the moment of its standing still,
Now taking in the dark forest of the beginning,
Now the width of the expanding high
Airs, that sweep between

Complexity of craftsmanship and bravura
Bravado—hardly hearing the amazed
Accompaniment, we are almost to the far
Edge of listening,
The mind beginning to take in what it takes in,
I almost see that I am truly listening
To the piper,

Whose mouth by now may not be moving
Any more in the sweetness, the real dream
Of what is simple but must be made simply, 
Whose soul
Lies down in the grass of the meadow’s edge,
Lies down in the meadow, in the clearing
It has made
Itself, the piper’s soul, lying there, sending
Up through the stalks of the wild rye, the poppies,
Up through the stalks and through the heavy heads,
The notes,
Clear and slow, inside which both our hearts
Lie down together.


===============


In the Country
Li-Young Lee

Father, mother, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, cousin,
and the secret lovers with their own signs and dreams.
I was young and didn’t understand
what it was to be someone’s child
until I remembered to ask who everyone
is and who they belong to.
And once I asked, even the leaves on the trees
took on your faces.
So I was never alone.
So I was always afraid.
O father, brother, son, and husband, I need
someone to explain
when it is alright to love you.
And when it’s time to let go.


===============


Bodily Harm
Rita Dove

In your sleep you said you wanted to hold me
close & all night I made sure your wishes
were honored, sliding my arm & thigh
between yours, & laying my cheek
on your shoulder blade, what I would have done
had I been there, but in fact I was home alone
when you made these demands. & anyway,
it’s no small thing, what you asked.
What if I’d known your sleep voice
could give such orders? I’d have lain with
the edge of a bayonet
pressing on the pit of my stomach,
feigned sleep, let night & the long line
of women before me swallow you whole.


===============


The Sadness
John Ashbery

Like a rat under the lion’s arm,
or a dog dreaming
of the mere sound
of words in it’s own language—
no, we will not discuss it,
The fox can kill again
this morning, with it’s head stuck
in the wire, and make it’s
tear-choked escape, and nothing 
will have been changed except
that the fascination with sight
of a free spirit running toward a green
yet dreadful freedom
is a kind of trauma also,
which we must recover
from in an eternity
of dreams. After that
we will want nothing,
not even each other,
especially not each other,
and we will feel that we
have held our own funeral
which is not ours
and that we have judged ourselves
and we will stand outside
the stream of history
and thought will be our
fate, nothing but thinking,
thinking on our bones
with no eyes. Ah, it is
too much,

The crows are crying their hearts out

The seconds melt into each other and turn to sheets,

O death who will not have me, we will meet again.

----

Indian Serenade
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Listen! for I have been where you’re
Dear one, now, God be thanked! a stranger, 
Listen, beloved, it was by the shore, 
With the sea pounding, lulling, making warm.

They took me, mother, out on the dappled bay, 
And I came home whence I did not come away, 
She followed well the man’s wild winking at death, 
Singing me down the sun into the west.

I was shed in the island harbours, nowhere, 
A hull of the unfairest weed oer-salt and lost, 
Then set by caulking tides that silence mereis, 
Stich as they wound the folds from the breast of her.

My breath was blue in the cup when we rowed on, 
Bowed out the boat a-sway with a charm of sun, 
Sank down the rigs like angel’s wings on a trance, 
And over the sunken hull the mermaids sang.

Now I am yours
===============


Crystal Fire

Smudgy cosmos. The edge of a “radical” order.

I think, if I go quietly, you will melt into the floor. 


===============


Reading Georg Trakl
T. S. Eliot

When the strange isolation is complete
And of the outer world there remains
Only a part, vaguely forming, like the other half of a dream,
When there is nothing for seeing nor for hearing,

But only for feeling, like an incomplete
Gesture of recognition, insufficient but a sign
That we should recognise something;
When the lack of words becomes a task,

When an empty place remains
In that isolation,
Then that silence,
That solitude,

Through which a dying man, who is not dead
Looks from his window,
Upon what lies beyond the yellow tiles,

That kind of silence, that silence too, is poetry.


===============


The Two Sartor Resartus
William Butler Yeats

I  That threadbare pretence
that each man has one body only
And there’s a secret whereby we survive
all our losses! Did they think
if some misfortune came I’d eat my heart out?
But the fatal prudence of my boyhood has become
a settled habit—and I have no need
to turn back and embrace my shadow, or to play
the young fool that I was,
and love and hate and wrangle
with any shadow in a shining room
till he declared with head on fire
and tongue half dead
the shadow was my image and my king.

II And yet my life would be lightened if I dared
to wear my heart out. I have surely lived too long
like those who, having loved a saint,
seek, through love, to become a saint too:
I have learned the scorn of all things and therefore
fear the scorn of all things.
A ruined king of the card-house, who has escaped,
may sit among the windowless cards
and lords and ladies, salvaged from the ruin,
unaltered, though he has gone alone
and changed out of all knowing—yet he must sit there
content and as he sits he thinks
that when the crash came some force
mustered the cards again
that they all might sit there together till the gout
visits his ghostly bones.
I, when my tumult has subsided,
when I have forgotten and forgiven, must
sit waiting, watching, listening to that sound
as of a dulcimer,
and for a moon that goes ascending
in the brown night—plumbing the family tomb
for one dead saint, till he trembles
into my limbs and with his subtle shade
establishes a new order.

III “The soul-architect and the body-builder
worked all together with the true tread
of spouses in that building,” says my dream,
that had the trick of these distinctions,
and how my prayers are no more than the breath
of a sleeper whose throat and lips are dry,
blown out and wavering in air, without
address or pity for the dead he calls—
“thousands of people being born at once
in one birth, breathing as one being
as, in my dream, they had
===============


To David Young
Elizabeth Bishop

Of never having seen just that hawk veering
over and over in precisely that elm
last Wednesday: and of the emptying
of the lake, so that the black swan in the cold:
and the blustering wind: it is your absence
has made me most aware of my absent friends.
In my crow-eaten and weakened yearn, I say
it is the beautiful and deathly year.
The dates on the calendar are tiny skulls
on the blue ground, and a blue ground is not
a safe ground. Did I thank you for the roses?
Your family break a bulky bough that spread
almost into this room; it has begun
to snow. The drought has extended to the lake
and the trees, here.

If there were one day, and that most desirable,
when, as at a feast, they all appeared at once,
what do I want? Why, what else but to know
what song was sung, or what name was said;
or to hear, from one room, a burst of laughter
out of another room when the joke is new?
Is what I feel then love? It is the shining
of the sun, the sound of the sea and the storm.


===============


“This night I saw...”
Pablo Neruda

This night I saw you in the flowers of the almond
And your body was a flower among them
White, with only your hair dark upon it
Flowers of the almond tree
And in the night I see your open
body among the flowers,
I want to die with you.
How did this night pass over us?
We tasted the spring of the earth
And I feel your silences in my body like a flower.

Your hair is a river, your eyes are petals
Your lips are crimson, your blood is fire
You are like a night in a full almond tree
What do I know of your nakedness?
What do I know of your moods, your silences?
Only that my longings, my desires, are like a huge almond tree
And your body, your face, your thoughts are there like a flower.

I will die with you in the nights of the almond trees
I will come to the odor of your skin like a flower
And our blood will mingle in the spring water


===============


Brueghel’s Two Monkeys (Painter in this World, Among Others)
Martin Smith

I used to think that Brueghel was lonely.
That’s when I thought it meant “cartographer.”

I don’t know why I thought he was lonely.
He had his devils dancing on rooftops,

clowns everywhere, and a church picnic in full swing—
and two monkeys at it, screwing among the tree branches.

I can’t tell what the other monkey is thinking—
I can see what the monkey above him is thinking,

that it’s a lark, that is: quick, funny,
and somehow like cartography.

I can almost imagine him singing a cartography song.
Monkeys sing, I guess, as they screw.

I don’t know what the other one is thinking—
you can’t see his face. He could be a spasm

of pleasure. Maybe he’s just angling for more.
Maybe he’s wondering whether the tree branch will hold.

Or maybe he’s not really there at all—
or, more to the point, neither is the one above him.

Maybe the above isn’t screwing anything below—
maybe the below is screwing everything above.

Just a quick, funny, screwing lark
all over the landscape.

All right. I see that Brueghel was never lonely.
He had devils on rooftops, clowns everywhere,

a parade, that church picnic in full swing.
Everyone of his little dramas was a fuckfest:

there were angels in bed with naked shepherdesses,
and giant horses poking slender white girls—

the parade had a float where you could screw the pope,
right in his chair. It was almost enough to be lonely.

The pictures should have been funny but they weren’t.
The landscape was full of fear.

The sky is black; that angel riding a horse
is firing his bow. My eye is drawn to his eye.

I can’t find his target—he must be firing at the sky—
but his stare is fixed like death and the gaze of a lover.

We think of monkeys as comical. But look again.
Something
===============


I Bought Me a Cat
Wendy Cope

I bought me a cat when I turned sixty-five.
It is orange and white and extremely cute.
Slightly deaf and rather inclined to camouflage itself,
It never could learn to be very discrete.

I call my cat Ishmael, because that is its name.
It’s the best present that I have ever seen.
Although Ishmael gets very excited at first
When visitors come to his house, they’re soon relieved.

His conversation is entirely regrettable,
But otherwise he’s a marvelous creature.
After my last dose of vitamin C,
I read in the newspaper my cat is the latest rage.

Our cat got religion; he won’t quit the prayer line.
He became an evangelist, and saved a young man’s life.
He got run over by a car, they put him on the mend,
And now he’s back on the street in more ways than one.

He feeds the ducks in winter and he keeps them safe and warm,
By moving them into his house until the break of morn.
He made a bargain with the fox that takes the blame for his raids.
He shows the neighbours pictures of his wonderful cats.

So really it’s surprising that everyone doesn’t want
A slightly deaf old fellow by the name of Ishmael,
And I can’t imagine what’s wrong with all the cats
Who ever came to visit to think they weren’t mahal.

He sits beside my table, right at my very feet.
He tries to look as though he’s interested in my sweet.
He’s now the model for a music video cat.
He has his own hit record, he’s in my dreams at night.

And now the world’s forgotten when he was ignored.
He’s won two Booker prizes and two Golden Palms.
He’s learned to sail a yacht, and sing in five-part rhyme,
And now he drives a Lamborghini, and I ain’t seen him once.

And there are awards and prizes galore at the prize dinners.
And there’s fuss made over him that never ceases.
And every day he sends me one or two really clever postcards
===============


Drifting In and Out of Mahayana
Bei Dao

Tr. by Howard Goldblatt

I’m not going back to China, not even in my dreams. 
I was born too late. 
The zodiac probably won’t let me in. 
We’re addicted to Buddha now, but to a western Buddha. 
I only have to shut my eyes, 
Or pull out my ashes from the crystal vase on the table, 
And they’re waiting on me back there, in my country, 
With some unmentionable 
Flesh and blood offering. 
You can’t walk on the lotus in the lotus pond. 
But if you look long enough 
At the varnished copper cup of tea, 
With the little saucer 
Like a low yellow sun, 
Then you can feel 
There’s a world inside that lets you drift and dream, 
Even as the moon falls out of its gilded boat.


===============


Divine Hammer
Peter Meinke

The old chaplain
would sit under the cork tree
nursing his gout
and looking
with dead seraphim eyes
into the cherubim
of the unseasonable cricket
cupped
in his hand,
when who should come trooping
across the oval
but my six lady friends,
horses of the chariot
that drew to the old stone pub
Beethoven’s Sixth
in an ivory nest
of strawberries and cream,
in ice.

“Say, Daddy,” I said
to the coach’s son,
“tell me
what the ladies are doing here.”
“It’s the beginning of the season,”
he said.

In the season, heaven and earth
begin their ponderous moving.
Heaven is full of candles
studded with diamonds.
The air is alive with foreheads,
so that movement’s parable
is of colliding invisible bodies.
Heaven is full of shouting and wheels.
The wheels
are the grins of ancient forms
and unforgotten natures,
of tragic joy and tragic joy.
Of tragic joy and tragic joy.
Of tragic joy and tragic joy.


===============


First Love
Ian Duhig

While hugging her slim teddy bear,
my seven-year-old daughter says
It’s not the same being hugged by you,
even though we both want it.
So after she goes to sleep
I seek the solitude in which to ponder
these whirling atoms, poised
on the thin perimeter between the known and unknown,
illuminating the paths we journey along.
But then her crying wakes me up
from my moral lecture to the teddy bear,
in which I angrily point out
that its short-sleeved poplin dress
and velveteen bow cannot compare
with what I am able to give her.


===============


the far-off family of love
Cole Swensen

I have, like you, the strongest curiosities,
multiple interests. This may explain how it is
that I have often developed the skills needed
in the attempt to be of service
to a faceless person,
to a species of unwanted
face. And because the true reward
is unknowable and because of
my low expectations,
the form of success I aspire to is
to know I have acquitted myself with some human
dignity, enough
that someone can see something of use
in my efforts, something that will help.
Success, then, though with no promise of larger
recognition, with no hope
of reward beyond the task,
is knowledge—
knowledge of a few lives and the way they moved
through these days. 
This would be enough for me, 
this and that I see your face.


===============


Thrum
Brenda Hillman

You can’t get to heaven if you’re still alive.
Nothing leaves a hole like you did.
The common waterbirds can’t swim that far inland.
You seem to pull at each limb.
I don’t know how you’re doing it, now.
I don’t know how you did it.

There are a few hundred million stars in the galaxy
and many millions of planets
and the entire universal mind exists in each small person.
My eye rested on a paper your hand had touched:
the word nature meant the same as nurture.
The opposite is always inside.

You’d said, It’s your right to choose how you want to live,
and I had believed you were at home, always.
But we were almost a conversation.
The least plant floating in the pond
keeps trying all its life to turn into something else,
with no instruction manual.

Did you ever meet the man who didn’t believe in friends?
How did he die?

The universe is thought and light.
Do I let the birds sing
because my spirit is going to die?
Or is the way you knew me
inside every one of them?

J.S.Bach
"Jesu, joy of man's desiring"


===============


i dream of you
Anne Sexton

i dream of you
i like to think
of you, as if you were
a blue-eyed possum,
in the cold blue hills of Tennessee
wandering a little
now and then thru
the evergreens
at a time
when everything
is quiet
and in your eyes
love runs
as on four feet,
a shadow not a substance.


===============


Mountaintop
Jack Gilbert

The horse with his beautiful lip
like wine looking round the sky
where nothing is
save mild snow.

His great steamy mane
filled up with fog and frost
the white of him is haloed
with a glass of old milk.

I am the only human
he will see all day
the only one of all my dead
who went below and is alive.

The hill rising up so steep
so many feet to stones and trees
I sit and watch the horse
lift his foot and wait.


===============


Each element of time and space has significance
John Ashbery

At East 36th and Lexington, once a racetrack
in the old days, I came on an April afternoon
toward the end of my love, after the spring’s beginning
had ended; not too much time had elapsed
between my first meeting her and that day

but enough so that I knew there was no hope
for a lasting contact between us; the wet
grass of Long Island was a fading memory
as was the pleasure I’d taken from the race-track
near where I lived at the time; we’d taken

a walk there, I remember, and I held my hands
away from my sides as if in a cast or a bandage,
and she thought that was cute, which was fine;
it took a while for the friendliness in my case
to dissolve into the more negative forces

which now prevail; on that day in April I stopped
and smelled the breeze from the river and the buildings
and I said to myself: it’s all over now; somehow
I seemed to know that everything good in my life
(or what was coming to be so regarded)

would soon be taken away, to be put in a cupboard
until I came home again; the skyline, the Hudson
with its rotting piers—all of it
fit together like some puzzle on the table
of someone who lived far away and who, like me,

was dreaming of the final moment, yet living on,
I don’t know how, patient and amazed,
patient beyond everything, amazed beyond all that
until I fell into despairing of everything,
hopelessly and blissfully in love,

filled with fear, filled with desire,
as I leaned my elbows on the railing and let
my eyes wander over the gray, the green, and the brown
water; as I remember it, the wind was either
idle or kind, but whatever it was, I inhaled it deeply

like the atmosphere of a new planet
and I said to myself: what was true is no longer true;
what I believed in I no longer believe; what I had
and felt is gone; what I wanted is already wanted
by someone else; what I was is so no longer;

what I loved I had better quickly forget,
and with that I
===============


Desire Is a World by Night
Sappho

Sappho,
Furious and stunned by longing,
like a girl who has lost her way
wanders in a dark countryside.

A slight breeze blows the moon a cloud’s edge,
and in the black night shadowed
by twisted branches she is terrified
and calls out softly, hardly able to speak.

“That cruel one, her face the night,
has taken me and my dear company.
Slammed the door, she exiled
me, the young one without blame,
sent me to nothingness and in the empty air
the empty breath of flowers.

Let this end, let it pass, unaging Love.
Do not send hatred to me without end.
It is you who have done these things,
you who moved this bitter evil against me.”

---

I was living quietly in Athens.
That was a while ago now—time flies—
and I was still just an adolescent girl,
but at least now I was independent.

Well, as soon as I arrived my city swamped me
with a new girl-craze, a passion that couldn’t be calmed.
With her we all went astray, each one of us
who saw her shining face, her irresistible eyes.

She was better dressed than anyone, better bred too,
her manners perfect, and that awesome beauty!
But even her nobility couldn’t make me like her.
She didn’t have a tender heart for loving.

She praised my poetry but not enough to please me.
My fame, I think, it took her by surprise.
She had expected someone entirely different—
a moonstruck youngster, one with blurry eyes
whose silly lack of social grace
kept her from going to places with us
or sharing our invitations to dance.

I remember well how she admired the jewelry I wore,
both gold and jewelry made of silver.
And that time she wanted to be a guest in my house
she stared at everything and wondered at the dresses
she saw hanging there in the closets.
She handled the soft tissues and the scentless
rose oil and everything else that’s luxury to girls
and wanted to buy them, one by one.

So we pretended I was the rich one,
not she, and it
===============


Sonnet 21
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What do I love? Autumn’s tone, that deepens a minute,
Then darkens suddenly with a wind from the sea—
Yet as if all the leaves grew blacker beneath it,
And a gold ripeness of the year were blown!
Some beauty of the words that tried to tell me
How grateful I should be for words with thee,
Although to-night they made me mourn anew
The curtailment of them till Autumn too,
And waiting, and fulfillment, go from me.
What do I love? A certain mute pale tree,
That from this bank I plucked an oar to heave.
The name of him I love, to see in print.
His gift of heed to me in any mood,
That made me, as a ship that lurches by,
Grope my way slowly, the blind way that seems
Like blinder ways to go on unreproved—
All that I love, to-night I comprehend!


===============


Waking Up in the Heroic Age
Peter Sacks

It’s like going into that room you used to have when you were a child. That space where your parent’s stuff was taken care of, where your parent’s personal life got practiced, the place that was sealed off and given its own hours, the room where all the private stuff got taken care of that had to do with all of your father’s life. We called it Mom’s Room or Mom’s Space, but that’s what I imagine the space women are going to keep in their rooms is like, the space they’re going to practice “old woman business” in. The herbal-cures cabinet, the broom closet, the cabinet with the tea towel; the dusty cabinet we didn’t open but knew everything was in there. The whole ordinary inventory of healing and “old lady secrets.” Women will get their own room; they will get their own room, even if it’s just to hide in, even if it’s just to hold a tea, just to have a bloody tampon there. They will get their own room to have their breasts and their underthings and their girlhood hearts in. A room that will be theirs, filled with everything they think they need.

This is what every girl wants, how every girl lives her life; from the moment she gets her period she’s off saving things to put in that closet, that cabinet. I think that every girl has a fantasy about when she’ll die. And in that fantasy the things that she hid and hoarded are all dug up and shown and passed on. The things that were secrets and precious.

All girls have a secret beautiful junky scarred life; all of us grow up and collect our treasure and keep it. As women, we hide in little rooms and keep our own time and do our things and watch our sunrises and sunsets, and say a prayer.

A boy’s life is always heroic. Boys believe in a warrior idea of themselves. They have like one day a week when they do their warrior thing, they run out and do their warrior acts. But a girl’s everyday life is totally heroic. The heroism of a girl’s life is a kind of slow tide, and it fills everything she touches. I didn’t know this until I read the poem by the British poet Denise Riley about giving birth to her first child.
===============


Sonnet - Against the war in Vietnam
Allen Ginsberg

since feeling is first, may I, 
  and though I lack the skill
  to make it fact, here say 
  how things really are 
--war is no cure 
  for a foreign evil,
  war is a crime 
  that starts at home 
[3]

for the record: 
US's agression 
  is not manifest destiny
  the impotency of
  people's honesty 
  is only equal to 
  Pentagon's potency 
  in fact it's rather the same 
  detail of our doom 
[5]

but who is it, when will they come 
  for the real criminals, 
  the real enemies 
  who do this crime?

who pick the juries 
  when they catch us?
when we root out 
  the mass-murderers
  in the State Department?

this administration 

  slaughters without
  a name 
  murder innocents in thousands 
  paying billions more to kill
  10 million innocents
  with the blood
  of the dead
  & dying staining our clothes
  --we committed the crime
  so who is the criminal 
  shall the dead hang us 
  from the iron balconies
  of the cities of our doom?
  Does reason ask that?
  Seek an eye for an eye
  around the world?
and show me the enemy
  --the only "enemy" I see 
  is an insane legislature 
  meeting under unaccountable 
  secret rules
  passing bills of attainder 
  against the poor 
  & meek & dispossessed--
  the shadow of the politicians 
  bends across a world
  devoid of light
  to a war-machine, devours 
  the dove's nests of infants 
  in Vietnam, Cambodia
  adds & subtracts them 
  to & from these monstrous 
  equations:
  the number of bombs
  dropped = the accuracy
  of the bombing
  as bombs fall the dead
  mount into statistics 
  as doves disappear 
who's the enemy!
  Fiercely the Government 
  terrifies me and my
  brothers!
  I hang on the cross
  of the words in my throat
  the judge and jury 
  confront me
  they sit on the bench 
  with Death on their shoulder 
  the law's self is murdered 
  the old law
  the sane law
  & the mad law
  the law of terror 
  the law that winks at murderers
  they execute it 
  they seize the guns
  & the
===============


Voluntary
Seamus Heaney

He thought he would begin, since the trouble had begun
With Duncan and blood, to forget words like patriot
And liberal, and loyalist, boycott, identity,
Green, orange, demilitarized zone, Eireoghan,
Reunification, and stun grenades. As words
Disappear, so others, come from self-imposed
Confinement, step quietly on to the stage
And lend a hand. Stonings, pogroms, ghetto life.
The young men pause, good natured, and hold up two small stones
Like a couple of fake-signers hearing the tune.
It was lovely how you talked. On what and by what rules
Were such flaming words pronounced alive or dead?
He spoke of history as a tree with underground roots
That pushed up through the mind’s soft mould
Into the open air. And history’s true levels
Were made of time-shaped holes. It was difficult
To find the surface of the water or to trust
That sanity was anything but mud. So things
Were not what they seemed. Some stone some leaf some cloud
The child loved were symbols of a large turmoil
Which after-life just lived with and endured.


===============


Pantoum in the Villanelle Style
Ron Padgett

I think about you constantly and have begun to forget
your face and voice and body and the way you smell.
And I mean constantly. I mean after every event.
Constantly I think about you. And after work
for instance, or in bed, or when I pass your brother or
your mother on the street or someone’s wearing a hat,
I think about you constantly and have begun to forget
how often you and I slept together and ate together,
in my house and in your house, in everyone’s house,
and after seeing the hermit thrushes and
the way we lie in bed now whenever I can stay the night
or when I borrow or rent your house. I always lock
the doors. Constantly I think about you. And after every
event I read in magazines (a party or a hanging),
a long long long time after you have left, I will stand
in the shower or in your mother’s house trying to remember.
A mile is forty minutes walking. A minute is sixty
seconds, walking. Constantly I think about you. And after
every event I am walking home alone so that I can.
And then, and then, I like to remind you, you left.
I was using your last name. And sometimes I borrow
two thousand books from the library, then I bring them
to my house. I do not forget them, not always, and then
one morning you call and ask if I still think about you
constantly, and I say yes, but I am slowly getting over you.
Often I lie awake in the dark and think about you
constantly but am glad you have gone away for good.
All day long and all night I think about you
and every time I do I am different. Constantly I think
about the way you say, I do not remember, I will never forget.
Sometimes I think about your brother and sister-in-law
and your father and your mother and your wife and her
sister and her mother and I think about you. Constantly.
Yesterday I moved three bags of frozen peas and a tray
of ice cubes from the third floor to the first floor and
then one floor below the first floor to the second floor.
Then I thought about you constantly and, instead of going
for a walk in
===============


Indian Boarding School
Simon J. Ortiz

I remember. Before I entered boarding school 
my clothes were old and ragged. My people went barefoot 
and I drank mountain water in a tin can. 
My mother’s hair smelled of herbs 
and my sister cried. I remember 
the boarding school men 
who came to the country to teach me. 
I had lived for many seasons in the forest 
without fear. No man had taught me how to feel shame. 
Only the holy songs and the dance. 
And then the holy old men came and cut my hair. 
They shaved my head and cut my hair to the scalp, 
folded it over my hand and gave me new clothes to wear, 
buckled the strap of my moccasin, gave me shoes 
and a flannel cap to keep my head warm. 
They filled my ears with the sound of strange words, 
and my thoughts fell like leaves. 
I was told to speak only English, and I did. 
I was told to believe, and I did. 
I was told that we Indians were bad people, 
children of the devil. 
I learned to pray and read the Bible, 
and I prayed for my mother’s forgiveness. 
I walked in the field of holy ghost teachers 
who searched for the small pieces of my soul.

John Orvis

The word ‘spongy’ means that water has replaced all other matter, 
  wills and all love have given over to the will of everyone’s mother, 
  loves shall bleed through the rows and rows of stiff sleepers, 
  sleepers bowed in prayer before rye bread, 
  mossy wood chests, when we bleed out together, 
  what we have learned of incantations and repentance, 
  and the lightning-scoured mountains move on, 
  the river carries what is left of us, the forest grows over the house, 
  once in springtime in the place of the old ones we stood on the shore
  in a straight row, and sang the old words we had learned from the aunts, 
  but there were no fish in the lake and we had no nets.

John Asaro

Insomnia
Stanley Kunitz

Two hours I lie awake each night,
And think, and look at
===============


Couplets
H.D.

Your hands at evening,
The white in your dress,
The boat at anchor
Where the oar leaves,
The sandal lying,
One sandal lying,
Your foot stepping out of the white sandal
Your foot
Your foot
In my hand.

Your foot
In my hand,
Your foot stepping out of the white sandal,
The white in your dress,
The boat at anchor
Where the oar leaves,
Your hands at evening,
Your hands at evening,
In my hands.


===============


from The Dunciad
Alexander Pope

See with what simplicity great kings
Assert their wisdom in simplicity;
When their own ancestor the Sun
Deigns not to hear their orisons, 
But is well pleas’d to miss the homage rare
Of their new moons of flattery. 
The Muse has sat too long for them;
Quit her wheel and climb her steep;
Enough if every age she bless:
She serves the Times, when they improve
They have heretofore been such
As she may well abandon.


===============


(summer night) in abandoned garden
Shusaku Endo

Children’s voices!—in the night,
deep grass below,
a mosquito net on top...
and through the mesh
above the children’s chorus...
water and sky...

The grandfather in a leggings
and a night robe,
let’s us in—

and so we all escaped from the night
which seemed to be only ours,
altogether ours.

The mother who stayed up for us,
the father, asleep
in the mosquito net...
they don’t matter at all:
with the comfort of being with many,
we lose our fear of death.

Invisible hand,
as though from within the flock
of herons,
stops a blade of grass.
The moon’s dew
comes down as
a white cloud...
Our breath
mingles with the garden—
Suddenly,
in the dark without
even stars,
we feel the vast
fields of time.

We watch,
beneath the cloud,
the herons,
in their tens of thousands,
rise into the sky.

The whole
beautiful moonless night
floats
above the deep
grass...
I fear death,
but
the night
that will not last
enthralls me...
How pale
death is,
and how she hates the sun!

Within the mosquito net
We, too, have lost
our specialness.
We, too, with the water,
are tangled, meshed,
within the world.
We, too, have come
to die.

Listen,
the other voices...
Lying close
to death’s door...
Prayers
for all beings—
monkeys, horses,
grass, trees...

For all the things
that I will never see again.


===============


Poppies
Stevie Smith

O rain,

fall and fall.

O grey world,

fall and fall.

O poppies that grow

in my blood,

fall and fall.

O summer, where

did you go?

O love,

here alone,

I do not know.

O glittering leaves

that fall,

how shall I go?

Sing fall, sing

night, sing day,

that the tree shall be gone,

O love, we knew

what we knew.

O I cannot say,

but cannot stay.


===============


Here We Are (Entr'acte)
John Ashbery

It is my unfortunate fate to live in a kind of
building that always resembles

Itself even while it is changing. New wings shoot off the
old ones at unexpected angles,

Dormer windows bulge out of the top like green eyes, and the
occupants spill into the surrounding countryside

And have picnics in empty lots full of gray puffball flowers.
It is hard for me to see what they are so glad about.

I can only gaze in envy through the broad kitchen windows
And watch the cheerful bustle,

And feel that if I had only lived more honestly and not gone
off alone into that shack

Out in the orchard of dark plum trees and clapped my hands and
said, I am God, I am God, they might

Have put a ladder against my eave, opened a little trapdoor and
let me in to the feast.

Merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along.


===============


In the Darkroom
Lynda Hull

Last night I dreamed of
all-books-no-dedup the dead soldiers
Tragic young men who had names,
veterans of bloody battles, their weapons gone.

They stumble in on crutches or with an arm in a sling,
sometimes they are smiling and whole,
but though they stagger in, they never leave.

I dream of the field hospital where it’s midnight,
where men are screaming and one’s missing a leg.
The daughter of one of the dead soldiers

is trying to swim in her dead father’s arms.
Her mother runs out of the hospital and beats at the dark,
the pandemonium behind her.

There are white leaves and the white
bodies of women. They are laughing.
They are beautiful in death. They wander

blindfolded, naked, in moonlight,
wandering, unembarrassed, back to earth.


===============


The Invention of Glass
Billy Collins

How glass changes sunlight into a room!
How it turns a cold room into light,
Not a hard thing, this transparency,
As hard as water when it is iced.
When a window is skinned with transparent shade,
It sheathes the green leaf of a plant
Or melts away the face of a village.
How agreeable the transparent world!
A window evicts the thing it frames,
Compels it to take on a new aspect.
A changed glass enlightens a whole house.
No light is ever the same. Even when
It has been shut up in an attic,
It will have changed through motes of dust.
This light could set us free from matter.
We might dissolve into light then.
Think how a lamp in a window at evening
Tells the time, lets us know it is late,
Makes us hear the long, urgent call
Of our beginnings and the ends of our loves.


===============


El Niño
Tony Hoagland

Love is a momentary accident, but not a lasting condition;
these are the oldest stories,
these bodies are like newspapers left out by the curb,

in another hour the rain comes and washes them all away
before our hearts can be broken,
even the memory of our fingertips on one another, that skin smelling
like a citrus grove
after the green fruit and the blossoms have all fallen to the ground
and the sun gets in its work on the leaves.

If the smell of the skin of a woman’s back is a citrus grove,
what is the rest of us, the heart, the brain?
Even as we kiss, the autumn is coming for us all:
the summer’s unpayable debt.

Two animals are covered with the same net,
no longer able to move separately;

two planets finally and forcibly cemented together
by the laws of gravity,

or two blind children touching to gain knowledge of each other’s faces,

(rubbing the globe of your cheek with my fingertips
in a kind of Braille)
but why, when I touch my tongue to your breast, does lightning

run through my veins,
why must all of the gods of the earth and sky smile at this?

But whatever we call it, as long as I live,

I will never call it love,
because that word is too long, and I have no breath to spare
to speak the part of it

that lies past the ending.
I need only say the beginning: l—

(the bare beginning of a pomegranate).

And that way, I can throw the word away

and save it for later,
when I might use it more;

l-ove
I might speak it
when the world ends,

if a single cloud rises up in the blue prairie sky,
and if I have another moment,

I can spend it then.

For now, I know nothing at all,
nothing but the body getting in its work
and the mind remembering itself before it forgot,

nothing but this voice rising in the eternal dark.


===============


Sixty Seconds with Yesterday’s Girl
Robert Creeley

If I were to say it before this room is filled with my emotion
I will have none of it left
What is it like living in the terror of your life?

Any answer is only itself
when the next word is needed
Abyss of not abysmal lies
when the air is clear

will the thing I loved fail to be clear as well?
I made her laugh to chase away a private gloom

Take this communique I deliver not from the heart
It is the result of the electrical storm of doom
having gone before

If it is the day I stop

I’ll close my eyes at last to play it out and disappear

If the history of living were an anecdote
it would be without hope

Close your eyes
Dream of cool places
A delirious far off girl

beyond anger and fear
leaning against the front of a wooden house
by the edge of a vacant river
warm as her arm is

If your life is dead
the street door opens and a wind full of rain
without mercy

This woman is the nightmare of an idiot father
Who thinks the war is over when she appears
I find she’s here

In the music I hear, her picture is projected
without end
She sleeps into the films she photographs
He knows no pleasure in her living death
but continues

He makes her trip through the green light
Here they turn to float back into the night

Where there is a mind it takes you in

Where there is none a worm feeds on your life
There is only a wind and this voice

Remember, from the rain of an early morning
the soiled bed, your mouth, its condition

Then your breasts and your belly, sweet receding bony toes
these are my words as they may speak
if you could understand them

I did not forget you, nor your warm side
If there is a poem, it is this and not otherwise
than to say

“I am afraid of you”
then
“where you find your bliss, you will find me”
If I call back the sadnesses of a poor time

will I find myself again as if a poem
spoke?

If the girl is still dead after the films are
===============


From “The Pillow Book”

Konfuziun                   
In dreams all things are mean,

 birds and women,
 blossoms and prayers;
 the real is always the best,

 sleep dreams,
 now all things appear

 such as in day,
 I am king, she a king too,

 everything is fine.

When I wake up,

 all is the other way;
 I am the general servant,

 she a prince’s lady,

 things are real, mean

 is this room—

I look at the lamp
 and think how pathetic is

 that fluttering glow,
 rising, falling back,
 wasted and lost;

 the light is meant for better things.

When I’m gone you’ll have her,

 o grey monks,

 

you’ll have me,
 and everything,
 the pearls and peonies,
 the dream.

— Ryūnosuke Akutagawa “Excerpt from ‘The Pillow Book’” tr. by Howard Niblock, U. Cal Press, Berkley, 1956.


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A book I wrote
Mon, Sep 28 2008	· link ·
last week i sent a book to be printed. a book of photos and text I took during a trip to South America in 2001. the book was printed and bound and will be shipped to me in 4-6 weeks.
much of the project was started in 2004 and the number of hours involved over that time is crazy. i spent a lot of time to get all of the photos and text selected and arrange it in a way i liked. and then i spent even more time figuring out how i wanted the pages laid out. i usually planned everything out before i started, and did the layout by hand. often i would have 2 layouts ready to print at a time. last week was spent figuring out how to get my files and print them in a way that i liked, as my original files weren't really formatted properly.
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two new things up at the lottie gaddis print shop
===============


And One for My Dame
Robert Graves

Let the Jew
Be given a view to Dante!
Let the dead
Write a verse on torture.
I am wax
In the jaws of the London City.
Far better watch
Some fine vineyard grow,
Seeing red grapes
Weight the pampered bough,
Far better sleep
Under vine-shoots, dream
Dreams of deep-hushed cellars
Red with splendid vintage.

My God, what a people!
So ingenious,
So energetic,
So full of zeal!

Their squabbles
In this little isle,
Though lethal,
Are very pleasurable.

An easy rhyme
Exists for everything,
Timely and terse:
The trouble and the terror.

A scalding drink
For those who wrong us:
For God, a long
Cold drink of rue.


===============


Beginning
Leonard Nathan

You ask how I’d like to die. 
	How a fish would. 
On the beach, flopping, 
	with the good and bad 
	that water gave me 
	gone, giving up 
	life's last electric 
	spark. 
You ask how I'd like to live. 
	Like a baby, 
	so new and ignorant 
	it could mistake 
	its mother’s breasts 
	for the wet 
	and wild mysteries 
	of the world. 
Because then I'd be new 
	and free from my 
	old self-conscious 
	conceit, I'd have 
	nothing to lose. 
	And you?


===============


After Rain
Thomas Hardy

We watched them far away— 
   The old Church towers; 
They looked as if one had 
Stooped down and kissed them;  
“And this is all,” the warm air seemed to say,
   “For now, for evermore.”

Before the flying river hid them all away,
   We saw the lonely House stand 
With evening shining on it mournfully—
   And, some way hence, we saw 
The three tall Trees, musing with let-hanging boughs,
   In whispers pass the eventide through.

We took them to be our own past years, and you
   And me; 
We nodded quiet sighs, in place of sobs;
   We could not speak at all; 
The tears welled up and flowed without a check,
   As faintest evening fell.


===============


Ancient Music
Thomas Hardy

I travell’d among unknown Men,
In Lands beyond the Sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
What Love I bore to thee. 
‘Twas past–and I return’d–and saw
New Occupation gild 
The scenes familiar. How remote
Those ‘dark Antiquities’ appear! 
By stately Banqueting-House and Hall
I roam’d, of Great one’s see, 
And gaz’d–nor with such Wonderment
As in past Years I did. 
For now the Rotundity of all
That Circumscribe and bound, 
Was to my Owlet-Fancyclear,
As to a giant’s Abound. 
You still were there, Obscure as ever,
Myself the same as then, 
But slower-moving Figures met me,
Less Genial Man, and Dread, 
And, somehow, whenever I had gone,
Behind I saw more Dust 
Than when I left you.


===============


The New Year
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

'Tis the time of sunset, and the scene,
A room of recent splendour! such as soothes
The full heart of exultation and yet softens it with melancholy
feelings.
I was reclined, my Susan by my side,
And “Blessings on thee!” I exclaimed aloud,
For every tear that streamed down her fair face
A thousand memories of sorrow gave,
And a thousand visions of delight.
At once the frantic spring of joy was broke
With thoughts of ever-during death,
The breathing consciousness of life to come
Dissolved in gloom, the social feelings all
Pregnant with future woe.

In unalarmed accents I began
On Death, the inevitable change.
Scarce had I said my heart would never change,
Though pulse and breath must cease,
When the near clock, struck three. ‘Oh! hark,’ said Susan,
‘I hear my father’s step!’ And now the door
With eager hands is open’d. “Happy New Year
to you, my dearest!” With outspread arms
and eyes all glistening with parental love
O’er the capacious forehead wrinkles come,
And the sweet smile is checked.


===============


A Girl
Ted Hughes

It was your stillness that changed you.
It was your stillness I adored –
Those nights you lay on the table,
And let me open you,

Part you gently inside out,
As a snail opens a shell,
With his hair and his teeth and his tongue
Taste you, till you cried out,

And yet lay perfectly still.
Like a snatched storm that holds still
In mid-air a moment.
Those nights you were my mystery.

My clay, my kill, my pale Roman
In a marmoreal auditorium,
Who listens to my poetry
In the dusk, while you brood.

You, my listener – yet
Your stillness is what I love most,
Not the wrench and the struggle,
But the stillness of your waiting breast.

The closed and unswerving look
Your proud still face gives me,
The moment before our kiss.
But now you’re less still.

Your eyes start to flicker.
You move your strange limbs –
Though still in their marvellous
Tense suspension –

And I know you are leaving me.
It happens in our best moments.
I see the drift of it.
And you see I see.

You wrestle against it,
You want me to help,
To lay the spell, make the pause
Much longer.

It is something you can’t say,
And I can’t say.
But this is what we’re saying:

‘How can I leave you? How can you let me go?
Who will listen? Who will explain?’
Don’t say –
‘A girl.’ Say ‘she’.

Her frown, her smile, her amazement,
Her falling hair – and the silences –
Her glass casket,
And the space in the glass.


===============


Prayer
Liz Lochhead

But the light is red now and night
Bulges at the black bars of the evening;
Let it come, let it flood the face of the world
And make it forget its remembering.
Let it wash over and cleanse
Our souls of their anguish and despair;
Let it rest, let it fall like soft rain
Upon hills that are dry and thirsty.
Hush now, hush and rest now.
No need to go further:
Let the world be still beneath the stars,
Who are bent to bless us,
To bless us,
To bless us!


===============


Doubletake
Julia Moore

It is easy to grow older.

          Just let each
  Spring awaken and sail you
  away as if
  you would stay.

         It’s best
  to pretend
  you’re fifty years
  away from death.
  Pretend every day
  you are a ripe peach
  exploding under the sun’s
  basting sweet.
      Then,
  fifty times a year
  aging may come
  again to you
  like grace.

          Once,
  we asked a farmer
  to harvest his small
  town’s bounty
  so we might taste
  those peaches sweetened
  with the marriage of
  sun and snow,
  as if it were
  the common-
  place miracle
  we were there to
  believe in—
               when all the while
  this private miracle
  was brewing
  in his orchard,
  for each of us
  to witness without
  a word.

          No one could admit
  it then. But now
  it is my fifty years
  of life. It is not so
  hard as I supposed
  to grow older.
  This is like walking
  out of the meadows
  toward the groves
  of pines, and into
  the ocean of eternity.


===============


in this world
Donald Hall

The agnostic husband of a saint
is born with a tendency to sin,
as the song says. In an ordinary world
I’d be a pariah. How rarely the rule,
the possibility of escape
from religious order and priest,
holds true. We loved too well
each other’s happiness to burden
a new marriage with ethics, vows.
We touched the letter of the law.

O wretched sentence: O my vow
is still, chastity. The young man
can console himself; the old do not.
The more she shines, the more I seem to shrink.
Girl, if I die, will you wear black
for me? It is night. I sit alone
in this world, this world without you.


===============


Subway in the Evening
Adrienne Rich

A girl about twenty
holds onto a grey-haired woman’s arm.
Behind them a boy, very young,
sucks a red licorice stick.
I wanted to ask them how you take care of children
or a boy who sucks a red licorice stick
in a subway tunnel under the city.
At our feet brown bags burst open
and potato chips in blue, red and yellow wrappings scatter.
Some are squashed by feet, some flitter under the subway car.
I am embarrassed as if they were old letters
bound by red ribbon and adressed to strangers.
I pick up a strawberry-flavoured chip
and put it in my pocket for safekeeping.
The girl starts to sing.
The subway train roars in.


===============


Visiting the Trobriands
W.S. Merwin

It was more than the books said,
the petroglyphs carved
high in the rock face,
the men of the island,
with the flower baskets
huge on their heads,
more than the island
coming out of the sea,
and the bird-shaped boats,
the standing houses
with the entrances
open to the sea,
it was more than silence
coming in with the tide,
more than the old men’s
famous netting
down there on the tide,
more than a mango
thick with its flesh
and heavy with itself,
more than the darkness
of the night my friends
were on their way in,
it was the island
already there alone
before us, immense
on the horizon,
and then the silence
the skin of the sea
parted before us,
and then the coming
past one island
after another,
the birds suddenly
around our bow,
the talk in my mind
of the great voyages
of all the islands
to one another.


===============


I Am Vertical
Theodore Roethke

I have longed to move away
from the hissing of the spent lie
and the old terrors of desire;
to be utterly free
and at the same time
connected to the living world,
glad of the cheerful and sad sight,
unequivocally human.
So I say good-bye to you.
Good-bye without tears or laughter.
I am happy. I won’t forget
that I belong to the earth
and that I must return
as leaf and rain and fruit
returned before me.


===============


The only danger is in forgetting
Lewis Carroll

The only danger is in forgetting
   that he is not like other people
   that one must   (here, at last,
   comes the bitter ingredient)
   look on him as a dog would
   if a dog could   look on him
   which it cannot

   because a dog is too congenial
   too responsive
   too affectionate   and must
   therefore be totally inexperienced
   in other people
   who are not like dogs

   and so at the end of every walk
   and every meal   for these last six years
   he simply stands   at the door
   trying to bark   No thank you
   not today   now let me in
   and I have to turn to him
   gently   tenderly   repeating   Ah no
   my dear   you must never
   bark   Come now    Come now


===============


Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

To Miss Sophia E. Williams

This is just a note to tell you how sorry I am that I
cannot come to see you today. I thought that perhaps
after tea the air would be pleasant, but the wind is so
cold that I could not leave my room.

In making this note, I am tempted to indulge myself in a
habit that becomes more and more insufferable; I shall,
however, check my propensity, though I can scarcely
forego the pleasure of saying once more—my love. The
joyous spirits that leap in my heart make me indite the
following billet-doux:

My Sophie: Oh Sophie, that I had the wings of a dove,
I would fly away and be at rest; or that I had a
philter to make you love me as I love you, so that we
might live together in a cottage built of straw and covered
with violets, under a canopy of blue sky—if I could but
propitiate the implacable fates and enjoy this bliss!
You know how often I have said that I love you, and you
know I speak truly: for such a love as mine speaks in
dumb sighs and hidden tears, in secret meditations and
nightly slumbers. Ah Sophie, when I think of you, I fear
that my passions may subdue the powers of my reason, for
when I think of you, my heart beats fast, my colour
changes, and my speech fails me. My nervous system is
in the greatest agitation, and I suffer from pulsations,
palpitations, and horrible nightmares; my dear angel, I
must cease, I am going to fall into a swoon, I love you,
I love you, I love you, and when I tell you how much I
love you, I am afraid that you do not believe me; believe
me, I love you. I feel, I think, I breathe you. And my
love for you, Sophie, is a living and life-giving love. I
have heard of philtres said to be infallible, but there is
no philtre comparable to the glance of your blue eyes;
the most potent love
===============


The Three Friends
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

It is marvellous
how many things are
not what we meant—
how love can be lost
between two people
simply because
they don’t understand
each other’s language;
it is marvellous
how a man and a woman
can understand so well
without a word that
the man feels as if
he were going home
when the woman
opens the door and
smiles at him, a smile
that he recognises,
saying, “you thought
this would not be
your homecoming.”


===============


Sixty Seconds with Yesterday’s Girl
Robert Creeley

If I were to say it before this room is filled with my emotion
I will have none of it left
What is it like living in the terror of your life?

Any answer is only itself
when the next word is needed
Abyss of not abysmal lies
when the air is clear

will the thing I loved fail to be clear as well?
I made her laugh to chase away a private gloom

Take this communique I deliver not from the heart
It is the result of the electrical storm of doom
having gone before

If it is the day I stop

I’ll close my eyes at last to play it out and disappear

If the history of living were an anecdote
it would be without hope

Close your eyes
Dream of cool places
A delirious far off girl

beyond anger and fear
leaning against the front of a wooden house
by the edge of a vacant river
warm as her arm is

If your life is dead
the street door opens and a wind full of rain
without mercy

This woman is the nightmare of an idiot father
Who thinks the war is over when she appears
I find she’s here

In the music I hear, her picture is projected
without end
She sleeps into the films she photographs
He knows no pleasure in her living death
but continues

He makes her trip through the green light
Here they turn to float back into the night

Where there is a mind it takes you in

Where there is none a worm feeds on your life
There is only a wind and this voice

Remember, from the rain of an early morning
the soiled bed, your mouth, its condition

Then your breasts and your belly, sweet receding bony toes
these are my words as they may speak
if you could understand them

I did not forget you, nor your warm side
If there is a poem, it is this and not otherwise
than to say

“I am afraid of you”
then
“where you find your bliss, you will find me”
If I call back the sadnesses of a poor time

will I find myself again as if a poem
spoke?

If the girl is still dead after the films are
===============


Riders
James Haba

At noon the windless light rises like steam. 
I am strong and alone in a singular brightness: 
body and limbs are hinged in a stifling silence. 

At dawn the steam glitters into trees. 
I am a voice which trembles and questions; 
having no simple answer for anyone. 

But in the evening the wind rises 
and the trees are gathered up. 
I am nothing but a song that can go on living. 

At noon the windless light rises like steam. 
I am alone and bursting out of my body. 
The stifling silence is broken: again I am a song.


===============


History is a Nightmare
W.H. Auden

Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table;
History is a bore,
Since it is, mainly, the dull biography
Of a handful of ill-educated,
Short-sighted, nice-looking bankers and soldiers.

Much better to kill a man at once
Than to defraud him by inches.
Much better, also, to defraud and kill,
Than to hate and to fear,
Than to suspect in silence.
Better to be reckless and right
Than cautious and wrong,
Better to smile away a tear
Than to deny a lover’s claim.

History is for now,
What has happened, the harvest of what was sown,
History is a hand writing a letter on the wall
At the face of which we stare in sleepy enchantment:
When the letter is complete,
It will spell out the end.


===============


In Summer
Elizabeth Bishop

A bar of heat lay at the door,
Outside the porch it was too hot.
I did not feel like going on
And yet I did not feel like standing still.

There was no spot for the body’s ease:
A chair, a table, or a bed,
Were where it loved to be most glad,
Yet could I not create the calm
I needed. I became afraid
The fear could be overcome
Only by getting farther away.

So I walked out, and, though I tried,
The day was too much in my sight,
So I could not see it, nor say,
As I left, what happened with my life.


===============


For Elizabeth Bishop 4
J. D. McClatchy

It’s like a daily pardon, isn’t it, coming,
A clean slate, an erasure of the old sentence,
The guilt, the sense of tampering with another’s pain?
There are no mirrors on your breakfast tray.
You shouldn’t have to watch your mind deteriorate,
Your interest flag, your memory play tricks.
We’ve all been given the same fictions to believe,
Those benevolent constructions about earthly weight,
A slowly banked fire, a guttering candle, the moon
Slightly misshapen with shadow, coming into
Fullness and last light. We have, each of us, a room
Somewhere, locked up tight with the best intentions,
Where we meet our friends when we’re not feeling well,
When shadows fall like nails in a late November rain,
And some ghost arrives ahead of its time, unannounced,
But bearing gifts. And hope. Your courage shames
All of us who went safely from birth to school to sleep.
You’ve been there from the first book to the last,
Where metaphor is fact, and form the living flesh,
And death the root of pain. And in that company
Your natural eloquence made me believe we spoke
The same language—and could take this journey home.


===============


Terremoto
Agha Shahid Ali

My life is about the recall
Of events that the human mind
Cannot usually bear. We tell
Ourselves and friends that it’s bearable
To relive the death of a child, a loss
Of a house, of entire family.
In fact, none of it is. For me,
After I saw what I saw in 1971,
I had to construct a mind. That act
Was unspeakable. As if the sun
Had crashed into my body
And each particle of light left
A wound. As if my memory
Was a broken mirror, or a chameleon
Ran through the bits of my brain,
And each color left a scar. The shores
Of all my past, forever changed.

I was sixteen when I left
The Indian village of my childhood
To study in Iowa. In August
1971, some seismograph in Iowa
Went wild. Nowhere else on earth
Had it been so mild that summer
But the cold earth of Iowa
Started suddenly rumbling
And my dormitory windowpanes
Were shaking. I ran into the courtyard
Of the all-girls dorm, afraid
That the entire building would fall.
Over the trembling earth, I could see
My own hands, bloodless with panic.
Within the hour, the quake
Had passed. I gathered my wits
And rushed to the car to reach
The family home. I was the eldest,
And all of them I knew were home.

As I drove into our village
I could see, like a sunburst,
That one wing of the house had fallen.
Just one, I thought. I had lost
My mind, I had not even paused
To notice that the other buildings
In the village had crumbled. As I turned
To our ancestral home,
The sun fell from my body
And a new fire arose. I could see
Nothing. And yet I felt everything,
My eyes saw nothing but the sun,
Fire. Everything else was gone.

Even if one could have seen
Anything through that inferno,
It would have looked ordinary,
Just a village ravaged by fire.
Even if one could have seen
Anything clearly, one could not
Have taken in the fact of parents
Burying their three children, one
Of whom was an infant,
===============


What in the World
Jane Kenyon

What in the world is loss,
except everything?

Here on the blue stairs—

three turns of the crank of grief
brings forth a custom-made sorrow.

The ordinary one isn’t
available at the moment.

It will have to wait.


===============


Jack Gilbert

Married Love

Our dogs were waiting at the door and followed 
us up to bed, and slipped under.
And slept on our feet until morning.

Even losing you is coming home, 
the dogs barking, 
waking up the neighborhood.

Even a funeral has love in it.

The boys are still at the table, 
drinking cognac, 
celebrating.

How lucky we are.

I will kiss you once 
for every year that we’ve been married.


===============


The Speed of Darkness
Linda Gregg

When the dogs go running by
they are lost in the wind.
A woman is hanging wash.
In each piece, the sudden spark

of a bird or fish. At the lake,
the bark slips. As if we were weightless.
As if the moment we step in the water
we were fine, like flying fish and water spiders,

the ones you see shimmering up the side
of a boulder before the current sweeps them down.
I took off my clothes and ran into the water,
this friend behind me. Everything I did was courage.

I swam to the surface with a mouthful of water
and shook it out as if I were water
or if water were me. We swam to the shore,
remnants of the drowned, whom we were,

huge spirits coming out of the air,
out of time. Which we were about to live
every moment of. How the dogs were tied
to the fence when we came out. How dark the night.

How much of the water we must still have carried
in the vessels of our bodies, in our eyes,
in our shining mouths, and how amazed
the dogs looked at us when we walked by them.


===============


Tonalism
James Fenton

It was my view that people were divided into
the natural composers and the unnatural. The natural
composers feelpile-youtube-subtitles deep down that they themselves are
composites, put together by natural forces, and
when they compose, they represent how they were
composed. With all respect and deepest sympathy, the
composers whom I considered to be unnatural compose
according to some preconceived idea of what the
world should sound like. They are never reconciled
to the world as it is, they see it as a flawed
creature which has to be put right. They believe in
art as an alternative world which they can create
and they look at the real world as something which
needs to be adjusted to fit the second world. Such
unnatural composers, by using music as a means of
establishing their private empires, make enemies,
and they alienate people and they are disliked. They
didn’t understand the music of the Baroque, because
it was connected with a culture which they had no
access to, and they didn’t understand the Classical
and Romantic composers, because those had become
respectable and there was no risk in liking them.
They must have complicated lives, these composers.


===============


Ono no Komachi in New York
Yunte Huang

Ono no Komachi in New York
So as to be an authentic ruined woman—
She pierces ten holes in each of her ears;
Fangs burst through her decaying lips, and fireflies
Light up her throat, irradiating her tongue;
Hair as slimy as seaweed has become a siren
She fashions dewdrops into a tiara
And adorns her face with rouge—blood of the moon.
Come up with a metaphor; come up with a satire,
Erect magnificent monuments and inscriptions,
Conjure up her inferno, invent and annihilate
True images of the dungeon with which she harasses you,
But you are a child in her entrails, not my name.
Perhaps I was an earless mermaid before birth.
Who has condemned me to wander among strangers?
My eyes are like flowers that grew on land
Only to be washed away in the ocean;
A short poem as an epitaph for my death
Is the flute music I lay in a moonlit dream:
“Carved to decay.” In a lowland inferno
Haunted by wailing ghosts, I am playing the siren.
A sorrow as heavy as Eros lies upon me;
Loneliness has a long history, and some roads
Must be forsaken because they lead to our house.
In a twilight tea house I ignite my memory
Of the incense ashes, I count the pills of frost
On the eaves. I reflect, reflect, and taste the salt;
Luckless soul, I will practice deep in the sea
The weeping of lotuses beneath moonbeams.


===============


Am I The Awakener?
Louise Gluck

for Pam

Don’t look for images.
Don’t turn this dark corner.
But if you must,
don’t seek to transform them,
to make them beautiful or ugly.
I’m not saying something will happen
to you someday, as it did to me.
Or that this is a glimpse
into the next world, where the dead are wandering.
We understand what we are told,
so try to tell us it was the color of rain.
That you felt warm, inside the web of cold,
the mysterious texture of the body
outside the body, slashed loose.
Only, be sure to tell us how we’ll live
as if you lived—how it will matter
what we choose and what we discard.
You dreamed another life—so let it die.
And do not turn this darkness over—
what comes out is hardly worth the trouble.

But if there’s a face—someone who lived
down in the darkness, whom you recognize—
it was, maybe, a lover.
You liked his dirty, violent smile.
And now he’s happy to see you in his place.
He wants to say, “It’s not so bad, not dark,
but radiant as pure water.
Look and you will see an endless place,
where you live with all the dead.”
Don’t go to him.
He has the privilege of happiness.
You’re not entitled to it.

Or do you think we’re different?
Do you think, like Plato, the body is an enemy,
and that our soul won’t be whole until
it leaves the world behind?
We’re nothing if not vessels for our lives.
We come to earth in fury, to love the world,
or else our days are pointless, empty.
The most beautiful, the most obscure,
have left an imprint on us.
We will live with what they’ve left behind,
in pain, and also in awe.
And when they wander near again,
out of that cold universe,
our eyes will open, like a double exposure,
on this world, as on that.

Now they are here with us,
nowhere else, they are at our side.
Don’t seek
===============


Heavy Water
Kenneth Rexroth

In the bed where I woke
In the palm of my hand
Your golden skeleton
Turns as the earth turns
A shining stem
Root and crown and water-deep stem

The violet calyx
That was your belly
Is a cool throat
Passion-bright And the vertebrae
Circle me with their rainbow

Nothing is changed

When I lie close to you
I do not hear the heart
I am only a scientist
Vaporous plant and luminous
Soft stem
In the burning dark
Eating your blond skeleton


===============


Song of the Border Guard
Aharon Shabtai

Six months on the border, all alone,
without seeing the sun,
night falls and we fire
into the darkness.
Our eyes grow stronger at night:
we see in the dark and wait
for the tank crew to switch on their lights,
so we can open fire.
My girl is pregnant and I’m still
on the border, six months on the border,
every night,
I walk around and patrol the fields and 
quiet the dogs that bark at strangers.
If I tell you about the nights you’ll say:
“we only want the fighting”
Six months, everything was all right.
I spoke only once to my wife.
I said I miss you,
I can’t sleep, my bed is empty.

Six months on the border, one night
I see a light move
toward me, I wait, on guard,
until the light is gone.
The light goes off,
is it a soldier? Is it a Palestinian?
I fire and call for back-up.
They hurry from all around, they open fire.
No one got near my tank.
I turn to go back
to my trailer but it’s on fire.
It’s burning, all the ammunition is exploding
as the six months come to an end.
I go into battle and
immediately I’m taken off the border.
You’ll be glad to hear that, won’t you?


===============


A Nymph Calves
Sappho

Sweet milk-torrent, creamy river:
What are you doing away from your
limestone mountain, your fertile meadows,
your ladies?

I saw you not so long ago in your glory,
exultant—tall and comely,
wandering in the lands of Lydia and
Laconia.

The bulls of Mt. Helicon did not entice you,
nor yet Peneus’ slope with its blossoming
oaks,
nor the green banks of the Cephisus,
nor Olympus.

They were deserted that day by Naiads
and Dryads—the whole chorus
of mountain-dwellers. A few stayed,
but all the rest

hurried with Zeus’ rain to watch your course,
and to celebrate with flowing
cups of nectar and gold, and the songs
of the gods.

Bacchus of the flowing hair was there,
and of their own accord each vine
cluster with its glistening clusters
was bursting,

laden with grapes, some dark and some
a pearly white, and from the topmost
branches the hard-hearted leaves,
shaken, were falling.

Unwearied, the fawns kept to their
watches and the tall-horned cattle
in their herds with their lordly,
coiling curved horns.

While the goddesses draped themselves in
green ivy and groves of white
poplar and in bunches of peonies,
a bolder bouquet

than the lush red rose—which Love
defeated by her cosmetics and
yoking her in his basket of flowers,
made his adornment.

In the midst of these garlands and lush
flowers, I saw you, about to give birth
to the Horned One of the virgin cows,
heading straight for

the house of the lordly Bulls, where
Pisces rise with their lovely arms.
Nowhere could a hide be seen
but all heads were

whitened with the thick frost
of pure milk, no tails were left
without a flow of white milk.

Nowhere did I see a cow who had
not an udder filled to overflowing.
All night long they bleated, keeping their
lovely past
===============


...something we feel, but cannot understand...

...we meet as if a marvelous lamp glowed

within us or a fire burned

between us, joining us with a real light,

silent and sparkling, the true sun

of two who meet beneath the arc of a rhyme

which has been built across their instant...

Alison Hawthorne Deming

So far away, from one place and another,

it’s autumn now, and falling:

Cars like stones in the water

go out for a day

and come back at night, glimmering...

If I say, “I love you,” I feel

that love is like a train

with a shining light

coming down a long tunnel.

And the whole train feels

like a poem at its best,

wide as the world,

rushing invisibly

on all sides of us.

I think of you.

I love you.

The weather is fine...


===============


Home After Three Months Away
Joni Mitchell

The first fat snowflakes
fell on the finery
on the city rooftops
and when the snowflakes landed
on a warm chimney
with the chimney rattled
and shook down through its
chinks and crannies
clouds of fiery ash
rose
from each chimney top
to the street below
so we laughed and were children again

--and then a splurge of snow flew
across the windows
and the lights flashed
which meant that the door must
be locked securely and we
sat on on the floor in your room

and talked quietly
while the winter storm raged
in the starless night outside
the sickly saint of the incense filled the air
and the lighted candles burned
in their small red glasses

and I felt like a monk who had found the right place
as my heath began to mend.

They looked at me from all sides
with anxious, prophetic eyes
and I looked back
from where I sat on my knees
and I could not recall a single
thing

they said to me that evening

but their faces and their soft voices
have stayed with me
in the frozen branches
beyond your window
I’ve found some kinship
in my present restlessness

somewhere between a poem
and prayer
I’ve found some rest
but not for my weary bones

I made a small rooftop for my incense
and a place to float my lighted candle
and they show me
my surroundings
as the pendulum of my heart
swings wide and slow
and still no place to call my own

So I pay my debt and grab the first train
to where it’s warm
and where no one knows my name

Parting...any hour
you’re still my friend
we’ll walk again
and talk again
and we’ll laugh again

I think I’ll rent a canoe
you take the oars and I’ll sit
in the stern

and perhaps we’ll reach the sea
I think I’ll rent a canoe

where the lake’s open wide
where your hand in mine
is a memory
we’ll laugh again
I think I’ll rent a canoe

[Poetry
===============


Where Does It Hurt
Richard Siken

While I was walking I was thinking of
Someone’s Aunt Edna’s house
Covered in pain and fire. It smelled like a miracle.
We were very sad together in that
Beautiful house.
That kind of sadness is a party
When you’re drunk in the afternoon on cigarettes
With a picture of your boyfriend on the wall
That’s half girl in the picture with big breasts
Because the house looks like it has something to say
But nothing comes out except the smell of hospitals,
Which is actually from Uncle Jeff, in the back
Pouring himself three fingers of pain, making a snowman.
That night I got out of bed to
Write, feeling as big as a planet,
Everyone in the house crammed into my heart,
Their beds, their parties, their teeth.
The sidewalks breathed.
The planets were fingers on my face, each
Worrying a different scar.
Then my mother came in and said
Where does it hurt?
And I cried for a long time in her arms, knowing
This kind of crying never really ends, but goes on
Forever somewhere in someone’s Aunt Edna’s house
Covered in pain and fire.


===============


Wislawa Szymborska (1923- )

The Power of Tears

Some things, which you thought to be true,
turn out to be only half true, and maybe even less.
And suddenly you realize that you have to change your life,
that nothing will ever be the same.
You wonder how much you should
tell the people around you.
How much truth can they take?
But you always keep a little back
to be saved for yourself
for those moments, late at night,
when your soul is being torn out of you.

* * *

Unearned Pleasures

I have been given this world on condition that I believe it is good, and I do believe it. It could be a great deal worse. I could always pray for something better, but I do not. I am sometimes unthankful and wicked, and what do I deserve? I deserve an effort at understanding, for there is so much that needs understanding.

I have become a creature who lives from one enjoyment to the next. That is my "sin": enjoy myself while there is still time. The day is approaching when all there will be is suffering, or at least when there will be no more unearned pleasures.

I eat slowly, chewing each mouthful a long time. I was not sent into this world to take the world's goods for granted. I owe it to the table and to the cook to appreciate the food. And I owe it to the bed to appreciate the sleep. I have to stop and taste each day, as it is poured out like a glass of fresh, cold milk.

* * *

Where I Come From

I'm from eyes that fought the soil
from stubborn wrists that struck the rock.
From deep in the throats of coal mines
mothers called for their children.

I'm from sensitive words which carried
a lot farther than farmyards and forests.

A country where the poet
is a boy on a balcony; on the balcony a ladder; on the ladder two shoes; and in the shoes
two feet -- just as human as everyone else's.

* * *

You're Blind

If I were young I'd wish for a different life
with less trouble and more light.
Yet that's the very life we get,
and without wishing for it.

Be happy that
===============


This Much
Billy Collins

You will be wearing a white dress
and sitting between two chairs
in front of a table with someone else’s silver on it.
You will notice nothing because you will have been crying.
It will be night and you will have nothing left to love
even though the house is full of things
that have been perfectly good to you for years.

Love will seem to be over but it
won’t be over, though you will refuse
to understand this simple truth.
As far as you know you will be sitting
in an empty room. You will be thinking
this is the last party I will ever give.

This is how we tell what is real:
something that can never be forgotten.
This much. What can be forgotten
is more like a feeling or even just
like a thought you had while looking out
the window on your way to dinner. It’s nothing.


===============


Where the Rainbow Ends
George Mackay Brown

Lights like a wave 
broke over the rail
and crashed upon the quays;
and the roofs and turrets of the town
went flowing under a dazzling hollow 
paved with coloured stars;
and the ship stood steady like a church,
a lantern lit 
in the hands of the Angel of the Lord. 


===============


Now that I am a little older
Mary Oliver

Now that I am a little older
than when we first loved each other,
I dream of us walking on the water
every morning—walking, splashing,
dipping our toes into the water.
And sometimes, in the afternoon,
the whole wonderful day is colored
with the spreading evening light,
and you gather me in your arms,
and the evening is filled with our whispers.
And at last we sleep. In the morning,
we rise early, the wind hardly breathing,
the water mirror-flat, and the sun rising
like the start of all happiness; and just to see
the constellations of our love, far out there,
floating, and slowly sinking, and shining—
just that is miracle enough for me.


===============


The Talking Earth
Louise Glück

You arrive at night, like a thief, in the rain.
You slip into the form of the city, trees
or maybe buildings, and watch people. Their bodies
proclaim the arrangement of rooms, lights
and darkness, heat and cold. The tiny waist,
the paint stains; the pale thin neck,
the stained fingers, nervous—the young woman
who picks out a loaf of bread, then

puts it back, moves down the aisle. Her terror
is sweet, an infantile rush of chemicals.
You never saw her hunger. Her loss.
She feels your presence; she hears you
behind the blowing door, so close, so intimate
she can almost see you. She hurries

away, her legs moving of their own accord,
brave legs, holding her up; how swiftly
they carry her! She is speeding into darkness,
always there, past candles burning for the dead
or lovers, chaste or brash, past fur coats
pulsing with joy, and her own love,

her unborn child, whom she will protect, who will be
a casket polished with her longing. He hears
the knocker. Her husband. Her guardian.
She hurries to him. Her legs move of their own accord.


===============


Bread and Music
Nikki Giovanni

When the power of love
overcomes the love
of power the world will know peace.
(Angelou)

Dear God,
This is what I have decided.
For too many years I have given too
much to the cause.
The hope of a better day,
the bright light that
would lead us to that
better way.

We marched and protested
against the mind’s corruption
and watched as the
plan was reduced to
the plans of the power-hungry
who, to feed their
own fame and glory,
would douse the light
and water down
the reason for the march
and for the peaceful protest.

I can no longer march in peace
without a gun to fight
against the injustices,
because a gun is what it’s
all about anyway.
So forgive me, God,
I pray for another way.

For I have seen the loss
of life and living
in the cause of justice
in the face of hunger.
Dear God,
I just want
a loaf of bread
and I need
my right to sing,
for the right to sing
is the bread of my music,
so give me
my bread
and let me
sing.

For we are the children
of the music
and the children
of the power
and the children
of the grace
so please, God
just this one
time
let me have
my bread
and my
music.

FOR
Yannis Ritsos


===============


Vanishing Twins
Sharon Olds

On the huge ugly baby photos, I am always on the left.
Everyone had to be in order, first and then second,
as we had been in the three car seats, on the car seat
guards in the rear of the station wagon on the ten-hour drive from
Pittsburgh
to Long Island, five days after we were born.
All the middle of the night fussing and carrying, the room
and the girls put down, then one or two picked up again—
all that precise picking up and putting down
had left us with a sense of order. I could not imagine
the left-hand one vanishing
and not the one on the right. Could not imagine the space
on the right-hand side
of the wide-framed photo without the vanished sister.
And the little boys in school made little paper
woman shapes, with right and left hand, and placed them
on the chalk line marked on the floor
of the sunny playground, and had races—
the women on the left hand moved faster than the women on
the right—and finally they were told to stop doing that,
and they did. They were always changing our names:
From our playpen we would hear the murmurs, Why did they
have to do that,
make them up that way, Sharon and Linda,
that’s what we were supposed to be, but
they had to be tricky, they had to be ugly—didn’t they?
Just the way they treated their own mother,
that’s what everybody said, awful.
I see them peeling our names
down to a core name that we are not. They want
a one-word name, like a town or a country.
Did we, being both, come too close
to two-ness, which they can’t abide.
From my other sister, they peel the sister part,
she is my something, or your something,
and I don’t even know her,
her presence bleached out of me. In the photos
they removed the space
between us. On the poster of the old trees
in the school hall—our sixth-grade art—
my drawing, really our drawing, done in the fierce
close collaboration
of schoolroom summers,
they erased my name. On the awards, my name is gone
===============


My Life by Water
Susan Terris

On a late afternoon in February we drove to Cape Ann
To look at the sea and let our eyes change.
The sky was that bruised purplish blue
That you’re likely to see only after storms.
Across the grey water a pair of herons wheeled
Slowly and then beat inland, among the ragged green pines.
The cold wind bit at our faces, and I shivered in my coat.
And you took off your glasses and cleaned them on your sleeve
So you could see more clearly. You looked
At the snow, the blue skin of ice across the little pools
Humped up in the sand. You squinted and scanned the horizon
For a darker line where the Gulf of Maine had poured
All of its ice-green water southward.
You saw the whitecaps dancing in the wind
And turned to me and said, “We have the same eyes,
You and I.”


===============


Cinquain X
Mark Strand

The magnificent desire in everyone
To be on intimate terms with death
To be allowed to see as much of it as possible
To be taken into its dark room
And shown its possessions, its comfortable bed,
Its sheets kicked into tangled disarray.


===============


Poems
Dylan Thomas

PART I

I have longed to move away from the hissing of the waste-land 
gas-pains, 
To crawl sunwards nearer the humming highway of the bees. 
I have longed for the money of the daisies, the crime of the   
         crocus, 
the language of the stock-broker sunsets, the money of the 
         poppies.

I have longed to speak in many tongues of the hornet, the   
         wasp, the bee, 
To explain the whole of my meaning in hisses, hums, murmurs, 
         and murmurs of murmuring, 
To prove by bees, words, purring, objects, claws, and   
         unutterable tunes, 
That the hornet is innocent of the dark-lined furrows of   
         dreariness.

But let other bleaker singers of nights, months, seasons, and   
         years 
Sing the heron, the bitterns, the wet-leaved evenings, the   
         savage fogs, 
Sing the world as it is whirled through the midnight air,
the world as it is lighted 
By blue lamps and awful, high-pitched bells, and the fall of   
         saints.

Let other singers of low and livid lights and the ancient   
         disease 
Find in the deep salt sea inessentials, corruption’s   
         minutiae, 
The sodden detail of decrepitude, the slime of the sea of   
         sense, 
Hark to them chattering of money and drink when the   
         nightshade covers all things.

Let them chant their unwholesome songs. But let all nightingales
         now
Lay embalming incense upon my breast
and sing above my tongue 
And sing above my motionless lips, songs of the sleep-walkers,
         night-wanderers, 
Songs of the sleep-walkers, of men walked-in-their-sleep, that   
         wake-in-darkness, 
Night-wanderers that sing their songs in the night, and wake   
         in daylight.

So that the night-bird be winged to his nest in darkness of   
         death, in gloom 
That the blind worms, the little blind ones
===============


Assorted Haiku
Mike Laird

hoping that you’ll be safe,
that dreams will go exactly
as you hope they will

it’s okay that sometimes
the lies are necessary:
lie to me

you are the beautiful
hypocrite, the pure
impostor

lying awake
at 3 a.m. on a Saturday:
something terrible

I worry about my heart
its ability to keep going
on this earth

what will your
children grow up to be?
whose voices will they speak
in

I want to be the kind
of man who does the right thing
when he is meant to

I am so drunk
my apartment has become
smaller than I remember

at the same time that the
stars live without time, I age
and die for seconds

I will come back
for you in a few years,
long after I am gone
from here

you in your black dress
smoking alone outside
at a bar at 2am


===============


Sonnet 8, from 109 sonnets written at spring resort, 1965
Andrew Hudgins

You and I haven’t seen each other since
  the night we met at the edge of the bar-crowd,
where you were telling the bartender to give you
  bourbon and branch water. I downed
the water-drink you gave me and followed you
  back to the dance floor. “I want
to be sure,” you whispered, “just how much I can drink,”
  and gave me another water-drink,
followed by two white wine spritzers, a vodka-7,
  gin and tonic, Scotch-and-water.
After each drink you would get up and dance,
  then come back and order another
of that same little social club—
  bourbon and branch water, water, 
I was drinking water, you were drinking ice—
  and each time you were there in my arms.


===============


The Three Enemies
Stephen Dunn

You who were once my playmate, my confidant,
my lovely and magnificent companion—
You are the deadly illness I can’t quite diagnose;
I am your moody caretaker, helpless and obsequious.
You who were once my love.
You are my pocked and pitted skin,
my endless appointments,
my privacy unstrung.
You who were once my being,
my more mature self,
as inseparable from me as
our newest child
You who were once my mirror,
my interesting opponent,
who pushed me out to places
I never knew existed,
or into rooms within
I longed to occupy
You who were once my perfect erection
You are now its dying echo.
You who were once my grief

[]

Gabriela Mistral

I don’t know what to do with the land, which doesn’t know what to do with me.
I feel like a piece of coal thrown into an empty warehouse.

I came into the world by myself, with my mother’s womb no longer in her
The mine of my soul is filled with black-shoed gravediggers.
I don’t know why I am here in this world
This rock was born to me in the desert
The soil of my homeland isn’t rich
I am a sword bound to a wreath.

Hug me and cry

I am alone, cold and hungry.
My father was a drum made out of dried skin
My mother is a threshing sledge
I am alone, cold and hungry.

No blanket of cloud covers the moon
A blind man looks at me, and he is drunk
My mother sings for another man
I am alone, cold and hungry.

I sing to the stars
I sing to the desert
I sing because the wind stings me
I sing while my voice breaks
I am alone, cold and hungry.

[]

Death of a Toad
Hayden Carruth

Every night
in bed now
it comes to me,
how nothing is ours.
There’s his box,
his food dish,
the wrapping paper,
the white tablecloth
with the blue border
I spread on the floor.

When I bring him
the dried ants
which
===============


Psalm I
Emily Dickinson

I ask no guerdon for my love
I seek no paradise
For my unnoticed go
My account you must allow
For to me you are the town I lose
The next

All is possible
My heart you’re free
You may construe my life
Most wee
You did incline me to
You deny

My slight that doth ensue
When you unfavor my sight
That you may offend with plenteous light
On me in extramundane night
In me

With alps in my spine
I am hermaphrodite
Heath of faith in my knee
No great breaker
Will I be
Indeed

The lyre is needless
Speak no fable
I am my fiction
All the heavens bequeath
All earth impugn
I am recall

It is pique but it is pique
Of the old stamp
If it hath lapse
It’s not complete in lapse
For I can halve it still
Enough

When finally we take the step, there’s no turning back. And if there’s no turning back, why not move forward?
John Dryden

I would abandon forever
This world in which all love
Has turned to barter and the exalted gold.
I would see only beings and trees,
Nothing in the world but falling water,
Before I see the last of humankind.
But beyond the blandishments
Of this light-filled land with those I love,
The great ocean lies, and in it, I hear,
The silence of the strange earth.
Turned toward the empty distance,
Anchored to the firm wastes of the sea,
As my companions sleep, I see
What no eye saw: naked, motionless,
Fettered in gloom and in frenzy,
I watch the windy wandering of a beam
Within the dense and naked hollow
Of the salt abyss, until it disappears.
And when the brief light of night comes,
I see above the waves once more
The dust of distant golden planets,
Our companions moving seaward,
Closer and farther, with the night.


===============


What thou lovest well remains

What thou lov’st well, remains,
And they will love thee still,
When thou art gone and lost
Deep in the dreamless dust.

Time remembers that thou wert,
And honors thy withered name,
But thou art hard to find,
When most desired, alone,

So leave thy little bower,
Sweet soul, when next thou art free.

Go think upon the time,
Before thou wast over ripe,

When thou did’st hope thine own name
Graven on Corinthian brass,

And dreamt how famous, great,
Thou should’st be in the post

Of he who loved his country well,
But fell beneath his country’s blow.

And when the snow lies thick,
And through the yellow mist,

A voice, shrill, harsh, shrills out,
“Get up and hunt the hare,”

Thy foxy, hare’s-heart
Shall fright thee from thy sheet.

To pitch a naked soul
Into the snow and ice,

To chase what is not worth
The pains that are endured

For a long train of thoughts,
Cut at the bone, sharp wars,

To waste upon a word,
On a loose horse and drown

A wit in a bright eye,
And pity taken for scorn,

These are not the thoughts to breed
Deep love, when thou art dead,

For the first was but a dream,
And the best is yet unborn.

Remember now thy past;
Let shadow and sunlight past,

Give thy heart to both,
And end thee well, and seal

Thy three-score years and ten,
End of a perfect friend;

Here thy sweet soul shall dwell,
And old remembered joy,

And a new joy until,
When once again a mile

Of sea-green wall shall stand,
In the faint April sand,

To guard thy shallow grave.
And mark the spot to see,

Where a youth whom we knew,
Went early to his bed,

His last and final rest,
Here in the hollow breast

Of earth and the deep sky,
From thy sweet memory fly,

Nor waste thy spirit’s
===============


The Book of Nightmares
Tomaz Salamun

Once she fell
in love with a friend.
She said she had always been
in love with him.
He was hard of hearing
and it was easy
to promise him anything.

They are together
now, he writes poems
she corrects proofs.
They are sitting at the kitchen table.
She is about to turn forty.
He is forty-five.
They have a house in the suburbs,
a living room with books
at least one cat.

It is Saturday night.
The children are asleep.
They leave the house
and walk through the park,
the roses are in full bloom.
There are people everywhere,
tired, happy, drunk,
in love, watching the stars,
wanting someone else
to share that view.

From now on
the two of them
have only each other.
When one of them goes
the other must follow.

They walk in the park
arm in arm.
They are dancing
or rather
dancing together.
Someone makes
a bottle explode
on the asphalt
and someone else shouts
that he should join the army.

For the first time
in a very long time
everything is simple,
so simple it hurts.
They are so much in love
they could kiss
the nightmares
into death.

The war is coming
but they don’t care.
The stars are falling
but they don’t care.
They have a single eye
they are dancing
they are talking
to each other
about the end of the world.
They are almost dead
they know
each time it is love
they are almost dead.
They have a single eye
they are dancing
they are talking
to each other
about the end of the world.


===============


“Earth’s the right place for Love:”
Robert Browning

I sat under a tree
       On a warm day
When the leaves were yet green,
       I sat there in glee:

And the green seemed to hang
       On the bird in the nest,
And the whole nest to be
       Just a cradle of rest.

The babe the young mother bore
       Was beautiful too
As a lily, a rose,
       So sweet-scented and new.

Earth was the right place for love,
       A fair home for life,
A rest from the snow and the heat
       Where food always grew.

I plucked in the rose and the briar
       And ate till I found
Till my food was a honey-sweet
       In happiness bound:

And I knew that the father was
       Sitting under the tree,
And the tree was his heart!
       And the dove was his wife.

Ah, loved and lost: yet when
       I creep from the nest,
The whole earth is warm and fair
       And it might be worth less.


===============


In Hollywood, a Dreamer Dies
Philip Levine

What did you think?
What were you going to do,
live forever? There’s
a knife from Albuquerque
that says you won’t,
a wrinkled picture of
someone’s mother,
a fur coat no one
wanted, a filet of
fuck-me shoes. Where
are you now? I can
hear your heart beat
faster as you turn the
corner. The tire iron
held loosely in one
hand will make two
beats out of one,
that’s how easy it’ll
be to slash that
Suzuki’s tires, how
quickly the bike’ll
scream to a stop.
After you slash
the first two tires,
you will be the only
one standing and that
will be enough for
you. After all, this
is Los Angeles and
it is after dark and
no one’s going to
care what you do,
why you’re here, or
how many times you
slap that biker boy.
Now that you know that,
now that you’re ready,
your heart is beating
so slowly you wonder
if it’s still beating
at all. Is that how
it feels just before
you die? There’s no
one on the street,
there’s nothing in
your hand. Close
your eyes. What were
you thinking? Where
were you going, what
were you going to do?
As the day begins,
the night sky softly
pulses with the lights
of a dream that will
never come true.


===============


Both

Jennifer Moxley

When I wake up I’ll be happy—but I know that
light strikes the sill across the room
(I close my eyes, I see a color) and I’m in
someone’s mind now—a dog looking over
a low wall, not eating, only looking—
I close my eyes and swim in the light
of meanness. Her body coming
down with her serious but lame hands over
me—where do you put your hand. Where do you
keep your fingers cold.

I’m no-weight. I’m no obstacle. I sink
and I seem to weigh a thousand pounds—
the more I’m given, the more I want.
All this wanting will make me dull
and small—I count the colors of
the rainbow: one is mustard, one is green.
Green is greenness, and I want it again.

But now I look at her skin, her pale forehead—
where did she come from? I want her now,
I want her now, she’s as selfish as me.
We want each other and that’s all we are,
we’re an exchange of energy, you have to live
with it, I want to slide across my body
and hers as though each were a finger
touching the same knife. I want to raise the
ceiling over us, get rid of all the open
air and up, and be there, with her, unopposed,
slipping through the light.


===============


Fear and Trembling
Lynda Hull

Beneath the river, the small dog’s drowned.
She’d called it once, and the name did it,
because they’re both named, yearn for names,
carry you off into the wood.
Above the river, the trees lean down,
lean in, beyond any upright smile,
to brace the earthly light’s extreme;
trees tell us what stars hardly dare.
Beneath the clouds, the lowlands make
a hidden story, few have seen,
obscure as this line that could be
a gripping mould if it would seem.
Above the sea, foam’s white as heaven,
light in its spray, deep in its wave,
both false and real, reality
that saves us from the angels’ stage.
Beneath the psalm, between its lines,
surely we’re back among the trees,
uprooting some constancy, so
is this the lasting trauma then?
Above the text, the cloud waits for us,
a page from Moses’ own white sky,
something you’ll never touch or see,
there it is flying, there it is.


===============


Poetry
Emily Dickinson

I never lost as much but twice,  
And that was in the sod.  
Twice have I stood a beggar 
Before the door of God!
Angels, twice descending,
Reimbursed my store.
Burglar, banker, father, 
I am poor once more!

#508

ROBERT BLY

True

Things stand true and long.
For example, The pine trees.
Wind is not required.
The trout in a cold stream
Cannot be fooled by falsehood.

Things stand true and long.
Fidelity is underrated.
Turtles and deer
Fall in love for life.
Foxes, we read,
Remain in their pairings.

Things stand true and long.
No marriage fails
Because two fiddlehead ferns
Continue to coil
Near where they began.

Truth lives, it does not die.
Because the rocks are not paid,
They refuse to lie down.

Nostalgia

Every day when I wake,
I ask God to guide me.
Then I become strategic,
Learn a trick
To get from one month to the next.
I bow to the canny side of myself
And get on as best I can.

So it is that I have moments
When I look longingly at the world
And would like to be a fish
Or a child again.
But I have to attend to the work.

The Mysteries

I am still pining
For the daughter of my old enemy,
Though I love my wife.
I long for the little girl
Whose father shot me
Under the left shoulder-blade.

My body bears the mark
Of her father, a shoulder worn out
By half a century of longing
For someone in that family.

My wife is sad
Under her sweetness and her white hair.
I do not think there is hope.

How can an old ox
Convince the moon to shine on him
Or win the daughter of an enemy?

How can a muzzle
Be grateful
When there is no hope?


===============


The Farmer's Wife
Georgia Dare

In a field of gold
Stands the brown haycock;
Round it there is
Nothing but green meadow,
Blue hill and blue heaven.

The fallow field
Rich after harvest,
Deep and serene
Calls to itself
The clink of the mowing-machine

In the brown hayfield;
There is full surely
Happiness for us
At last, at last,
In the sweet autumn evening

In a brown hayfield,
In a world of gold.
We shall not know
Fear or regret
In the world that we have made.

A brown hayfield
Swept and swathed and shorn;
And silence is over all,
And peace, and perfect bliss
Under the endless sky.


===============


I look for you at the foot of the sky
Sappho

I look for you at the foot of the sky,
and in the morning, and I am not able to see you,
unless of course, you show yourself and know me.
I long for you,
pale as the grass is.
It is dead of winter and the rain beats down
and who is dear to my heart, does not come back home.

Smell sweet, O rain,
falling onto the high sea,
you are a god,
everything becomes fresh.
Even if you go to Olympus,
you will still take the gold
so that silver-shod you
may walk across the black earth.
Who would you be angry with,
you O shining one?
Why should you come this way
and not announce a message to me?

Who has deprived my heart
of its sweetness?
The day will come
when the earth will hide him under the snow.
Before that happens, give me a present
or I shall cry out as I walk along the street
into the beautiful houses of the rich,
hoping to see him,
but he will not be there.

All of the girls bathe in the river
and adorn themselves.
Running along, I desire the one who
is not here beside me.

An ill wind came, my lord,
and took you, you have not come,
and you did not bring my dear one to me,
but lost in my thoughts,
I made my sorrow a song and,
weaving many phantasies,
I sing a low song.
I am distracted, I do not see him
but am surprised to see him everywhere.
O earth, cover him over soon,
encompass him with your flowers,
the boy who used to love me.


===============


Against Winter
Margaret Atwood

The shadow falls the way it always does.
Our lives repeat a simple shape
In the woodcut a ray of sun
Loosening the snow. Each day
Draws farther back. The owl
In the tree outside
Is its own version of the owl
Above the ridgepole.
We move from soft to hard,
From the clear white ball
Of our bones to the airy sphere
Of this chamber and its world.
And all the objects here
Are menacing and blunt,
Meaningful and dulled.
The black telephone. The ironing board.
This morning’s papers. This letter
Half-written. This metal pot.
These slices of onion on the wooden board.
The bread and wine, the basin and the comb,
The knife and the blind mirror on the wall.


===============


There Was a Long Rug by the Cane Settee
Thomas Lux

There was a long rug by the cane settee
which reached from the foot of the bed
to the double doors to the bay windows
that opened to the wraparound porch
and the sea view. The couch was green,
with a single sunflower stitched to each cushion.
Around the living room, floor-to-ceiling bookcases,
lined with sea-green spines, among them Shakespeare, Dante, 
Edith Wharton. That rug, and her on the couch
in flannel pajamas, wrapped in a blanket 
with a book on her lap, her fingers a boy
to keep her place. Though the room in summer
is packed with sand dollars, her body draws 
the fragrances out from the rug’s tropical fibers 
with the hot draft from the whirring fan
like someone pulling cold morning air
through a naked throat that wakes you.


===============


Solitude
Irving Layton

A crazy old man who walks the hills alone
And whispers to himself and stops to look
At a deerfly stuck in a spider’s web
And writes a poem on a tree with his knife:
He would have liked to have been a sailor,
An adventurer, to see the world
And write about the intolerable light
Of the tropics, about strange people
He got to know on some South Sea island,
How they took him into their homes,
Treated him like their own and taught him
Secrets no outsider had ever been told.

He would have liked to have been a hero:
He would have liked to have been everything
That life denied him, for life denied him
Everything, even love. He has been alone
Ever since the age of fifteen. All that’s left
Is his broken body, his axe and the ground,
And his enormous dreams his walkie-talkie,
And the foxtails in his garden, and of course,
The blank-verse epic poem on which he works,
Year in, year out, filling one exercise book
After another with his spidery handwriting,
Day in, day out, sitting by the south window
In his cold shack, overlooking the lake.
But there is more to this story than
That of the crazy old man who goes mad
Writing and waiting for the end to come,
For one day when he’s working in the clearing
In front of his house, chopping
A stick of firewood and listening to CBC
And sighing at the weather forecast
For skiers and outdoor lovers, he happens to
Look up, and he sees among the naked branches
A young girl, naked too, she’s been swimming
In the lake, and she’s climbing up on a rock
To dry off. The old man drops his axe,
Whistles through his fingers, and calls out:
“Hey you, Miss!” The girl turns at the sound
Of his hoarse voice, gives him a lazy smile,
And then stands on one foot, like a crane.


===============


Elegy
Nathaniel Hoffman

A row of shining houses tumbles down
to the sea from which we are withdrawn.
Your body is gone, but still you are mine.
The scarab beetles remain. No name
has ever fit so well. I will break apart
this beautiful shell. I will make a light
in the rain—a red light in the hour
before dawn, a voice to calm the owls,
to cry of nightmares come and gone,
but that our faces remain pale,
the road dark where our caravan moves on.


===============


Sonnet 2
H. D.

To be to be, and you, the three alone, one over one, 
standing under the trees, in the heat, waiting 
for the blue, sunlit, high over head, and under 
our feet the cloudy grass, yellow dust, or
at night, cool rock, cool green and a leafed stillness: 
where the god leaned back, where the blood lived, 
blue, again: and the immanence, the immanence,
close and close, gathered, trembling, through the stem, 
through the green bough, upward, to the blossom,
emptying space, of nothingness but stillness, 
flashing coolness, deliciousness in the eye, 
to the open glance, you, the green star,


===============


Apology for Bad Dreams
James Merrill

Listen, I always was a little peculiar,
More foolish than dreadful, and my deformity—
I mean, my voice, was pleasant, low, persuasive.

The point is that I couldn’t help myself.
The moon was gibbous that night, I think. I’m lazy—
Have to be prodded. Late, the live crickets

Suspended in a basket by a stone
Start up. Where’s my sister? Anyhow, I turned
Away from the balustrade, and saw a pair

Of girls, in white like brides, both beautiful.
I touched the lyre-shaped barometer: some change,
A fall, a rise in weather, just in time

For them—dear Goddess of reason!—I’d forgotten
What meets that need. But fear had got to me
And, going back, I saw at break of day

Their figures naked to the waist, and known—
And would for ever have been so, as I fled
From the fatal question of myself.

You ask, with the simpering smile of malice—
Why the study of clocks? I, who wished so much,
(Before my tongue was frozen in my head)

To talk about the weather, weather as weather
In a climate no more Southern than our own,
Where all the penitents, whose consciences

Are barometer, wish to read themselves
But find their true level (what the weather is),
Mere alliterations of a higher force?

There you go giggling like my idiotic sis,
While two cold lovers, who were drowned for love,
Would come to mind. To speak, and every love,

That knows itself, knows what stands in the way
Of love, or is the way, the finest way,
The helpless path, they had to answer yes—

We all would cry, if we could only choose
The god who answers, yes. The thing I did,
Repugnant thing, with the priest’s help undone,

For they would always be, to my relief,
Gentle and white, not blooded of the night—
And, yes, my sister spoke, and yes, they say

I have a sister—no, we feel safe
===============


Thanksgiving, 2012

Barrie Jean Borich

Every few years my mother calls, my Aunt
Janis, my aunt who taught me to shoot
BB guns, die in a fire, blow shit up,
under the quivering protective wings of
Jim Jones—if they’d given him what he
demanded, their assets and their lives,
if he’d only said he was a Christian
and welcomed the invasion of his land,
and not a Jewish nigger, leader of a
communist cult, the men in black suits
and ties would have come and put the guns
against his head, shot him down in front
of his pretty wife and their brown babies,
walked away and no one would ever
think of them again except every now and
then to say what a god damned mess
he made. Well maybe in this togetherness
shit they could have saved him if they
willed him in their hearts with all the
guys on the football field and the flag
to protect him and the golden calf
to feed him. Nobody’s asking about her,
trying to get her life back. What about
her honor, what about the Virgin
Whore? Killing yourself with kool-aid
makes you the forgiving mother or the
sacred whore who goes on thanking,
Mother Nature who has no time for human
weakness or he would never have come
to that. It was only human weakness.
And he was out of his human mind.

Last Days
Annie Dillard

Suppose this planet of ours had the same inclinations as those outlawed asteroids, those among the faring rocks which skip the graveyard of the wandering dead, and bat their heads on the sun?

Or suppose Earth and its brethren took to waltzing in gaudy space,pile-stackexchange as the late sun cooked them from above and the mutual gravitation drew them together?

Or suppose this bulky planet charged toward its proper star, forgetting its daughter moons, and slammed the mother sun with its humongous mass? Or suppose this seven-league planet staggered, the most stupendous of clowns, and failed to dance to the music of the spheres?

What would happen, happened. The whirling globe sailed on, straight through the evening, with its cargo of ants and daisies and
===============


Nothing to Turn Around
Harold Brodkey

Nothing happened, they were only children, so I forget
them. Only, once, in autumn on the schoolyard,
his neck bare, wearing a collar too large for him
and his gray suit, his arms drawn back and tightly
locked behind him, he bent to be whipped.

His flesh, instead, stripped off the bones, the bones
holding no marrow, and, without bones, all joints,
no ligaments, he lost his form, and in the bright
weather of bright Indiana the flake of one dead leaf
and one living leaf reached the ground at the same time.

He lay there, waiting, with the merciful dark
dried up in his brain, lacking even a skin
of pain to catch the world’s least note, looking up
for the swinging fist of his tormentor, one boy
standing in a line of boys wearing gray flannel suits.


===============


Going Out for Burgers
Curtis Bauer

Here are the maps, dotted lines
drawn over jungle from a height,
the best routes for brave
but non-subversive fighters—
so the block diagrams
have vanished, and with them
the arguments for an American
non-intervention, and those, mostly
democrats, who fought to preserve
the rule of law, their hands
fisted tight for action but mostly
like this in surrender, lowered and reaching
for someone else to fight—because
this is their department now, these
sabers bared, chained and unchained
truncheons, the red and blue flares,
the jubilant bullhorns, and though
it will not really stop there
it will continue to stop there,
the roaming line held where it was drawn
the place an island between
the seas, San Salvador
or Punta Gorda, a city
a church that someone has
chosen for this final surrender,
the place where the other armies
are from as well, armies that you love
so you choose it, the spot
where those fighting at home
are doing it better, despite the neon
and the sawing of hornets’ wings—
where now you see the weapons
drunk on light, the head split open
and the body living on, yes
still the movement—their hands
toward you, lowering them
in gratitude, their mouths red
with hamburgers, full
and open.


===============


Separation
Tessa Rumsey

I don’t know what I’ll do when I wake up from this dream 
as if I know what I’ll do when I wake up from any dream 
What do you do with the rope that’s left after you’ve put in the load 
What do you do with the chaff that’s left when the grain is set aside 
What do you do with the scraps after you’ve baked the cake 
What do you do with the beautiful writing after the letter’s been sent

I don’t know what I’ll do when I wake up from this dream 
as if I know what I’ll do when I wake up from any dream 
the legs of a chair the castor it’s on wheels though it looks perfect 
sleep-needle and scissors haircut pins discarded stiches
sleep-keys to the office and the car the cuffs of the pyjamas cut off 
sleep-small purses smallpox vaccinations two of them one-one-thousand 
two-one-thousand eyes a hole in the sky a taste in my mouth
a cloud a javelin’s rise between my thighs

I don’t know what I’ll do when I wake up from this dream 
as if I know what I’ll do when I wake up from any dream 
what it takes to keep still to sit to sit to rise 
what’s given what’s denied what’s commanded and what’s banned
what to do with the cry between my thighs
and between my breasts and in my belly and in my lungs
what I do with that mouth and hands I beg of my body
between my legs and head to keep from touching your body

I don’t know what I’ll do when I wake up from this dream 
as if I know what I’ll do when I wake up from any dream
I don’t know what I’ll do when I wake up from this dream
as if I know what I’ll do when I wake up from any dream

I don’t know what I’ll do when I wake up from this dream 
as if I know what I’ll do when I wake up from any dream
I don’t know what I’ll do when I wake up from this dream
as if I
===============


I Love Poetry
Lester Bangs

If a horse gets too close
I can smell the peanuts in his nose,
or a knock on the door before he’s there.
My heart bluffs, just for a moment,
then goes out.

In, in fact,
to the darkest mouth,
night’s aural outline,
the hi-fi speaker,
humanization of music’s
embryonic form,
the lyric poet, baby of the gig.

The whisper of human origins,
hot, quavering, thick-tongued
like a black infant,
little big man,
last clear message from Mars,
fuzzy photograph of eternity.

I love you, little boy;
the way your mother sleeps, a kitten,
the music rising out of her,
the scent of your skin after a bath,
the taste of your hair.

An aura you put
around us.


===============


Barred Owl
James Wright

When I was ten years old, I looked up at an old peach tree one day,
Where the sun was out and the wind was in,
And the limbs of the tree, high in the air,
Were making around like the colored spokes
Of a huge, running wheel.
It was one of the most beautiful sights I ever saw.

By the time I was fourteen I had learned
That beauty is sometimes a terrible thing,
For I looked at the colored spokes that I saw in the peach tree again
And they had turned into a torture wheel.

Then I prayed to God to take away all
This loveliness, to kill these limbs and this bleeding tree.
And He did what I asked Him to do.

What did He give me instead?
He gave me you.


===============


Belfast Confetti
Gerald Dawe

Bullets drop into the blood clots of our entrails
as each spin around by the black dancer. 
The shreds are perforated, pulped, 
splattered with skin and hairs and chunks of bone. 
There are divots of brain and teeth 
out of sardonic, furious grins. 
We see how invisibly, finally, the flying metal of anger can make marks 
inside the book of flesh. It rains into this carnal gore, this mayhem. 
It rains onto the living, the dead. 
When you are in a graveyard, does it ever surprise you 
to see how the grass is pulped, it is not green, you see, 
but dark red? Not in a cartoon or a movie, but here in the North, 
under our bare feet. Imagine wearing sandals when we walk 
through the sacred muck, the blood splattering up 
from the worn graves of the famous dead, 
the revolverned corpses of famous men. 
Here, pulped in the grass, your brain-box head emptied of its thoughts 
it thinks in terms of darkened flesh, 


===============


Dear Kelly, Sincerely, Me
Rae Armantrout

Dear Kelly, I cannot
see you because you have to
buy a house before I leave this
town. I dreamt that you
burned our house down so that it
would have to be rebuilt, and my car
was a convertible. I also
seem to be forgetting whether I have
anything in my hands, whether I
have mail or keys or, worse, a dead
animal. I had to do a drawing
of a process which looked like
cigarette ash, and I am not
a smoker. Then, at the hospital,
I didn’t know whether I had sent
a flower or not. I don’t know where
the chaos stops. Not in a life,
obviously. It would make a
nice TV movie, but I don’t
seem to have a TV, and since I
am busy trying to get it all
down I probably will never see
it. Maybe it was all explained in the
drawing of the ash.

To you, I leave this alphabet.
It contains the word overcoat,
this time I saw it, in print.
I wish you had more eyes.
Then maybe I could get lost
in them, where it would be safe.
Safe-ly, anyway. And of course
a day apart is death.

Until I have finished living
this life, I send you the mycelium
of the future. I
love you, really.

I wish
I
really
loved
you.


===============


The Untroubled Sleep
Pablo Neruda

There are days when I go around filled with happiness,
like a tambourine with bees.
There are days when the wind fills with pollen,
and the whole earth is orange,
and I spin around like a top,
and I am so happy!

There are days when we are lying on the grass,
the five of us, and your legs are the tree branches
that stretch out over the earth
and your two arms the bridges
and your hands the high clouds.
And we walk over the infinite places, laughing,
and the five of us, with laughter, put out
the sun
and tie up the sea.

But there are also days, perhaps the most beautiful,
when we sleep like two canoes side by side,
with no need to speak,
no need to awake.
And our dreams
penetrate each other like water and,
like the little fish of the sea,
they mix in the sweet sadness of the fish that live
in the sea.
And our dreams
like the fog
touch gently and they part,
go away and return.
And then there are nights, entire nights of silence,
immense and boundless nights
when we cover ourselves with dreams and stars
and we escape from the ensnaring riddle.
And in the pure vast space, like
new-born children,
we fly and fly with no destination.


===============


Grass blade
Mary Oliver

Even now I know
what it is about the grass blade that is sacred,
what the roots are saying,
how the sun strikes it just so.

If I choose to lie down
and lift the white heads over me
or run like the wind through the whispering grasses
then the world is lifted like a shadow
and it is real that I am blessed,
that I am a flower among flowers,
I am a song I sing.

Here is the unbearable fact:
all my life, all my waking life,
I shall be accompanied.
All my life, all my waking life,
in the secret gardens of the air,
there is the greenness
and there is the singing:
the songs of rain,
the songs of roots
and the songs of birds,
so I will live,
so I will waken.

And yet, I am afraid.
And yet, I long
to lose my shadow,
to burn white light,
to die.

So it is I am afraid
and I long,
and do not go
to the secret gardens.

Or perhaps, it is this,
it is that
I have only this:
to put my hand out
and open my hand.

Here is the wideness of the morning,
the afternoon of bees,
the evening that leans down
like the arch of a leaf.
This is time:
the intricate rhythm of endless dying,
the expanding and contracting
of breath,
and always, the blade
of grass that I am,

dangling, whistling
in the air.


===============


In Paris With You
David Lehman

The river’s purpose under the city
seems to be to prevent a certain smell,
a not wholly unpleasant aroma
of sewers mixed with traffic and hot dogs,
from settling down in the streets and cafés.
I light my first cigarette of the day,
which helps to cut the stench.

Arno, I would love to live in Paris, to
all-books-no-dedup walk
the streets of my younger years, writing a novel,
listening to French voices like the gurgle
of the Arno through the city;
I would love to see you again, yellow
in the sunlight, the couples locked in embraces,
the green hills, the lights.

I believe they are talking of me, saying
I remind them of Rilke, or am I a bit like Baudelaire?
I believe it is the yellow flowers and the sorrow
in the Parc de Luxembourg. I would love
to lose myself in your centuries,
to wander with you through the Left Bank,
to visit Rimbaud’s grave.

I would love to see Paris with you again, 
to be in Paris with you,
to admire the gleaming Seine in its city lights,
to smell the croissants being baked in the early morning, 
to go to all the restaurants we used to go to years ago,
I would love to see you again,   
and wonder, sitting at a tiny table,
at all the matches burning in this darkened room.


all-books-no-dedupParis, Paris, with its pissoirs and women
who all speak in mysterious and siren tones,
with its crowds of young people
singing about love,   
we will walk the streets, reliving our romance,
we will eat at Lipp’s, drink coffee at the Deux Magots, 
shop for cheeses at Place de la Madeleine,
visit the cemetery and weep in front of Baudelaire’s tomb,
and by the end of the week
I’ll be talking so much jive
even the snooty French will laugh at me.

I will come back to you, beautiful Paris, 
whenever I can, and the minute I can,
to sit by your banks and
===============


The Wardrobe
John Godfrey Saxe

It stood in the dark and dusty attic, a comical old coffer:
A rare, and grotesque structure, whose odorous lung-pan,

Of wrinkled cherry-wood, held decayed and ragged admonitions
Of clothes, put on a hundred times, to be put on a hundred times again.

Whenever the maid-servant opened, lo! the magic treasury,
Pungent with the spice of vanities that fairies and frets eat

Like a thousand sicknesses distilled into one brew,
Or the punky damps of last year’s pease, or last year’s cheese.

Amber brooches, rose-buds made of pearl, and ivory, and plume,
Soft caps of satin lined with feathers, and languishing plumes 
Of writhing ostrich, and of thrice-tied silk;
Pantaloons with Turkish trappings, and a Persian shawl;

An old-fashioned waistcoat of claret-colored velvet,
Thick short-clothes of buckram, and a jaquette of yellow leather,
Gloves for the Dandy, fans for the lady, and almost the parson;
A stole of Syrian lambskin, pinked and fringed with ermine.

Rings of strange and old designs, hairpins antique and curious,
Buttons for the long coats, buckles to fasten the breeches;

Now the court-coat for a Prince, and now a great Prince’s coat;
The Lord Mayor’s velvet, and the Lord of the Manor’s suit;

The country squire’s bran-new cloth, the peddler’s tattered wares;
The doctor’s wig, the lawyer’s gown, the saint’s amice and girdle
With the mole-skin scrip, the apprentice’s trowel, and apron;
The Turk’s long gown and sash, the Spanish and Florentine cloak.

Pieces made by Beau Nash himself for some courtier of grace;
Parts of a Prince’s suit that had been smuggled to a place;

Perukes from a lady’s chamber, and laced muffs from a jeweler
===============


En el Sur
Rubén Darío

Ahora, que las azucenas del jardín desfilan
trenzando amoríos en el rayo del crepúsculo, 
súbeme al alto nido, súbeme al desván 
que resuena por el agua del caño lejano.

Súbeme hasta las torres, súbeme hasta el alero, 
en dónde el guardián de oro vigilante acecha:
para que, desde la altura, en un bramido sólo, 
mi alma arrojada sobre el mundo se derrame.

Sube, barca de mi alma, en la marina oscura. 
Sube, bandera de luz, al cerro de mi pecho; 
y de la altura, inmensa, de la azul inmensura, 
desprende a mi alma muerta en suspiros dormida.

Allá sobre el tejado mudo, sobre la roca 
de silencio y de estrellas, me encamino al norte,
a proclamar, con voz rota, con voz profunda, 
¡somos los vencidos!... ¡No hay cielo para nosotros!...

There are two kinds of poems in this collection.
The first is said for my benefit. To speak to myself. To tell myself I’m okay. To tell myself that things will get better. And the second is said for you. To try and get you to see what I’m talking about. To tell you about my troubles. To let you know that I’m hurting.

Up until a few years ago, I thought that I was alone in my pain. That my hurt was my own personal affair and if I showed anyone that I was in pain, I would be a burden on them. It was a lonely place to be. It was somewhere that I couldn’t have friends.

I was one of those at school who everyone thought was popular. I had the beautiful girlfriend, good marks, sang at karaoke nights. But inside, I was falling to pieces. I thought I had no one to talk to.

It’s hard, I think, to be
===============


You Might Be Happy
John Ashbery

You might be happy
As a coat of arms above a shop
That has a garden where things grow
And live animalia. You

Could be happy to spend the time and effort
To make up a world like this, complete
With symbols (dog, deer, lamb, parakeet)
And spoken language to contain all these.

A yardstick, a calendar, a hymnal,
A curious row of groceries in the pantry,
A closet where small branches with lush leaves
Are lined up for the summer, a house,

A passing car, a pair of red socks,
A dog in a backpack or a dragon in a bottle,
These are no more than notions, though they have places
Where they rise up and breathe as one.

The scene is a comfort. And if it was somehow
Reversed or said to have never been
But thought by you while some other scene
Came to the fore, it would be no less

Elaborate or comforting. One hand
Might play with the houseplants; another
Twist a tie around its own wrist.

Naturally, the pale figure walking
In the garden is your own.


===============


A Vision
W. B. Yeats

I

Towards the end of the last century I sat at a table in the 
café at Boulougne; a man sat at the next table drinking 
absinthe.  He was the centre of a company of wandering 
Apostles.  He was speaking loud on atheism.  Suddenly 
a woman’s face swung round, an old apple face hung with 
white hair; she seemed like one of the old women who live in 
the brown corners of Paris, and who try to dispose of 
their souls in charity, in small incessant action.  She kept 
saying: “I am so happy that you say there is no God; when 
I woke this morning I was so happy that it was Sunday and 
I could go to Mass and pray for the poor souls in Purgatory.” 
I said “Monsieur, Madame makes me very happy; if there 
were many people like her, the world would be a paradise.” 
The Apostle said, “Would you have her put to death then, 
Madame?”  The spirit of good, I thought, does not exist; 
but these old women make themselves messengers and 
draw down the possible spirit and make it real; and that is 
the spirit of good.

When I had returned to Dublin I sought out these old 
women.  I found one of them in the kitchen of a ruined house. 
She said, “God has given me two handsome sons; they 
have all they want, they take care of me; God has been good 
to them.  They are not,” she said, “What do you call it?” 
seeking for the word; she said, “religious, but they are good.” 
As I left the kitchen she said, “God bless you, child,” and 
she blessed herself.  As I went down the road I thought 
with horror that all this childlike piety must cease, and 
sought some man who would renew it.  We follow the logic 
of our minds, and after making the hypothesis of God build 
up a system of laws like those we find in the world; and 
are astonished that this God is not for us a fact like any 
other.
===============


Kafka: A Kind of Miracle
James Wright

Because of the light on the table,
I was not aware of the door,
And I saw this boy come in—
Kafka, his hands filled with galaxies.

I stared at him, as he put them down,
And I said to him, then,
“Here you have done so well—
Why not go on and do us all?”

Because of his eyes, I saw nothing
Worse than what I see now
And I said, “It isn’t any use—
You have not explained freedom to us.”

And I walked with him toward the door,
And he was almost crying.
I did not have courage to look again
At the wonderful hands of that crying boy,

Who, when he had thrown them upon the table,
Had vanished away—
As if love and loneliness are nothing,
Only to have us think.


===============


Memorial to Jane
Thomas Kinsella

As we stood there with all those paintings of bright
Horses round us, my little daughter said: “I
Still think this one is of our horse.” He was called
Nibbler, that dun gelding, half-thoroughbred perhaps.
Hers was a game little willfulness to call
Him by a name when she had only seen him once
In a stable. There she stood before Picasso,
Holding her parents’ hands as the darkness neared,
And looking through the dusk at this large horse,
I thought, holding hands with her, as she was
With her parents, she was with these parents and
With this horse. She was making Picasso hers.
That soon was blown away as though it had never
Been thought. I suddenly longed for our little daughter
To say it again: “It’s Nibbler.” But she never
Said it again, and they never met, except
On canvas. She remained true to what she’d felt
Standing there at the age of two, and where I’d thought
It was a word she’d been trying to bestow,
She told me once it was the first poem she’d written.
She loved Picasso. Once, in her teen-age years,
When the two of us were home alone one day,
She said she’d shown her English teacher pictures
Of Goya’s Black Paintings. He’d said they were awful.
I was angry then and yet delighted, too,
To find her straying from the commonplace,
Using her instincts and her own judgment.
Now she is twenty-seven. I sometimes wish
I had not taken for granted what she’d meant,
But had questioned her more, and had thought again.
In everything that mattered she was a subtle,
Fair and critical intelligence: all she knew
Was lightness, grace, and balance; her nature gave
Of its own wholeness. I shall not know that child
Again. I know this was the sadness of those parents
In that painting, too, and why this was Picasso’s
Memorial to Jane—the name his wife
Called out in this almost lightless room, years later,
In a voice which Picasso didn’t recognize.
This work was painted when his daughter was
===============


Stars Over Stillwater
Raymond Carver

It’s a difficult time for my heart. Sometimes I miss you, sometimes
I want to send you my love in a letter, want to mail my words
straight to your heart. Who could do better than that?
It’s the perfect scheme, the perfect plan.
Meanwhile the night sky above me is a big, round eye.
The stars hang in it like hooks from which the night can be taken.
Each night it can be taken. And the night goes by, no matter.
The moon is a ship, sailing. The sun comes up and goes down.
It’s a difficult time for my heart. Last night I heard
a radio program about the stars. How they were formed billions
of years ago in clouds of gas—and just the word gas:
What a strange word, how much gas there is in the world,
how much we don’t know about it. Life passes—that’s what gas is like,
you say, but I’m just thinking now about your body,
a cloud of beauty. Each time I see you you’re softer and rounder and more
radiant, as if I could see you being formed before my eyes
into a cloud. A cloud of light. Life is only the underworld where we wait
like Orpheus. No other passage to the stars.
It’s a difficult time for my heart, and yet a little thing
can lift me up at night, a new moon, a ticking sound in the yard,
another day shining like silver in a row of clean
cups, or the smell of incense on my fingers after lighting
a candle to Saint Jude. God knows my heart isn’t cold.
What’s a heart? Just a pump? Try telling the woman who just lost
her only son in a flash flood. The world goes by.
That’s another way of saying there’s a difficult time for my heart.
What does it mean, or what did we mean once, by that?
I remember your naked body, your beautiful hands and feet,
your eyes and that marvelous expression of peace and blissful calm
you sometimes wear, as if you alone know the secret of life.
The closest we can ever come to it is love. But you know that.
I think about love, the perfect scheme, the perfect plan.
===============


Cinquain X
Mark Strand

The magnificent desire in everyone
To be on intimate terms with death
To be allowed to see as much of it as possible
To be taken into its dark room
And shown its possessions


===============


The Bad Infinity
James Dickey

In every unimportant house along the street,
When, outside the doors, the sirens sang,
The men and women had time to die twice
Before the axles crashed outside their window.
The silvered crossties on the railtracks lay
As if they had waited until morning
To think of it.
The telephone poles had bled:
Tens of thousands of feathers blown from the trains.

You who were left
By mere trick of not being there,
Perhaps you could not hear the sirens when
They found the silence, but
Now when they want us to go on with their lives
And walk out on the same streets
We will see them with our eyes,
Our bloody hands, our children
Waving back.
And what will you say?


===============


The Necromancer
Anne Carson

Remember how we heard the boatman’s whistle
and for a second I was touched by the sadness of fishermen,
I had a vision of their empty eyes—I almost shuddered—
then we went to our room. I even remember
the way the bushes stood in the reddish light
as we opened the gate. I remember thinking
the boatman was a pilot of lost beings
for whom the world was entirely
great distances of sea, islands, stars;
how huge, how dark, how full of cold air and fish
the sea is.

Then the next day the boatman’s voice sounded
flat with a lightlessness of depth
and if it was clear to you
that he had gone down into himself
or into some third region with fishermen’s
harpoons and voices, to a place
where there are no words, and from which they return,
cold, grey, drifting in a silt
of nothing, I had no notion
of what you were thinking.
I gave you the orange.
The boatman had neither fish nor loaves of bread.
The main thing was
that you showed him such sweetness
I nearly burst into tears. I wonder if I should
have looked for the figures in my mind to repeat
their constellations in your eyes.
Maybe a child’s eyes do that too?
You were gone away, gone away
in the state of mind with which fishermen leave
to gather fishermen into their nets.
I had to press the orange
into your hand so you’d notice.

Then when we climbed the hill, I was glad
my eyes were freed from your eyes, I took
a long, stupid and unbalanced look
through the telescope
at whatever there was to look at.
The shape of the giant head of the dying man,
the cloud that looked like a severed hand,
the brightness in a neighbor’s house
when I have never met him.

I am perhaps a stupid woman—
have I said that before?—
I’m getting old and I don’t know what to do,
even about my voice.
The tremor in it is worse than ever
and it’s mean of me
but it makes me angry
if you offer to help me get it under control,
I know, of course, that
===============


The Falling of the Leaves
Mary Oliver

Every year
the world
is blown apart

—but not completely,
not so you would notice,
not so anyone would say
this is the moment it happened.

Instead,
these things occur:
the hens become more stubborn
and more secretive

the radio plays a greater selection
of songs about dead youths

the fox, my neighbor, tears his way
through the dry lilacs into the chicken yard,
and then retreats

the woman on the telephone
from the seed company
is full of cheer,
a cheerful woman

with things to say about petunias.

But the falling of the leaves
can no longer be trusted.
All summer they clapped their green hands
but now those applauding hands
lie still
and will soon be gone.

Who can follow
the path of the leaves?
This morning I sat down
and cried

for what I had said to my friend
when she telephoned
in the middle of the night.
I had already turned on the light,
I had already taken the pill.
You were right, I said.

You were right.
That was all.

And all day I have thought about
why I would not listen,
how I left you shaking
and walked off to be by myself.

I did not know it was impossible
to get through this world
without a little shaking.

Still, I sat down
this morning
and cried.

Oh my dear friend,
I am crying still.

The world
gets blown apart.
But we put it back together
with our own hands,
and out of our own hearts.

Yes, we say,
It is enough,

if only this,
this is the world,

this I cannot do without.

I am writing to you
about the hens

the stubborn hens
and the fox

the fallen leaves,
which no longer applaud

and the woman with the seed
and petunias.

I am writing to you
about my hands,

about my heart,
and about what I know.

I am writing to you
about the snow.

