We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass, something massive, irrational, and so powerful even the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it. You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains have no word for ocean, but if you live here you begin to believe they know everything. They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine, a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls slowly between the pines and the wind dies to less than a whisper and you can barely catch your breath because you're thrilled and terrified. You have to remember this isn't your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside and thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.
Copyright © 2009 by Philip Levine. Reprinted from News of the World with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
The trees went up the hill And over it. Then the dry grasses of the pasture were Only a kind of blonde light Settling everywhere And framing the randomly strewn Outcropping of gray stone That anchored them to soil. Who were they? One in the picture, & one not, & both Scotch-Irish drifters, With nothing in common but a perfect contempt for a past; Ancestors of stumps & fallen trees & . . . . One sits on a sorrel mare, Idly tossing small stones at the rump of a steer That goes on grazing at tough rosettes of pasture grass & switching its tail In what is not yet irritation. What I like, what I Have always liked, is the way he tosses each small Stone without thinking, without A thought for anything, not aiming at all, The easy, arcing forearm nonchalance Like someone fly casting, For this is what He wanted: To be among the stones, the grasses, Savoring a stony self That reminded him of no one else, And on land where that poacher, Law, Had not yet stolen through his fences, The horse beneath him tensing Its withers lightly to keep The summer flies away, And the woman in the flower-print dress hemmed With stains A half mile off Is the authoress of no more than smoke rising, Her sole diary & only publication, From a distant chimney. They have perhaps a year or two Left of this Before history begins to edit them into Something without smoke or flies, something Beyond all recognition.
From The Widening Spell of the Leaves by Larry Levis, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Copyright © 1991 by the estate of Larry Levis. Reproduced by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved.
Widening Spell of the Leaves by Larry Levis. Price: $19.95 (cloth), $10.95 (paper). ISBN# 0-8229-3675-5 (cloth), 0-8229-5454-0 (paper).
The slivers run their course,
And the bad eye can now burn with accuracy.
The cough? What cough?
What stinging rubber band against your wrist?
The sneeze moves the leaves of the potted plant.
A dab of lotion solves the scaly hand.
The knuckle accepts the rap,
The knee goes only so far
And walking is so overrated.
Heal yourself, daughter. Kisses help,
Handholding, snow caught in your hair.
Daughter, lovely daughter, be with us.
Let the thing inside you pass without warning.
Don’t be like the cloud, thin and sailing away,
The dark birds like commas,
Then ellipsis in the far distance,
An uncompleted life.
Copyright © 2016 by Gary Soto. Used with permission of the author.
for Phil Levine, RIP
They are writing about you Phil—you know
good stuff—the prizes Detroit and that
poem where you said in past lives you
were a wild sun-crested fox being chased
by “ladies and gentlemen on horseback”—
you said you would wake up with the poem
ready that it slipped untangled from a dream
all you had to do was sit up and write
the stage was a poem too—even though
most of us were too prepared you
preferred to joke before we went on
before the poetry light hit us on the face
it did not matter to you—you just carved
chiseled punctured rotated jitterbugged
and whirred past a distant gate
(2-14-2015)
Copyright © 2015 by Juan Felipe Herrera. Used with permission of City Lights Books.
It was there, in that little town On top of the mountain, they walked, Francesco and Chiara, That's who they were, that's what They told themselves—a joke, their joke About two saints, failed lovers held apart From the world of flesh, Francis and Clare, Out walking the old city, two saints, Sainted ones, holy, held close to the life... Poverty, the pure life, the one Life for Franziskus and Klara, Stalwarts given To the joys of God in heaven And on earth, Mother, praising Brother Sun And sister Moon; twin saints, unified In their beauty as one, Francisco and Clara, A beauty said of God's will and word, bestowed And polished by poverty, François With Claire, the chosen poverty, the true Poverty that would not be their lives... And they took their favorite names, Clare and Francesco, Walking the streets of stone the true saints Walked, watching as the larks swirled Above the serene towers, the larks Francesco once described as the color Of goodness, that is, of the earth, of the dead... Larks who'd not seek for themselves any extravagant Plumage, humble and simple, God's birds Twirling and twisting up the pillowing air... And Francesco said to Clare, Oh little plant I love, My eyes are almost blind with Brother Sun...tell me, Who hides inside God's time...? And Clare, rock of all Poor Clares, stood In the warm piazza overlooking the valley, weary, Her shoulder bag sagging from the weight Of her maps and books, and said across the rain-slick Asphalt of the parking lot, to the poor bird climbing The wheel of sky it always had loved best, Dear lark, dear saint, all my kisses on your nest!