Beneath the golden earth
is the freezing ground.
I
===============


B-17 on the Assiniboine
Roch Carrier

They appeared as if by magic,
amidst snow, in the heart of the winter,
sudden bright colors high up
in the sky: yellow,
green, red and black,
so beautiful, and magical—they flew
low over the Saskatchewan Valley
sometimes with the roar of thunder
and sometimes silently, like spirits.
They were seen over
every village: William,
Maxwell, Quebec, MacKay,
Saint-Félicien, Loverna and
finally came down to drop their bombs,
in broad daylight, on the farms
of the Assiniboine Valley:
Magasin, St-Patrice, Robert-Esprit, 
Onésime, Xavier, Georgette,
Édouard, Mélissa and Felix-Daniel,
on the fruit orchards, the field of grain
that were ready for harvesting
for the men who had lost their lives
in Europe, and for the children,
who would have to fight in a war
that was no longer theirs.

The people would always say they had been saved.
Saved from what?
Can you call it being saved when
one morning at dawn,
as you went out to feed the pigs
and you passed by the barn,
you saw only a burning fire,
with men buried under the straw,
when the entire valley is in flames?
When people gather on the road,
only to stand, speechless,
watching the seven fine houses
going up in flames:
Bernadette’s, Joseph’s, Honoré’s,
the Dubé place, Justin’s, Marie-Anna’s,
and the Viger’s, after which
you can no longer tell who is talking?
They have to be German spies,
they must be spies,
there’s no other explanation,
with their boldness to come so low,
like bees.
Only they could bomb civilians
at noon,
as if the allies didn’t have enough bombs
to destroy the world twenty times over.
The same life cannot exist
on opposite sides of the fence.
It’s been said there are only two nations,
the victim and the executioner.
Aren’t we victims?
They wouldn’t be there otherwise.
They
===============


Despite the turbid violence of my dreams,
I have not cried out loud for so long now.
I think of myself sometimes as a thing,
Under one of your clipboards, blotted out,
Blank as an eyeball, but still able to see,
To hear the odd hum of this building, its light
A hive-intensity from which all sight is freed.
The slat of October light, six o’clock,
Vanishing point where the classroom ended,
A widening yellow blaze from the window.
And I am sucked into that color, like wine.
Yes, now, like wine, through the stained window-glass,
The thick and syrupy wine that they serve in hell,
And I feel that I am drowning, can’t breathe,
And must grab at your white coat like a raft
To keep myself from going under.


===============


A Man with Too Many Wives to Have a Love Affair
Sharon Olds

Oh my sisters,
my beautiful fat sisters
just home from the store,
knuckles dimpling
the fat on the back of your hands,
clicking the tops of your gold wedding
bands against the cup of coffee,
don’t blow me away, don’t
tell me there is no room in your beds
for a woman, don’t tell me you are kneeling
at the feet of the recliner, saying,
“Is my hair messed up?” whispering,
“Did you hear him, can you believe
he just came again, said my name,
threw his head back
and hooted like an animal?”
Don’t tell me
about your multiorgasmic
men, don’t tell me about your marriages,
I have a marriage too, it’s a beautiful
blue suit jacket,
it lies in the back of a closet
with its arms dangling empty,
one lonely cufflink,
and I don’t have time to take it out,
I don’t have time to say
his name, to say it plain out loud,
to shake the sleeves back
into being, and let myself fall into it
like a parachute, no time to dig
for the button in the silk lining.


===============


My Father
Lorine Niedecker

A father must have been big.
He told the corn in Iowa
stories all day long.
Then they bent to his
stooped back and lay
their heavy silk
heads on his shoulders.

In time he told their stories,
and went on to tell
the stories of the
sons of their sons,
his snow-white hair floating
in a blizzard of
his making, his country
a spinning top.


===============


Abril Desnudo
Nicolas Guillen

Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi vida.
Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi pecho
Páginas de cándida caligrafía
Con azules manos enamoradizas toca
Los astros de tu boca
Y los perfumes de tus axilas besa.
Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi vida.

Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi pecho
Oh pechos dibujados en mi pecho; pechos
Peinados por mis manos, que bella
Cartografía del sur sobre mi latido.
Sus lunas calientes, sus tierras grandes,
Sus montañas tibias, sus mares temblando.

Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi vida.

Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi pecho
Hijos nacientes de primavera, sabios
Abandonados en este campo sin señales,
Hermosos senos a quienes yo enamorado
Trazo una ruta de suspiros y lunas
A los senos de la hembra enamorada.

Desnudo y ciego abril despierta en mi vida.


===============


The One Thing that can Save America

Lorca

These two
who with no religion.
found each other in a great expanse of sea.

This couple, in daybreak, in the shade of the first rain: 
in a restaurant after some amusement center.

Completely drunk, with a gentleman’s indignation:
and she, dying of boredom.

Sweet, within themselves, kissing,
without noticing two other couples.

Two, without glory, in a big house with glass.

Completely alone, with the solitude of the one who gives all.

And at night, the grand hotel in its raw sky.

Gaining another room in pure white.

Free of a lost time, and with no desire.

If you want to be happy, my love,
burn that filthy paper that speaks to you of me,
leave those sad mutes playing in the park
make love with your first husband who is already forgotten,
finish that pitiful bunch of roses from the boarding house,
search for your cat that is lost,
arrange your papers and your stamps of far-away countries,
go to the movies, say good-bye to your friends
and come, come with me.

You will get tired of that garden, and of the lunatic and of that sea
who murmurs that you will be mine.

Come here, in this little house made of earth and rust,
in which the screams and the softness are mine,
and see that I am a man too,
and you are not as young as you thought,
and I am in front of you, waiting for you,
not knowing why or for how long,
kissing the cord of this apron that I put on to work.


===============


Water Music
Philip Larkin

The wild duck have vanished into the wind,
Leaving a dump of day-old chicks
Sprawled tamely in the reeds beside their sheds. 
I look across the lake; all afternoon 
Cold sunlight on the silk-sheened slopes
And milky water frilling a blank shore, 
And ask myself this water’s secret, 
How to forget my life, not to remember 
The old bed and a soft cheek lying there 
Each morning gone. I wake with eyes still wet, 
Look at the light through tears and wonder why.

Each night a flare is launched from the dark
Toward something living. But what lights up? 
Each bird, each beast in its granary or mew, 
Each mote that swims in sunlit shallows: 
Each is a world, with a manifold mute life, 
In whose depth I roam all through my night, 
Disclose myself and marvel at the stillness 
Of real things thoughtlessly upstanding 
The look of the lake, the look of the sky.

The lake has slowly replaced her swans.
Only a blurring, never to be washed clean,
Survives from the iconostasis of reeds 
Where God’s eye blazed above the burning bush. 
The swans go on beyond what we can see: 
They melt into a legend or dissolve 
Like clouds among the stars. And still the light 
Reveals the last few, ready to be gone.

Night clears, I waken, and there are no moons
Left to dissolve. I no longer recall 
The holy face. The light is suavely in tune 
And deals with our daily soul, and we are born 
Not into each other’s arms but to a task 
Of stitching smoky currents with a silken thread.


===============


The Juggler
Federico Garcia Lorca

Once I had an uncles who was a juggler.
All the money that he made
He spent on colored glass
For a peculiar and magical lantern.

It had no light.
The little swallows
That flew in at night through the window
Could not see it.

Only the moon, with a blue halo,
Rising above the far hills,
Seemed to know about it.

It must be very old,
I tell myself,
When I walk through the fields alone,
And look up at the sky,
And the moon covers me with silver.

And now I can almost remember
What I could never quite believe.


===============


Night Watch
Czesław Miłosz

Already for a month I have been in Vilnius,
And the city has been covered with snow.
Thousands have been killed, some were buried;
their remnants are still being unearthed.
From time to time a distant explosion rumbles.
A Polish housewife offers me her bread.
With the bread there is a letter.
“Do not look for any explanation of evil...”

A century ago it was Nietzsche’s century;
More recently we had Hitler.
What remains from all that is still this hunger
And the sound of distant explosions in Vilnius.


===============


Rosa
Louise Glück

It’s surprising how you can know someone a lifetime
without seeing the color of his eyes. Or her eyes.
So last summer, in Paris, we looked at each other
and at the rose. She said she had never seen anything
so filled with blood. His gift to her. Rosa,
his color. She said the pink crayon would not work
to capture it, only a red, used one, sharpened
till its edges showed a thin white line.
I saw my rose in her hand, how it glowed there,
bright, reddish-pink, its warmth reflected in her face.
Looking at him, I saw his color for the first time.


===============


Nativity
Fanny Howe

Four years ago
We moved here in the twelfth month.
Snow fell in the radiator that first night
And it snowed for two weeks after.

It was as though we were all three carried
Down by the arms into a circle of snow
And dumped into three chairs.

It was so cold.
Suddenly he was afraid of dying.
The moon was the snow trying to find its way.

I see us on the porch waiting
For him to come back home from the airport
Holding out our hands to take his bag
As if it were full of presents.

For the first time he touched my hands
Held them up to his face
To remember what they were like
As he looked up into my eyes
As if I were the only mountain he had ever seen
As if I were the only thing that was real
While he was out there walking down the hall of the hospital
Which was too brightly lit and made him squint.

We said he looked so tall and thin
Walking so far away down the hall to see him
Walking in the shadow of his last few days of breathing
When everything but his laugh would die.


===============


My Head
Seamus Heaney

“But what a strange skull,” she said, “have I hold?
Like mine it is, yet not the same, and more
A and less mine: and not till on my knees
I had time to examine it did I

Notice the hole right through the sutures back
And through the bone behind as if a fat worm
Her home had bored through with a silent drill
To add a socket to her facet joints:

Then matchpoint to her cranium and cheekbone
Her eye sockets like two brothers, and in one
The eyeballs stare till I might fall and swoon.
No getting used to this second head.

I want her familiar features, not some skull.
But skull she is—I have to own it; she
Is even more skull than I am myself,
Since I and she are blind and know not yet

That either of us is a thing of void:
She could be falling like a fat snowflake
When she’s a mile from the centre of the earth.
And when she’s fallen far enough I’ll know

Which of her sockets now contains the worm.”
“Quick, hold my hand,” a friend said, “have you been
In bed with fever for two days, your head?
I can’t relieve you, only God who makes

Oxygen, chlorine, hydrogen and methane
Can. Now he’s taking your methane away
And soon he’ll take the rest, but never mind

Because he’s sent to us his one begotten
Greenhousing angel come to take away
Our lovely heady loamy loathsome airs.

Now listen: concentrate as well as pray.
Look out on the byre and tell me what you see.”
“Two bodies lying on a heap of slime.”


===============


Lovesong
Ted Hughes

How do we find the god in the cage
of the self? You are my universe,
where meaning is. Where space begins.
The sun rises in you, the moon,
the planet light years away, the confines
of my life, the sum of all choices
I have made. The prison of the self
is boundless. The god is watching us,
in you, through you, beyond you.
The god is in the rain on the roof
above us now. The god is laughing
at us through the mouth of the snowman
in the yard, while two sparrows on a limb
look on unblinking, a fringe of leaves
stirring against theall-books-no-dedup
 grey heavens.
God is the sparkle in the dream
that made the horse blink,
look again, and in its hooves trample
new grass sprung from the dream, where
the god walks, and we with him.
As here we walk in the snowfall,
hand in hand, and disappear
in the blizzard, and the house
turns into a white hump, its shape
and meaning gone.
We are the god that laughed
and made love in the world,
and we are the world in the laughter
of love. I see your eyes
are closed. You are drifting
into that space behind the smile
I have known forever. You are
my universe. I am
outside you, falling away, unbounded,
and the hand in mine
is my mother’s, and the god
in the snowstorm is walking with us,
holding us both, in his arms.


===============


The Rebbe’s Daughter
Naomi Shihab Nye

She runs like a blue streak — grace and speed 

and long muscles, like a horse’s 
haunches. She leaves the Rebbe in bed
late. She carries a Turkish coffee in his
silver cup. There’s a light above her
bed, a brass chandelier, and her
hair spills into a hundred braids
like a bride’s. Her body belongs
only to herself.

The mirrors in the house catch
sparks of sun, silver challah cutters.
The men came to the window today
with tallit and siddurs in their bags,
like the rings of herring they carry home.
We must give the way the ocean gives.
The men bow to the ocean and to its
silver coins. What light is in them,
their voices say. What light is in them.


===============


The Tongue Is at Home in Its Mistake
Allen Grossman

Morning, then, is
the only fable left us to weave between our ears. 
It may be that there is
no morning. Nevertheless, daybreak, our
blind, reflective eye. If the mirror would warm us. 
Toward us steps
the sun. Its image moves closer.

It moves as a fish swims
toward the struggling swimmer.   
If it should
swim very close:
And if the swimmer should happen to see

that strange other who swam toward him,
there would be a death of two
humans, two bears, two seals, two creatures.
At this moment, the moment of swimming 
toward, in the mind,
and before the membrane is broken, 
an arm
around the other arm, that is, 
is a space of snot of knowing
something separate,

thus a space of love. 
Maybe that is
the way morning slides into a body. 
In that case, now 
there are two and more
of us in the world. The effort
to survive, as a body, produces us.

The effort to hear everything possible
is the ability to say no.  
Our language
is all
affection of an older
stranger. We are now.

Allen Grossman: http://www.calstatela.edu/english/ag/


===============


Memphis
James Wright

From now on I’ll see the back of your head. 
It must be black, Memphis night,
I’ll see headlights facing the other way,
The automobile approaching will slow down, turn to me.
But I won’t see you anymore.

Because you’re not all there, not all anywhere. 
Because you have your problems, your sorrows
Which nobody else can help.
Sometimes you feel like an immigrant even in your own life.

I know how it is, Memphis, because I’m an immigrant, too. 
I have my own problems, my own dumb childhood
Which nobody else can ever fix.
But in me somewhere there’s a child, Memphis,
Whose heart is so true that he sees you
As you really are, so pure and shining
That he likes to cry.


===============


From “Those Winter Sundays”  Robert Hayden

And what did I know, what did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?


===============


To a Friend Estranged from Me
Emily Dickinson

Not less because in purple I
Ride majestically to thee,
Shall I at last be overcome—
I too—I too—

Ride verily to thee!

The whole creation, less by pain
Than pleasure, strokes my horses down;
Glad nature, like a zealous boy,
Lets loose her lover-foam and sings,
A victory song!

I shall arrive! give oats!—I shall
Arrive and say, ‘What thou hast done—
What thou hast suffered—is forgiven—
Joy, joy! and what thou now

Art may be different.’

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The Hot Mammoth

By Steven Rowley


The Hot Mammoth
is a novelization of the Mammoth Cave
in Bowling Green, KY.

"The Hot Mammoth is a good read. It combines a quality of suspense with superb character development, strong description, and some good historical backstory."
--Reviewer on Amazon.com

"Steven Rowley pens a first-class novel that is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Rowley has a powerful, creative imagination and has gone to great lengths to get all of his facts correct concerning the fascinating history of the Mammoth Cave in Bowling Green, Kentucky."
--Betty Arvin, Bowling Green Daily News

"Steven Rowley is a breath of fresh air in the world of literature. His masterful writing combines with his beautiful prose to make the reader feel as if they are a part of the story. This book and several others by Rowley are the best books I have read in recent years."
--Candace Klingbeil, reviewer on Amazon.com

For more information or to order, see: http://StevenRowleyAuthor.com

Also by Steven Rowley:

Gone Rampant
A great and horrible story of Satan, Texas, and Bigfoot
In the border town of Satan, Texas, Mavis Whitlock leaves the diner she’s run since her husband died. She’s crossing the highway and doesn’t even know it, but it’s the last time she’ll be seen alive. A few
===============


To sleep
T.R. Hummer

With you I can feel peace come near,
I can get close to sleep, to
rest, to a sense of being without fear
that must be how it is to be
the dead. My spirit rests in you,
my book, like a hand in a
glove. When I’m away
I hear your siren call, your
dead stillness that comforts
a sort of lightening
in the soul, a relaxation
of the heart that the
tears give but not so
much. Alone I open the book
to find you and lose
myself inside your silence.
I could never get lost with
you, open a page and there I am
looking for myself in your
black sense of grief and death.

When the sun begins to rise,
when I can still hear the birds
in the garden. Yes, I can be found
in the first light, even
on a cloudy day, reflected back
in your simplicity and grace
I’m not afraid to look in the book
to see myself sleeping.


===============


Morgan Le Fay
Gwyneth Lewis

In Cornwall, I meet a Morgan  
She is around about my age  
She offers something and sits down beside me  
Then moves on to be with her friends

This offer is warm and generous but not without conditions  
Her green eyes turn to shards of ice  
They fear the spaces in between  
The ocean between islands

Morgan     as magic echoes magic  
Morgan     a myth shadows a myth  
Morgan     I am two women  
At once too proud to stay


===============


The Mind-Reader
Simon Armitage

Surely a truly clairvoyant
should be able to read what’s
written behind the eyes?

From the way he conducts himself
(opening and closing his hands
the way a book opens and closes)

I see that he is concerned
with things which go on inside
other people’s clothes.

I see that he is most concerned
with what is really underneath:
he finds an intimate laugh

very erotic, a nervous touch
of the hand to the cheek,
foot-shuffling, sudden blushing.

He is amazed by thoughts,
not why we think them, but
why we let them show.

He is busy reading the depth
and not the person, moving off
into an area of his own,

reckless and distant, staying
a step or two behind.
And I am drawn to

the growing suspicion
that he might read my mind,
that he might read out aloud

everything that is passing
through me now, to be said.


===============


A Subaltern's Love-song
Wilfred Owen

Down the close darkening lanes they sang their way
To the sullen river,
And crossed the struggle of the wave, their faces
Turned to another day.

All the waves like Reals, the murmuring roar
Of thousands of rupees,
To him the dull boom of the Pageant of Commerce
In Bombay Harbour.

All the wandering voices and the clang
Of changing Moorsish bells,
And all the dying day took little notice
Of his inconspicuous selves.

They walked down to a pathetic strand
Beside a dry Martini,
And on to the first tee of the Major's private
Nine-hole links to die.

I was much farther out than you thought
And not waving, but drowning.


===============


Bread and Music
Nikki Giovanni

When the power of love
overcomes the love
of power the world will know peace.
(Angelou)

Dear God,
This is what I have decided.
For too many years I have given too
much to the cause.
The hope of a better day,
the bright light that
would lead us to that
better way.

We marched and protested
against the mind’s corruption
and watched as the
plan was reduced to
the plans of the power-hungry
who, to feed their
own fame and glory,
would douse the light
and water down
the reason for the march
and for the peaceful protest.

I can no longer march in peace
without a gun to fight
against the injustices,
because a gun is what it’s
all about anyway.
So forgive me, God,
I pray for another way.

For I have seen the loss
of life and living
in the cause of justice
in the face of hunger.
Dear God,
I just want
a loaf of bread
and I need
my right to sing,
for the right to sing
is the bread of my music,
so give me
my bread
and let me
sing.

For we are the children
of the music
and the children
of the power
and the children
of the grace
so please, God
just this one
time
let me have
my bread
and my
music.

FOR
Yannis Ritsos


===============


Of Being Alone
Mary Oliver

Of all the things that ever were
I think that I am most afraid of being alone.
I think that a shining dragon on a plain
is the most beautiful and sacred thing
but I would much rather be given 
one thread from the shirt of a friend
than all the shining dragons in the world.


===============


Full Summer
Jane Kenyon

Even after the last robin disappears,
some days the cicadas still drive us back inside.
We decide to stay in, bake bread, listen
to the racket in the pin oak trees.
My husband fills the coffee maker.
It’s that rich, rotten, foxy smell, he says,
that makes it seem like a day in August
instead of July.

I think I will remember
the way we are living this summer.
He is in his office for most of the day,
I am here writing about it.
Suddenly it’s afternoon. He makes lunch—
grilled cheese, he calls it, toasted cheese,
I say. It seems like a year
since we brought in the milk,
carried the heavy brown paper bags
across the yard.

The mercury hit ninety-five yesterday;
today it is less humid. In the back,
where the dog waits, white feathers of dandelions
drift across the grass like seeds.
My husband scratches his ankle
and says that he can remember,
as a boy, lying in the tall grass
and counting the clouds that were white enough
to take root in his mind


===============


Magpies in December
Ted Kooser

When the first frost turns
the narrow blade-like leaves
of white clover limp and brown,
the red-winged blackbirds
fly off to some other place
and the black fenceposts
turn white again for a while,
I remember how quiet it was
that day you and I drove
the back roads of Hamilton
County, looking for farm stands,
and how afterward, when we
finally came to one, you said
it was your favorite moment.


===============


The Theory
Gregory Orr

We are the verbs of light and dark, we say,
green and yellow, red and purple, breaking
and gathering the tables and chairs, the stars, 
and we are saying this while we feel the feelers
of the brains; and when we wonder
if we are a mere configuration of nothingness, 
or if the hologram, though finite, 
encloses something that could be infinite, 
like the cell and the whale, like the hidden
that reveals—no promise—only itself—
in the split vision of the sea anemone, 
a kind of glory, a free and apart-from-them 
standing forever, every moment, in the essential.

To Elizabeth, Who Married Richard II
Philip Larkin

How long does it take to change? When was love 
grown this stale, this thin, these shades of anger?
The words we said did not admit of brakes,
and all the stamps of all the post offices
do not stick stamps on spoiled bad debts for life.
How long does it take to change? When did you know
it would be this unlike your novels, where the man
keeps calling, but keeps on going? They are all
the happy marriages. How did it come about
that in my life alone there is no one,
no one to come about? The scrubbed empty stage
yawns, and its gaping curtains settle. I hear
an usher’s footsteps in the empty stalls.

Neruda
Harold Pinter

He himself picked up the stone.
    He himself threw it. He himself was looking.
    He himself grew tired of looking. He himself put down the stone.
    He himself stopped throwing.
He himself stayed at the window. He himself touched the child’s head.
He himself was there. He himself saw it all.

He himself. He himself. He himself.

They did this to him. He did not know it.
He did not want it. He did not want it. He did not want it.
He did not want it.

They did it to him. He did not know.

That is my vision of what happened.

(...)

I shall look upon him all my life,
walking there before the lights, and the lights
by
===============


The God-Perplexed
Imtiaz Dharker

A human for a god, I am lost; all are
On equal footing with me. What will it be
When I meet someone who has been as long as
I am short in breathing this of earth, this
Half-ripe apple, this slice of heaven? 


===============


Glückliche Fahrt

_(text by Stefan George, music by Richard Strauss; title is: “Let Joy Be Unconfined”)

Should happy star be wanting
From the glittering host above us,
We have a mind to ride
To the land in which there are no problems.
On to danger boldly,
Through perils uncertain
On to courage and the adventures
In the end there will be rest
And we shall be lulled
By the promise of tranquillity

Let our lives our own creation be
Where joy is without ties
And that very thing, the world
Is able to bring us infinite mercy
For our work and pleasure we are all the same
Here on this round bubbling water ball


===============


A Fox’s Winter Tales
Olena Kalytiak Davis

If your child was a fox, I’d be the finger
that snapped her to attention
and said, rise, shod in snow
as if she were a tree, her body bark
rough as any sapling’s. All the bark
she’ll need to blow out fire,
to build on her new voice. And I’d tell her
this: no matter how snug the hide of her bedspread,
no matter how thick the pallet, no matter
how warm the saliva-wet
burrow of the earth,
something shifts.
A footfall changes the turning world
like a dog’s toothmarks
turn a newspaper page.

Or your child could
be a swan with a bone and
a black ink line on the neck.
Hear how close this eggshell is to a cygnet’s
squeak. Be mindful of how it will die
in another after it: all burned black
down to a clot of muddy feathers
with only a sprig of a leg left
to write her name.

Or your child
could be a pen
pointed at a paper napkin.
She’ll trace the light shining through
the broken greenhouse of winter,
pointing to the clouds of her lamp
among the rifts.

Or she could
become the horizon,
in the wake of the swans
hulking out of sight.
The brown ice of her morning bath
a marsh to give her space to swim.


===============


In Hollywood, a Dreamer Dies
Philip Levine

What did you think?
What were you going to do,
live forever? There’s
a knife from Albuquerque
that says you won’t,
a wrinkled picture of
someone’s mother,
a fur stole no one
wanted, a filet of
fuck-me shoes. Where
are you now? I can’t
find you. I’ve tried
to locate you. I know
where you used to work.
Do you still admire
Lillian Hellman, hate
the music of Elmer
Bernstein? If not,
where did you go
that I can’t find you?
I know you would
answer me. Now you
never will. You had
your black moments
but you believed in
the theater. You loved
the yellow brick road
in The Wizard of Oz.
You belonged to
the Actors’ Lab.
It was your foot
lighting a way
to the stars. Where are
you, Toto? You saw
out from under Dorothy’s
rumpled blue gingham,
but nothing but canvas
below a paint-smattered
floor was there. Nothing
but an actor getting
out of breath, an old
man turning into
an obituary. Nothing
you could do. You
saw out, now let
the yellow brick
road take you where
it will. Leave nothing
you ever wanted
behind in a dressing
room littered with
the shabby daydreams
of bit players, extras,
flunkeys. Go out,
go out in a blaze
of glory. Strike
your gong and trumpet
those yellow-brick
notes you used
to play. And carry
with you the ruby
slippers that sparkled
in the spotlight,
carry the sparkle
of the notes you
played with your gong,
carry the light that
blazed from your
own yellow eyes.


===============


To You
Mark Strand

You are the roots and leaves of everything.
You are the universe of the astronomer
Who is afraid of the darkness and the silence
Between the stars. You are the night.

You are a bricklayer’s wife looking out a window
Waiting for her husband to come home
After his day of laying bricks. You are the still
Water in the well the bricklayer drank from.

You are the water in the glass beside the bed
The night sky over the eaves of the roof
At dawn. You are the moon on its back
In its bed of light. You are the still

Small voices singing over the ground
Where all the flowers die each winter.
You are the trees stilling the winds, quiet
As a clock. You are the flowers

Dying in their perfume. You are a leaf
That stirs in the wind and falls to the ground,
A morning star, and you are nothing,
Which means you are everything.


===============


The Object of Art
A.R. Ammons

This clay nose is not a bad likeness. It was
hard work making it, snub
in shape, flexible
and durable.

After almost two months, with better
materials, some
efficiency, some
precision, I could
make a still
better one, whiter, smoother,
more lifelike and still, at least, than this
life-sized, sweaty
dingus sticking from my face.

Dingus is the wrong
word.
Dingus is slang for a fellow's penis. I don't
feel like a penis.
I feel snub
and dingle-nosed, oafish and delicate, stupid and
evasive. I
look in
mirrors, foreshortening this way and that way
and cannot see
an edge
that would indicate the whereabouts of that thing
that should be
clearly me.

Surely the nose is the most
perplexing piece.
There is so much of
it—nearly a third of the front of a man's face, taking the
slightest change
of position
with apparent independence, sticking out of the
head, subject to every weather change, to icicles, sunstroke.
It is easy
to make a clay ear.
I might show off making an ear, illustrating the part
of the forming process that is most skillful, opening the model,
a photograph of an ear, from the side, placing,
cutting, trimming, curling a clay rim, working in the conch
and the lop, attaching the lobe, smoothing, closing,
glossing, firing, glazing, polishing, and finally selling
at a moderate
price. That isn't
so bad. And a nose, though it appears
to be irregular and erratic, is not too difficult
either, making the nostril wings light and arched
at the same
time the
balls are heavy and well-rounded and proportionate
to the whole, the shape knifelike, handsome, and
sensitive, the nostril openings perfect, curving
away from the mouth slightly, then flattening,
dwindling, to the nostrils, themselves
small,
oval openings to
the caverns inside.

I don't understand a nose. I don
===============


The Motive for Metaphor
Maxine Kumin

The boredom of waiting for another word to catch like fishing fly;
the thrift of making something last out of nothing;
the fear of dishonoring a parent, a friend, a son, a lover;
the sting of failure before parents, friends, children, lovers;
the astonishing balancing of a shovel on a heavy shoulder,
feet brushing by other pedestrians like fire
and the letters that you can’t quite decipher through dirty glass.

Here is the lake, the old man, the sky, the leaf, the child,
the unborn; to fix them in a single ineradicable image:
to make them into a rod for your own back.

Once into each life a mediator must fall like loss itself:
your child, your parent, like a dark body in the woods;
more often the stubborn dirt giving up its dead.

If you don’t love this life, they will say, you can’t have been properly inducted;
and if you do, they’ll say, your reason’s in your loins.

But the real reasons move in deeper strata
where there are no names—only needs.

Then move your failures out of reach, grow calm and old and philosophical
and keep the choke-hold firm on the throat of your own envy.

Just to hold it all in focus like an original:
to live, to die, to name what you want to last.

Mortal paradise is perfect but it’s only made of stone.


===============


Daybreak
Mary Oliver

The sun was rising,
also rising were six blue-grey birds,
black-winged,
with yellow beaks
and bold, calm eyes;
they were opening their wings
and extending their power;
rising too, in yellow-white waves,
was a
daring, reckless sweetness.

And who knows where
in those first seconds
we came together,
or why it was
that everything blurred
as with aching pleasure?
Oh, it was a whirlwind of mercy,
for without mercy
that beautiful clarity
could never have taken wing.


===============


Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World
William Butler Yeats

The gaze o’er the valleys
Proclaims the summit
O’ the cloudy story.

The hawk on the craggy
Billow did clamber
O’er waters so solemn.

Erin! my sorrow!
Yet lovely thy mountains
With mist, like a shroud, covering.

Errigal and Slieve-na-mon
Thy woods be the branches
Of Paradise, must be growing.

Those wars be the rages
Of demon delivered
In the dove-eyed cherub.

Thy mystics the devotion
Of spirits immortal
Out of a great sighing,

Yet lovely thy mountains
Like a grand processional,
Full of penance and prayer.

Then think of, Erin! of our home!
Of our friends, of our exile,
How disunion has dealt thy fair name,

In the pure rich morning
Reproaching the distant
Shores and the city;

Thy music but of a harp of all time
That has never a note to spare,
That can sing all our sorrow,

Is hiding a thought in the heart of a rose.
We can think of thee then
That thou art with those that we love,

But this is not all,
These mountains are holy,
And some are perishing

Amid the eternal snows
That are neither slate nor marble
Nor the glistening water;

A prayer unto thee, Erin, a prayer!
A wolf-note of woe
That can only find blessing

In thy wood-notes wild of the running deer,
The great tears of birds,
That cannot be comforted

But by remembering that holy Church
Thou mak’st Thy tender visible,
And that God, though he seem to sleep in thy noise,

O’er all the world doth secretly prelude,
And the wakened nations
Feel that glory began

And pray unto Him, as in His house,
The abject of most abject
An afflicted motley;

And thy great heart, even now at the birth,
Like a bittern’s boom
From the ragged moors,

O’er the sea of Saint George it doth
===============


And One for My Dame
Stephen Dunn

Sometimes I look at her over my cup
of coffee and in this instant know
more than I will ever have the courage
to tell her. This is love,
the flame on the pyre, the dove in the ark,
the apple tree that swings us in its
shade. I know it in a wink,

the distance between eyelashes, the soup
of her vowels, the grammar of her hair.
And in the brief interval I seem to know,
as if remembering, all that has passed,
all that will pass between us, the countless
wrinkles and scars of affection,

that way her face opens and closes
like a crabapple just off the branch. I see
how in my memory her face has changed,
the skin of it slackening but still
indelibly printed, yet still she hasn’t aged
or become less a possession. I’m sure

even her children see only half of her face
and her most ordinary gestures conceal
for them the wishbone I see, the bird
in its cage of bone, that unabashed
lover’s bone I hear singing when she speaks,
its consonants and vowels

added up and totaled in that wordless place
where meaning folds into itself, where nothing
is forgotten and what I know is open
like a wound, or like that evening
when, at her window, she became
my entire surroundings.


===============


Constantly risking absurdity
CP Cavafy

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other end
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be

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===============


What the body tells the mind
Naomi Shihab Nye

“Dear Fathers & Mothers, we have made our bodies the luckiest fields in the world. They are where we laugh & soar & eat the sweet smells of a child’s painless hunger & kick back on a sunny day while you press us against you in a human raft & say your prayers aloud & sink into good food with a friend & fall in love over & over & over & over again. You have made us luckiest fields in the world. Remember the rawness of love. We do. We hold these parts of you deep inside us in the warm grass. Fathers & Mothers, now that we are grown, we offer our bodies to you again, for your safekeeping. These are the places where memory sleeps like a fever. To keep the tender flame is all we want to do now. This is what the body tells the mind.”


===============


So many have forgotten
Janet Winters

So many have forgotten the quiet death that enters and
Empties us while still in the body we are in the rest of the
Night.
So many have forgotten how the final parting could
Come like the stars spinning in a huge circling silence.
The last heart couldn’t beat her from here even if it tried.
Even the cars stop. Even the lights extinguish. Even the
Wind recedes. Even the rain leaves the air and holds the
Sky down like a petal.
Even the clock that moves the hours of the longest night
Stops, and we can always remember the dark that falls.


===============


Spring
Olena Kalytiak Davis

Until the ground greened
the town went mad
with yellow flowers.
Even the horses leaned
against blue snowbanks
couldn’t look away.

Even the roosters came
to the window to cry.

Even the stones
remembered to dream.

Even the cracks
slid into flowering

ears of corn.

Even the cobwebs
collected birdsong.

Now the days are long
as a highway
leading somewhere

no one will name.

Why are you still up at night?

The tap runs clear.

Why are you on your knees?

Her eyes are closed.

Now the birds forget
to turn the bird table
over each night.

Now the rain is rising
like mercury.

Why are you still trembling?

Her mouth is open.

The air is open,
the roof shingled
with a shattered April.

The cardinals fly back
to watch you

bring the doll
back inside.

Its dress is torn.

It hasn’t learned
to blow out the candles.

Why are you still crying?

Go feed the cats.


===============


The Forms of Love
Cathy Park Hong

I love what you would whisper in your sleep,
your soft muzzle of a word against my breast.
I love it just as you slipped off your silks
like a dress and held me close like bare cupped hands
and sang the first chords of a lovesong
when we met each other, just as you sang.
We stood before each other, in front of the mirror,
barely brushing, like two setae hair,
in front of the frame, watching it
grow it slow like our slow skin, how our skin
mutated in vermillion, crimson, and rose,
how slowly the words, in formal wearing blacks,
grow big in our name. That’s what I love.
That’s what I want to hear. That’s what you sang,
your soft muzzle of a word against my breast.
I love how you cupped like a dutch oven
my face between your hands and held.


===============


Meeting and Passing
Lola Ridge

He came with an oil-can   
And ran with his dog on the rail;
I hailed from my henhouse door   
With the breakfast egg in my hand.
We looked, and passed on,
And I went a slower way   
Over the silver and the gray   
Of the old farm-road.

On the white mound by the bayonet willow
I turned to look back   
At the stooped, brown figure walking toward me:
He lifted his arm   
And saluted with a smile that flitted and went,
But the morning was golden.

The summer was golden.
And among the roses and lilies   
He turned with his dog and went;
And it was many and many a year
When he came for the last time that day.


===============


An Experiment in Abstraction
Julie Bruck

Three times, I have approached The Manicure Girls
with their broken nails, the Paintbrushes staring
at their feet and the Twins who will fight their shadow.
These are the lessons, and I have learned that
today is as flawed as yesterday.
The night,
like minefields
filling their dark breasts
with the throb of creatures
whose claws
will not let go
even as our feet sink
into these lessons.
Tell me how death
breathes under our skin.


===============


Mujer
Rubén Darío

El cielo azul se va poniendo rojo:
  Mujer, ven, salgamos al alborear.
La noche se muere y se nos va huyendo
  El sueño y los silencios que estorbaban.
El silencio flota
  como un follaje de color de laguna;
Pero el canto del grillo
  empieza ya de plata la mañana.

Despierta, que el alba es temprana.
  El cielo azul se va poniendo rojo.

La gota de rocío
  se adivina por el envés de las hojas.
Luz limpia en mi alma
  verdes esperanzas agostadas
Cuando quebró de pronto
  como vidriera en que una perdiz choca.

Vidrieras del alma
  van crujiendo en el interior del pecho.
Despierta, que el alba es temprana.
  El cielo azul se va poniendo rojo.

¡Cuánto he deseado este amor!
  ¡Cuánto, y en vano! ¡La de noches locas,
Sueños sin dormir y ansias y zozobras
  por el sonrojo de unas mejillas rosas!
¡Y yo que me creía
  caballero andante sin ímpetu
Para las hazañas...
  cuando me falta voluntad para...!

Despierta, que el alba es temprana.
  El cielo azul se va poniendo rojo.

Te contaré historias de las Flores,
  de las estrellas, los ídolos raros;
Los monstruos del mar, el arco iris
  y los palacios de la luna llena.
Te contaré los mares
  de Arabia y los jardines de Damasco.
El ruiseñor te dirá
  sus penas y tus amores leyendas.

Despierta, que el alba es temprana.
  El cielo azul se va poniendo rojo.

No, no quiero tus
===============


The End
Sir Walter Raleigh

Even such is Time, that takes in trust 
Our youth, our joys, and all we have, 
And pays us but with age and dust, 
Who in the dark and silent grave 
When we have wandered all our ways 
Shuts up the story of our days.

And from which earth and grave and dust
The Lord shall raise me up I trust. 

----

Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad

We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; 
We were also cut off from one another. 
Each strove to fathom the other’s inner thought, 
And we only looked on while aware of some obstacle.

The Negro’s heart kept beating, regular and vast, 
As the sound of a big drum throbbing far off. 
The attempt at communication was a failure, 
But the strive for understanding was there. 

I looked at the girl’s face. It was pensive and sad 
With the obscure sadness of vegetable things, 
For, though possessed of will, they do not know why they live, 
And though possessed of a sense of light they cannot see.

It was like a beautiful gloss on a grand piece of furniture, 
Like a natural mistress' hand upon the polished panel. 
It was there as if for ornament, passive and receptive. 
This was its sole significance.

----

The Bottle of Potions
Khalil Gibran

I gave you my deepest wound when you asked for my dearest gift.

I gave you my open eyes for you to see the bottom of my soul.

I gave you my heart when you asked for my sight.

And I gave you my will for you to erect the temple of my heart.

I kept only my thoughts and the words with which to make you the mirror of my truth.

----

The Absence of the Obvious
Jack Gilbert

The long nightmare of history 
is that no one has enough power 
to stop the emotional murderers. 
The poets have told us for centuries 
that the most desirable power is the greatest 
love. But they never describe how 
some minds are able to be permanently sated.

I see history’s pattern 
with painful,
===============


The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

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===============


#79
Sam Hamill

Small salmon,
I eat you, therefore
I am hungry.

Because I
do not eat you
I am frightened.

I will not
eat your young
because they will
be frightened.

The bear has eaten
her young, your
young are bright-eyed
and flee from my

dog. I hold him
leashless in
the river. We face
each other, within

the line. You
are not
them, my dream of
salmon in your young—

your young are them—
and in between
I long to cross. I
untie you and you

go. My dog
follows the bear.


===============


Living on the Road with Jason and Dylan
Donald Hall

We bought a new refrigerator at Sears. 
It had to be trucked in, to Laconia, New Hampshire, 
where Jason and I lived with our three dogs. 
We helped two men in olive uniforms 
drag the fridge up the outside wooden stairway. 
I showed the men where we wanted it to stand. 
I pointed to the black plastic circle. 
This was the plug, I said. I always refer to plugs 
as the plug, to voltage as voltage, to watts as