From Study for the World's Body, published by HarperCollins, 1994. Copyright © 1991 by David St. John. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
There is this ringing hum this bullet-borne language ringing shell-fall and static this late-night ringing of threadwork and carpet ringing hiss and steam this wing-beat of rotors and tanks broken bodies ringing in steel humming these voices of dust these years ringing rifles in Babylon rifles in Sumer ringing these children their gravestones and candy their limbs gone missing their static-borne television their ringing this eardrum this rifled symphonic this ringing of midnight in gunpowder and oil this brake pad gone useless this muzzle-flash singing this threading of bullets in muscle and bone this ringing hum this ringing hum this ringing
From Phantom Noise by Brian Turner. Copyright © 2010 by Brian Turner. Used by permission of Alice James Books.
Lost softness softly makes a trap for us.
—Gwendolyn Brooks
Michael’s skin splinters below the water’s line, his navel and all murky and lost
like a city from my old life, or that scarf I’d loved, the softness
with which we sink into what disappears, and the country of his groin and knees so softly
already blackened. His sister snores below my hands. Her mouth makes
tadpoles. Her breath wet from chemotherapy, I’ve massaged her a-
sleep. Her shoulders swell their small tides. The air burns leaves. I want to want to trap
her sighs, dividing the stillness, in glass, to a Mason jar: breath like smoke against a window—: for
this man halved by water. But we sit in sun and grit, watch the waves which lose us.
From For Want of Water (Beacon Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Sasha Pimentel. Used with permission from Beacon Press.
I am a seed
Of the tree of knowledge.
I arrived here
In mother’s steel womb—
A snug, dark pod—
With my hundred siblings.
On impact, her womb opened
And we scattered hundreds of yards.
I am a blue ridged-winged ball,
Created to appeal
To any child’s senses
Of beauty and curiosity.
When a child finds me,
Buried among roots of berries
Or wild flowers,
And cradles me
In her warm hands,
My heart melts.
Copyright © 2017 by Soul Vang. Used with permission of the author.
Never step back Never a last
Scent of plumeria
When my parents left
You knew it was for good
It’s a herd of horses never
To reclaim their steppes
You became a moth hanging
Down from the sun
Old river Calling to my mother
Kept spilling out of her lungs
Ridgeline vista closed
Into the locket of their gaze
It’s the Siberian crane
Forbidden to fly back after winter
You marbled my father’s face
Floated him as stone over the sea
Further Every minute
Emptying his child years to the land
You crawled back in your bomb
It’s when the banyan must leave
Relearn to cathedral its roots
From Afterland, published by Graywolf Press. Copyright © 2017 Mai Der Vang. Used with permission of Graywolf Press.
The bright-faced children have gone home, trailing the sun to supper. Tonight, these others have come, almost sweetly shy, starched for their monthly party. Nurse herds them into metal chairs. I've come to sing, Nurse tells them, and they fold their hands --these lately mad who failed behind a door or slipped under in a jammed street, whose eyes blossomed like silver fists in mirrors, in plate-glass windows. Nurse is waiting for me. So I sing for them, for the boy in the front row, groping the stiff corners of his pockets; for the ugly one in pink anklets --her legs have never felt a razor, though her wrist has; for him whose fingers are eaten by ants; for her whose face sags like a torn sack. They do not like my songs, but infinitely polite, they turn their smiles up into the dark as if a smile should fall softly, obliquely, like rain. "Home on the Range," Nurse calls out, her sure fingers on the pulse of America. I start in faltering voice, half-forgetting those dead words sung at campfires in the past. One joins, and then another: Home, home on the range. . . Where the deer. . . And the skies are. . . The voices crack and lurch, we are singing--the boy, the ugly one-- singing like crows in the empty prairie of a children's playground where if there are distances that shine they shine like the eyes of pain.
From From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems by Peter Everwine. Copyright © 2004 by Peter Everwine. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved.