In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
From New and Collected Poems, published by Harcourt Brace, 1988. Copyright © 1969 by Richard Wilbur. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Sometimes I wish I were still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to Earth and we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish and old space suits with skeletons inside. On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness, and it is good, a way of letting life out of the box, uncapping the bottle to let the effervescence gush through the narrow, usually constricted neck. And now the crickets plug in their appliances in unison, and then the fireflies flash dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex someone is telling in the dark, though no one really hears. We gaze into the night as if remembering the bright unbroken planet we once came from, to which we will never be permitted to return. We are amazed how hurt we are. We would give anything for what we have.
© Copyright 1998 by Tony Hoagland. Used from Donkey Gospel with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org
In memory of Jay Kashiwamura
In Chicago, it is snowing softly and a man has just done his wash for the week. He steps into the twilight of early evening, carrying a wrinkled shopping bag full of neatly folded clothes, and, for a moment, enjoys the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper, flannellike against his gloveless hands. There's a Rembrandt glow on his face, a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek as a last flash of sunset blazes the storefronts and lit windows of the street. He is Asian, Thai or Vietnamese, and very skinny, dressed as one of the poor in rumpled suit pants and a plaid mackinaw, dingy and too large. He negotiates the slick of ice on the sidewalk by his car, opens the Fairlane's back door, leans to place the laundry in, and turns, for an instant, toward the flurry of footsteps and cries of pedestrians as a boy--that's all he was-- backs from the corner package store shooting a pistol, firing it, once, at the dumbfounded man who falls forward, grabbing at his chest. A few sounds escape from his mouth, a babbling no one understands as people surround him bewildered at his speech. The noises he makes are nothing to them. The boy has gone, lost in the light array of foot traffic dappling the snow with fresh prints. Tonight, I read about Descartes' grand courage to doubt everything except his own miraculous existence and I feel so distinct from the wounded man lying on the concrete I am ashamed Let the night sky cover him as he dies. Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven and take up his cold hands.
From The River of Heaven by Garrett Hongo, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1988 Garrett Hongo. Used with permission.
By the last few times we saw her it was clear That things were different. When you tried to help her Get out of the car or get from the car to the door Or across the apartment house hall to the elevator There was a new sense of heaviness Or of inertia in the body. It wasn't That she was less willing to be helped to walk But that the walking itself had become less willing. Maybe the stupid demogorgon blind Recalcitrance of body, resentful of the laws Of mind and spirit, was getting its own back now, Or maybe a new and subtle, alien, Intelligence of body was obedient now To other laws: "Weight is the measure of The force with which a body is drawn downward To the center of the earth"; "Inertia is The tendency of a body to resist Proceeding to its fate in any way Other than that determined for itself." That evening, at the Bromells' apartment, after She had been carried up through the rational structure By articulate stages, floor after flashing floor, And after we helped her get across the hall, And get across the room to a chair, somehow We got her seated in a chair that was placed A little too far away from the nearest table, At the edge of the abyss, and there she sat, Exposed, her body the object of our attention-- The heaviness of it, the helpless graceless leg, The thick stocking, the leg brace, the medical shoe. At work between herself and us there was A new principle of social awkwardness And skillfulness required of each of us. Our tones of voice in this easy conversation Were instruments of marvelous finesse, Measuring and maintaining with exactitude "The fact or condition of the difference There was between us, both in space and time." Her smiling made her look as if she had Just then tasted something delicious, the charm Her courtesy attributed to her friends. This decent elegant fellow human being Was seated in virtue, character, disability, Behind her the order of the ranged bookshelves, The windows monitored by Venetian blinds-- "These can be raised or lowered; numerous slats, Horizontally arranged, and parallel, Which can be tilted so as to admit Precisely the desired light or air." We were all her friends, Maggie, and Bill, and Anne, And I, and the nice Boston Brahmin elderly man Named Duncan, utterly friendly and benign. And of course it wasn't whether or not the world Was benign but whether it looked at her too much. She wasn't "painfully shy" but just the same I wouldn't be surprised if there had been Painfulness in her shyness earlier on, Say at dancing school. Like others, though, she had Survived her childhood somehow. Nor do I mean She was unhappy. Maybe more or less so Before her marriage. One had the sense of trips Arranged, committees, concerts, baffled courage Living it through, giving it order and style. And one had the sense of the late marriage as of Two bafflements inventing the sense they made Together. The marriage seemed, to the outside world, And probably was, radiant and triumphant, And I think that one could almost certainly say That during the last, heroic, phase of things, After his death, and after the stroke, she had By force of character and careful management, Maintained a certain degree of happiness. The books there on the bookshelves told their stories, Line after line, all of them evenly spaced, And spaces between the words. You could fall through the spaces. In one of the books Dr. Johnson told the story: "In the scale of being, wherever it begins, Or ends, there are chasms infinitely deep; Infinite vacuities. . .For surely, Nothing can so disturb the passions, or Perplex the intellects of man so much, As the disruption of this union with Visible nature, separation from all That has delighted or engaged him, a change Not only of the place but of the manner Of his being, an entrance into a state Not simply which he knows not, but perhaps A state he has not faculties to know." The dinner was delicious, fresh greens, and reds, And yellows, produce of the season due, And fish from the nearby sea; and there were also Ashes to be eaten, and dirt to drink.
From Of No Country I Know by David Ferry, published by The University of Chicago Press. Copyright © 1999 by David Ferry. Reprinted by permission of David Ferry. All rights reserved.
Out for a deadbolt, light bulbs and two-by-fours, I find a flock of sparrows safe from hawks and weather under the roof of Lowe's amazing discount store. They skitter from the racks of stockpiled posts and hoses to a spill of winter birdseed on the concrete floor. How they know to forage here, I can't guess, but the automatic door is close enough, and we've had a week of storms. They are, after all, ubiquitous, though poor, their only song an irritating noise, and yet they soar to offer, amid hardware, rope and handyman brochures, some relief, as if a flurry of notes from Mozart swirled from seed to ceiling, entreating us to set aside our evening chores and take grace where we find it, saying it is possible, even in this month of flood, blackout and frustration, to float once more on sheer survival and the shadowy bliss we exist to explore.
From Messenger by R. T. Smith. Copyright © 2001 by R. T. Smith. Reproduced with permission of Louisiana State University Press. All rights reserved.
translated by Robert Bly
The snowfall is so silent,
so slow,
bit by bit, with delicacy
it settles down on the earth
and covers over the fields.
The silent snow comes down
white and weightless;
snowfall makes no noise,
falls as forgetting falls,
flake after flake.
It covers the fields gently
while frost attacks them
with its sudden flashes of white;
covers everything with its pure
and silent covering;
not one thing on the ground
anywhere escapes it.
And wherever it falls it stays,
content and gay,
for snow does not slip off
as rain does,
but it stays and sinks in.
The flakes are skyflowers,
pale lilies from the clouds,
that wither on earth.
They come down blossoming
but then so quickly
they are gone;
they bloom only on the peak,
above the mountains,
and make the earth feel heavier
when they die inside.
Snow, delicate snow,
that falls with such lightness
on the head,
on the feelings,
come and cover over the sadness
that lies always in my reason.
La nevada es silenciosa
La nevada es silenciosa,
cosa lenta;
poco a poco y con blandura
reposa sobre la tierra
y cobija a la llanura.
Posa la nieve callada
blanca y leve;
la nevada no hace ruido;
cae como cae el olvido,
copo a copo.
Abriga blanda a los campos
cuando el hielo los hostiga;
con sus lampos de blancura;
cubre a todo con su capa
pura, silenciosa;
no se le escapa en el suelo
cosa alguna.
Donde cae allí se queda
leda y leve,
pues la nieve no resbala
como resbala la lluvia,
sino queda y cala.
Flores del cielo los copos,
blancos lirios de las nubes,
que en el suelo se ajan,
bajan floridos,
pero quedan pronto
derretidos;
florecen sólo en la cumbre,
sobre las montañas,
pesadumbre de la tierra,
y en sus entrañas perecen.
Nieve, blanda nieve,
la que cae tan leve
sobre la cabeza,
sobre el corazón,
ven y abriga mi tristeza
la que descansa en razón.
From Roots and Wings: Poetry from Spain 1900-1975, translated by Robert Bly, edited by Hardie St. Martin, and published by Harper & Row. © 1976 by Hardie St. Martin. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.
And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.
Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.
Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.
I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.
But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.
Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.
By Pablo Neruda, translated and edited by Robert Bly, and published by Beacon Press in Neruda & Vallejo: Selected Poems. © 1993 by Robert Bly. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
And the just man trailed God’s shining agent, over a black mountain, in his giant track, while a restless voice kept harrying his woman: “It’s not too late, you can still look back at the red towers of your native Sodom, the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed, at the empty windows set in the tall house where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.” A single glance: a sudden dart of pain stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . . Her body flaked into transparent salt, and her swift legs rooted to the ground. Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern? Yet in my heart I never will deny her, who suffered death because she chose to turn.
From Poems of Akhmatova, by Anna Akhmatova and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Published by Little, Brown & Co. © 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Granted by permission of Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agency. All rights reserved.
Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.
Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.
But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.
In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.
I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.
Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.
To thrust all that life under your tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,
and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.
Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,
leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.
From The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton, published by Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright © 1981 by Linda Gray Sexton. Used with permission.
When I go away from you The world beats dead Like a slackened drum. I call out for you against the jutted stars And shout into the ridges of the wind. Streets coming fast, One after the other, Wedge you away from me, And the lamps of the city prick my eyes So that I can no longer see your face. Why should I leave you, To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?
This poem is in the public domain.
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
This poem is in the public domain.
They decide to exchange heads. Barbie squeezes the small opening under her chin over Ken's bulging neck socket. His wide jaw line jostles atop his girlfriend's body, loosely, like one of those novelty dogs destined to gaze from the back windows of cars. The two dolls chase each other around the orange Country Camper unsure what they'll do when they're within touching distance. Ken wants to feel Barbie's toes between his lips, take off one of her legs and force his whole arm inside her. With only the vaguest suggestion of genitals, all the alluring qualities they possess as fashion dolls, up until now, have done neither of them much good. But suddenly Barbie is excited looking at her own body under the weight of Ken's face. He is part circus freak, part thwarted hermaphrodite. And she is imagining she is somebody else—maybe somebody middle class and ordinary, maybe another teenage model being caught in a scandal. The night had begun with Barbie getting angry at finding Ken's blow up doll, folded and stuffed under the couch. He was defensive and ashamed, especially about not having the breath to inflate her. But after a round of pretend-tears, Barbie and Ken vowed to try to make their relationship work. With their good memories as sustaining as good food, they listened to late-night radio talk shows, one featuring Doctor Ruth. When all else fails, just hold each other, the small sex therapist crooned. Barbie and Ken, on cue, groped in the dark, their interchangeable skin glowing, the color of Band-Aids. Then, they let themselves go— Soon Barbie was begging Ken to try on her spandex miniskirt. She showed him how to pivot as though he was on a runway. Ken begged to tie Barbie onto his yellow surfboard and spin her on the kitchen table until she grew dizzy. Anything, anything, they both said to the other's requests, their mirrored desires bubbling from the most unlikely places.
From Kinky, Orchises Press, 1997. Reprinted with permission of Denise Duhamel.
for David Ignatow
Midnight. For the past three hours I've raked over Plato's Republic with my students, all of them John Jay cops, and now some of us have come to Rooney's to unwind. Boilermakers. Double shots and triples. Fitzgerald's still in his undercover clothes and giveaway white socks, and two lieutenants--Seluzzi in the sharkskin suit & D'Ambruzzo in the leather--have just invited me to catch their fancy (and illegal) digs somewhere up in Harlem, when this cop begins to tell his story: how he and his partner trailed this pusher for six weeks before they trapped him in a burnt-out tenement somewhere down in SoHo, one coming at him up the stairwell, the other up the fire escape and through a busted window. But by the time they've grabbed him he's standing over an open window and he's clean. The partner races down into the courtyard and begins going through the garbage until he finds what it is he's after: a white bag hanging from a junk mimosa like the Christmas gift it is, and which now he plants back on the suspect. Cross-examined by a lawyer who does his best to rattle them, he and his partner stick by their story, and the charges stick. Fitzgerald shrugs. Business as usual. But the cop goes on. Better to let the guy go free than under oath to have to lie like that. And suddenly you can hear the heavy suck of air before Seluzzi, who half an hour before was boasting about being on the take, staggers to his feet, outraged at what he's heard, and insists on taking the bastard downtown so they can book him. Which naturally brings to an end the discussion we've been having, and soon each of us is heading for an exit, embarrassed by the awkward light the cop has thrown on things. Which makes it clearer now to me why the State would offer someone like Socrates a shot of hemlock. And even clearer why Socrates would want to drink it.
From The Great Wheel, published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Paul Mariani. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.
From Bite Every Sorrow by Barbara Ras, published by Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Copyright © 1997 by Barbara Ras. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.
All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.
What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.
From The Dream Songs by John Berryman, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1959, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969 by John Berryman. Used with permission.
We moved into a house with 6 rooms: the Bedroom, the Map Room, the Vegas Room, Cities in the Flood Plains, the West, & the Room Which Contains All of Mexico. We honeymooned in the Vegas Room where lounge acts wasted our precious time. Then there was the junta's high command, sick dogs of the Map Room, heel- prints everywhere, pushing model armies into the unfurnished West. At night: stories of their abandoned homes in the Cities in the Flood Plains, how they had loved each other mercilessly, in rusting cars, until the drive-in went under. From the Bedroom we called the decorator & demanded a figurehead... the one true diva to be had in All of Mexico: Maria Felix [star of The Devourer, star of The Lady General]. Nightly in Vegas, "It's Not Unusual" or the Sex Pistols medley. Nothing ever comes back from the West, it's a one-way door, a one-shot deal,-- the one room we never slept in together. My wife wants to rename it The Ugly Truth. I love my wife for her wonderful, light, creamy, highly reflective skin; if there's an illumination from the submerged Cities, that's her. She suspects me of certain acts involving Maria Felix, the gambling debts mount...but when she sends the junta off to Bed we rendezvous in the Map Room & sprawl across the New World with our heads to the West. I sing her romantic melodies from the Room Which Contains All of Mexico, tunes which keep arriving like heaven, in waves of raw data, & though I wrote none of the songs myself & can't pronounce them, these are my greatest hits
From Madonna anno domini by Joshua Clover, published by Louisiana State University Press. Copyright © 1997 Joshua Clover. Used with permission.
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place, that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. Wherefrom fall all architectures I am I say are likenesses of the First Beloved whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady. She it is Queen Under The Hill whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words that is a field folded. It is only a dream of the grass blowing east against the source of the sun in an hour before the sun's going down whose secret we see in a children's game of ring a round of roses told. Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos, that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is.
by Robert Duncan, from The Opening of the Field. Copyright © 1960 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris—and I don’t step aside—
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.
It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down
these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on
wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself
with all the road ahead of me, alone.
César Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him
although he never does anything to them;
they beat him hard with a stick and hard also
with a rope. These are the witnesses:
the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,
the solitude, and the rain, and the roads. . .
By César Vallejo, translated and edited by Robert Bly, and published by Beacon Press in Neruda & Vallejo: Selected Poems. © 1971 by Robert Bly. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
Part II Setting the V.C.R. when we go to bed to record a night owl movie, some charmer we missed we always allow, for unprogrammed unforeseen, an extra half hour. (Night gods of the small screen are ruthless with watchers trapped in their piety.) We watch next evening, and having slowly found the start of the film, meet the minors and leads, enter their time and place, their wills and needs, hear in our chests the click of empathy's padlock, watch the forces gather, unyielding world against the unyielding heart, one longing's minefield laid for another longing, which may yield. Tears will salt the left-over salad I seize during ads, or laughter slow my hurry to pee. But as clot melts toward clearness a black fate may fall on the screen; the movie started too late. Torn from the backward-shining of an end that lights up the meaning of the whole work, disabled in mind and feeling, I flail and shout, "I can't bear it! I have to see how it comes out!" For what is story if not relief from the pain of the inconclusive, from dread of the meaningless? Minds in their silent blast-offs search through space-- how often I've followed yours!--for a resting-place. And I'll follow, past each universe in its spangled ballgown who waits for the slow-dance of life to start, past vacancies of darkness whose vainglory is endless as death's, to find the end of the story.
From Firefall, by Mona Van Duyn, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1992 by Mona Van Duyn. Used with permission.
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
‘O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by the Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
All right. Try this, Then. Every body I know and care for, And every body Else is going To die in a loneliness I can’t imagine and a pain I don’t know. We had To go on living. We Untangled the net, we slit The body of this fish Open from the hinge of the tail To a place beneath the chin I wish I could sing of. I would just as soon we let The living go on living. An old poet whom we believe in Said the same thing, and so We paused among the dark cattails and prayed For the muskrats, For the ripples below their tails, For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making under water, For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman. We prayed for the game warden’s blindness. We prayed for the road home. We ate the fish. There must be something very beautiful in my body, I am so happy.
From Above the River: The Complete Poems by James Wright. Copyright © 1992 by the literary estate of James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved.
My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand
he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know
even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes
he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father
he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me
oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me
oh yes I say
but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here
I say nothing
he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you
I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know
though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do
From Opening the Hand, by W. S. Merwin, published by Atheneum. Copyright © 1983 by W. S. Merwin. Used with permission.
He continues to ponder And his wife moves next to him. She looks. They look at themselves Looking through the fog. She has a meeting she says in about Thirty minutes, he has Something too. But still she has Just stepped out of the bath And a single drop of water Has curved along her breast Down her abdomen and vialed in Her navel then disappeared In crimson. Unless they love Then wake in love Who can they ever be? Their faces bloom, A rain mists down, the bare Bulb softens above the glass, So little light that The hands mumble deliciously, That the mouth opens Mothlike, like petals finding Themselves awake again At four o'clock mid shade and sun.
From Swamp Candles, by Ralph Burns, published by University of Iowa Press. Copyright © 1996 by Ralph Burns. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
Excerpted from The Late Hour by Mark Strand. Copyright © 2002 by Mark Strand. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Someone was saying something about shadows covering the field, about how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning and the morning goes. Someone was saying how the wind dies down but comes back, how shells are the coffins of wind but the weather continues. It was a long night and someone said something about the moon shedding its white on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead but more of the same. Someone mentioned a city she had been in before the war, a room with two candles against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching. We began to believe the night would not end. Someone was saying the music was over and no one had noticed. Then someone said something about the planets, about the stars, how small they were, how far away.
From The Late Hour by Mark Strand, published by Atheneum. Copyright © 1973 by Mark Strand. Used with permission.
Clara strolled in the garden with the children.
The sky was green over the grass,
the water was golden under the bridges,
other elements were blue and rose and orange,
a policeman smiled, bicycles passed,
a girl stepped onto the lawn to catch a bird,
the whole world—Germany, China—
all was quiet around Clara.
The children looked at the sky: it was not forbidden.
Mouth, nose, eyes were open. There was no danger.
What Clara feared were the flu, the heat, the insects.
Clara feared missing the eleven o'clock trolley:
She waited for letters slow to arrive,
She couldn't always wear a new dress. But she strolled in the garden, in the morning!
They had gardens, they had mornings in those days!
Excerpted from Looking for Poetry by Mark Strand. Copyright © 2002 by Mark Strand. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced without permission in writing from the publisher.
Of all sixty of us I am the only one who went to the four corners though I don't say it out of pride but more like a type of regret, and I did it because there was no one I truly believed in though once when I climbed the hill in Skye and arrived at the rough tables I saw the only other elder who was a vegetarian--in Scotland-- and visited Orwell and rode a small motorcycle to get from place to place; and I immediately stopped eating fish and meat and lived on soups; and we wrote each other in the middle and late fifties though one day I got a letter from his daughter that he had died in an accident; he was I'm sure of it, an angel who flew in midair with one eternal gospel to proclaim to those inhabiting the earth and every nation; and now that I go through my papers every day I search and search for his letters but to my shame I have even forgotten his name, that messenger who came to me with tablespoons of blue lentils.
From American Sonnets by Gerald Stern. Copyright © 2002 by Gerald Stern. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing Heaven, and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth,-- And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy?
This poem is in the public domain.
Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re- infolding, entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into itself (it has those layers) a real current though mostly invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing motion that forces change— this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself, also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go. I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never. It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
From Never by Jorie Graham, published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 2002 by Jorie Graham. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years ....
I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper ....
When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me ....
I am food on the prisoner’s plate ....
I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills ....
I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden ....
I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge ....
I am the heart contracted by joy ...
the longest hair, white
before the rest ....
I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow ....
I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit ....
I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name ....
From The Boat of Quiet Hours by Jane Kenyon, published by Graywolf Press. © 1986 by Jane Kenyon. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,
That when we live no more we may live ever.
This poem is in the public domain.
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
This poem is in the public domain.
You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking . . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”
From Modern Poets of France: A Bilingual Anthology, translated and edited by Louis Simpson, published by Story Line Press, Inc. Copyright © 1997 by Louis Simpson. Reprinted by permission of the author and Story Line Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
We need some pines to assuage the darkness
when it blankets the mind,
we need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly
as a plane’s wing, and a worn bed of
needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind,
and a blur or two of a wild thing
that sees and is not seen. We need these things
between appointments, after work,
and, if we keep them, then someone someday,
lying down after a walk
and supper, with the fire hole wet down,
the whole night sky set at a particular
time, without numbers or hours, will cause
a little sound of thanks—a zipper or a snap—
to close round the moment and the thought
of whatever good we did.
From Rampant by Marvin Bell. Copyright 2004 Marvin Bell. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved.
Loaded on beer and whiskey, we ride to the dump in carloads to turn our headlights across the wasted field, freeze the startled eyes of rats against mounds of rubbish. Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still like dead beer cans. Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow into garbage, hide in old truck tires, rusty oil drums, cardboard boxes scattered across the mounds, or else drag themselves on forelegs across our beams of light toward the darkness at the edge of the dump. It's the light they believe kills. We drink and load again, let them crawl for all they're worth into the darkness we're headed for.
From Armored Hearts, published by Copper Canyon Press, 1995. Copyright © by David Bottoms, 1995. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.
The brief secrets are still here, and the light has come back. The word remember touches my hand, But I shake it off and watch the turkey buzzards bank and wheel Against the occluded sky. All of the little names sink down, weighted with what is invisible, But no one will utter them, no one will smooth their rumpled hair. There isn't much time, in any case. There isn't much left to talk about as the year deflates. There isn't a lot to add. Road-worn, December-colored, they cluster like unattractive angels Wherever a thing appears, Crisp and unspoken, unspeakable in their mute and glittering garb. All afternoon the clouds have been sliding toward us out of the Blue Ridge. All afternoon the leaves have scuttled Across the sidewalk and driveway, clicking their clattery claws. And now the evening is over us, Small slices of silence running under a dark rain, Wrapped in a larger.
From Buffalo Yoga by Charles Wright. Copyright © 2004 by Charles Wright. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.
Come at it carefully, don’t trust it, that isn’t its right name, It’s wearing stolen rags, it’s never been washed, its breath Would look moss-green if it were really breathing, It won’t get out of the way, it stares at you Out of eyes burnt gray as the sidewalk, Its skin is overcast with colorless dirt, It has no distinguishing marks, no I.D. cards, It wants something of yours but hasn’t decided Whether to ask for it or just take it, There are no policemen, no friendly neighbors, No peacekeeping busybodies to yell for, only this Thing standing between you and the place you were headed, You have about thirty seconds to get past it, around it, Or simply to back away and try to forget it, It won’t take no for an answer: try hitting it first And you’ll learn what’s trembling in its torn pocket. Now, what do you want to do about it?
From Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems by David Wagoner. Copyright © 1999 by David Wagoner. Used with permission of the poet and the University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
This evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the darkness. I could easily have switched on a lamp, but I wanted to ride this day down into night, to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page with the pale gray ghost of my hand.
From Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser. Copyright © 2004 by Ted Kooser. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. All rights reserved.
(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
From The Language of Spring, edited by Robert Atwan, published by Beacon Press, 2003.
When fed into the crude, imaginary
machine we call the memory,
the brain's hard pictures
slide into the suggestive
waters of the counterfeit.
They come out glamorous and simplified,
even the violent ones,
even the ones that are snapshots of fear.
Maybe those costumed,
clung-to fragments are the first wedge
nostalgia drives into our dreaming.
Maybe our dreams are corrupted
right from the start: the weight
of apples in the blossoms overhead.
Even the two thin reddish dogs
nosing down the aisles of crippled trees,
digging in the weak shade
thrown by the first flowerers,
snuffle in the blackened leaves
for the scent of a dead year.
Childhood, first love, first loss of love--
the saying of their names
brings an ache to the teeth
like that of tears withheld.
What must happen now
is that the small funerals
celebrated in the left-behind life
for their black exotica, their high relief,
their candles and withered wreaths,
must be allowed to pass through
into the sleeping world,
there to be preserved and honored
in the fullness and color of their forms,
their past lives their coffins.
Goodbye then to all innocent surprise
at mortality's panache,
and goodbye to the children fallen
ahead of me into the slow whirlpool
I conceal within myself, my death,
into its snow-froth and the green-black
muscle of its persuasion.
The spirits of children
must look like the spirits of animals,
though in the adult human
the vacancy left by the child
probably darkens the surviving form.
The apples drop their blossom-shadows
onto the still-brown grass.
Old selves, this is partly for you,
there at the edge of the woods
like a troop of boy soldiers.
You can go on living with the blade
of nostalgia in your hearts forever,
my pale darlings. It changes nothing.
Don't you recognize me? I admit
I too am almost invisible now, almost.
Like everything else, I take on
light and color from outside myself,
but it is old light, old paint.
The first shadows are supple ones,
school of gray glimpses, insubstantial.
In children, the quality of darkness
changes inside the sleeping mouth,
and the ghost of child-grime--
that infinite smudge of no color--
blows off into the afterlife.
From Perdido by Chase Twichell. Copyright © 1991 by Chase Twichell. Published by Farrar, Straus & Girioux. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
Don't tell me we're not like plants,
sending out a shoot when we need to,
or spikes, poisonous oils, or flowers.
Come to me but only when I say,
that's how plants announce
the rules of propagation.
Even children know this. You can
see them imitating all the moves
with their bright plastic toys.
So that, years later, at the moment
the girl's body finally says yes
to the end of childhood,
a green pail with an orange shovel
will appear in her mind like a tropical
blossom she has never seen before.
From The Snow Watcher, published by Ontario Review Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Chase Twichell. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Thank you for the gift. Never have I seen a more thoughtful tea-strainer. For you I'm striking a silent movie pose. For instance, I step out and take in the moon like a tourist. It puts tiny gloves on the ferns. It's bigger than life size. I've a room here just for sitting. If I want I fetch some music to slap me around. I've three other rooms-- in this way the house resembles a cow's stomach. I have the feeling we'll be excluded from frescoes despite the fitful way you loved me, Alice, I'm confident we're finally on our own. If I need to think of you and I do I let telephone wires paraphrase the landscape till there's just a city block, a sooty building, you settled into a chair with your legs and hair up and your face adjusting to that new weather right after the TV's been turned off. Hello. Just past the hill here is the truckstop borealis. This is Barkeyville. Maybe we could argue over ice cream.
From Big Back Yard by Michael Teig, published by BOA Editions, Ltd. Copyright © 2003 by Michael Teig. Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher. All rights reserved.
Your baby grows a tooth, then two, and four, and five, then she wants some meat directly from the bone. It's all over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet talker on his way to jail. And you, your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue nothing. You did, you loved, your feet are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.
From New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995, published by Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Copyright © 1990 by Thomas Lux. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Boil it down: feet, skin, gristle, bones, vertebrae, heart muscle, boil it down, skim, and boil again, dreams, history, add them and boil again, boil and skim in closed cauldrons, boil your horse, his hooves, the runned-over dog you loved, the girl by the pencil sharpener who looked at you, looked away, boil that for hours, render it down, take more from the top as more settles to the bottom, the heavier, the denser, throw in ache and sperm, and a bead of sweat that slid from your armpit to your waist as you sat stiff-backed before a test, turn up the fire, boil and skim, boil some more, add a fever and the virus that blinded an eye, now's the time to add guilt and fear, throw logs on the fire, coal, gasoline, throw two goldfish in the pot (their swim bladders used for "clearing"), boil and boil, render it down and distill, concentrate that for which there is no other use at all, boil it down, down, then stir it with rosewater, that which is now one dense, fatty, scented red essence which you smear on your lips and go forth to plant as many kisses upon the world as the world can bear!
From The Cradle Place by Thomas Lux. Copyright © 2004 by Thomas Lux. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.
I'm mighty glad to see you, Mrs. Curtis, And thank you very kindly for this visit— Especially now when all the others here Are having holiday visitors, and I feel A little conspicuous and in the way. It's mainly because of Thanksgiving. All these mothers And wives and husbands gaze at me soulfully And feel they should break up their box of chocolates For a donation, or hand me a chunk of fruitcake. What they don't understand and never guess Is that it's better for me without a family; It's a great blessing. Though I mean no harm. And as for visitors, why, I have you, All cheerful, brisk and punctual every Sunday, Like church, even if the aisles smell of phenol. And you always bring even better gifts than any On your book-trolley. Though they mean only good, Families can become a sort of burden. I've only got my father, and he won't come, Poor man, because it would be too much for him. And for me, too, so it's best the way it is. He knows, you see, that I will predecease him, Which is hard enough. It would take a callous man To come and stand around and watch me failing. (Now don't you fuss; we both know the plain facts.) But for him it's even harder. He loved my mother. They say she looked like me; I suppose she may have. Or rather, as I grew older I came to look More and more like she must one time have looked, And so the prospect for my father now Of losing me is like having to lose her twice. I know he frets about me. Dr. Frazer Tells me he phones in every single day, Hoping that things will take a turn for the better. But with leukemia things don't improve. It's like a sort of blizzard in the bloodstream, A deep, severe, unseasonable winter, Burying everything. The white blood cells Multiply crazily and storm around, Out of control. The chemotherapy Hasn't helped much, and it makes my hair fall out. I know I look a sight, but I don't care. I care about fewer things; I'm more selective. It's got so I can't even bring myself To read through any of your books these days. It's partly weariness, and partly the fact That I seem not to care much about the endings, How things work out, or whether they even do. What I do instead is sit here by this window And look out at the trees across the way. You wouldn't think that was much, but let me tell you, It keeps me quite intent and occupied. Now all the leaves are down, you can see the spare, Delicate structures of the sycamores, The fine articulation of the beeches. I have sat here for days studying them, And I have only just begun to see What it is that they resemble. One by one, They stand there like magnificent enlargements Of the vascular system of the human brain. I see them there like huge discarnate minds, Lost in their meditative silences. The trunks, branches and twigs compose the vessels That feed and nourish vast immortal thoughts. So I've assigned them names. There, near the path, Is the great brain of Beethoven, and Kepler Haunts the wide spaces of that mountain ash. This view, you see, has become my Hall of Fame, It came to me one day when I remembered Mary Beth Finley who used to play with me When we were girls. One year her parents gave her A birthday toy called "The Transparent Man." It was made of plastic, with different colored organs, And the circulatory system all mapped out In rivers of red and blue. She'd ask me over And the two of us would sit and study him Together, and do a powerful lot of giggling. I figure he's most likely the only man Either of us would ever get to know Intimately, because Mary Beth became A Sister of Mercy when she was old enough. She must be thirty-one; she was a year Older than I, and about four inches taller. I used to envy both those advantages Back in those days. Anyway, I was struck Right from the start by the sea-weed intricacy, The fine-haired, silken-threaded filiations That wove, like Belgian lace, throughout the head. But this last week it seems I have found myself Looking beyond, or through, individual trees At the dense, clustered woodland just behind them, Where those great, nameless crowds patiently stand. It's become a sort of complex, ultimate puzzle And keeps me fascinated. My eyes are twenty-twenty, Or used to be, but of course I can't unravel The tousled snarl of intersecting limbs, That mackled, cinder grayness. It's a riddle Beyond the eye's solution. Impenetrable. If there is order in all that anarchy Of granite mezzotint, that wilderness, It takes a better eye than mine to see it. It set me on to wondering how to deal With such a thickness of particulars, Deal with it faithfully, you understand, Without blurring the issue. Of course I know That within a month the sleeving snows will come With cold, selective emphases, with massings And arbitrary contrasts, rendering things Deceptively simple, thickening the twigs To frosty veins, bestowing epaulets And decorations on every birch and aspen. And the eye, self-satisfied, will be misled, Thinking the puzzle solved, supposing at last It can look forth and comprehend the world. That's when you have to really watch yourself. So I hope that you won't think me plain ungrateful For not selecting one of your fine books, And I take it very kindly that you came And sat here and let me rattle on this way.
What is unwisdom but the lusting after Longevity: to be old and full of days! For the vast and unremitting tide of years Casts up to view more sorrowful things than joyful; And as for pleasures, once beyond our prime, They all drift out of reach, they are washed away. And the same gaunt bailiff calls upon us all. Summoning into Darkness, to those wards Where is no music, dance, or marriage hymn That soothes or gladdens. To the tenements of Death. Not to be born is, past all yearning, best. And second best is, having seen the light. To return at once to deep oblivion. When youth has gone, and the baseless dreams of youth, What misery does not then jostle man's elbow, Join him as a companion, share his bread? Betrayal, envy, calumny and bloodshed Move in on him, and finally Old Age— Infirm, despised Old Age—joins in his ruin, The crowning taunt of his indignities. So is it with that man, not just with me. He seems like a frail jetty facing North Whose pilings the waves batter from all quarters; From where the sun comes up, from where it sets, From freezing boreal regions, from below, A whole winter of miseries now assails him, Thrashes his sides and breaks over his head.
Yardley, Pennsylvania, an expensive dump and the van seats shake their broken bones. Duty-free liquor and cigarettes, the refineries and the harbor's cranes. The moon digs its way out of the dirt. The branches of an evergreen sway. She's nice the woman you don't love. She kisses you hard and often holding your face in her big hands.
From Tocqueville by Khaled Mattawa, published by New Issues Poetry & Prose. Copyright © 2010 Khaled Mattawa. Used with permission of New Issues Poetry & Prose.
Under the separated leaves of shade Of the gingko, that old tree That has existed essentially unchanged Longer than any other living tree, I walk behind a woman. Her hair's coarse gold Is spun from the sunlight that it rides upon. Women were paid to knit from sweet champagne Her second skin: it winds and unwinds, winds Up her long legs, delectable haunches, As she sways, in sunlight, up the gazing aisle. The shade of the tree that is called maidenhair, That is not positively known To exist in a wild state, spots her fair or almost fair Hair twisted in a French twist; tall or almost tall, She walks through the air the rain has washed, a clear thing Moving easily on its high heels, seeming to men Miraculous . . . Since I can call her, as Swann couldn't, A woman who is my type, I follow with the warmth Of familiarity, of novelty, this new Example of the type, Reminded of how Lorenz's just-hatched goslings Shook off the last remnants of the egg And, looking at Lorenz, realized that Lorenz Was their mother. Quacking, his little family Followed him everywhere; and when they met a goose, Their mother, they ran to him afraid. Imprinted upon me Is the shape I run to, the sweet strange Breath-taking contours that breathe to me: "I am yours, Be mine!" Following this new Body, somehow familiar, this young shape, somehow old, For a moment I'm younger, the century is younger. The living Strauss, his moustache just getting gray, Is shouting to the players: "Louder! Louder! I can still hear Madame Schumann-Heink—" Or else, white, bald, the old man's joyfully Telling conductors they must play Elektra Like A Midsummer Night's Dream—like fairy music; Proust, dying, is swallowing his iced beer And changing in proof the death of Bergotte According to his own experience; Garbo, A commissar in Paris, is listening attentively To the voice telling how McGillicuddy met McGillivray, And McGillivray said to McGillicuddy—no, McGillicuddy Said to McGillivray—that is, McGillivray . . . Garbo Says seriously: "I vish dey'd never met." As I walk behind this woman I remember That before I flew here—waked in the forest At dawn, by the piece called Birds Beginning Day That, each day, birds play to begin the day— I wished as men wish: "May this day be different!" The birds were wishing, as birds wish—over and over, With a last firmness, intensity, reality— "May this day be the same!" Ah, turn to me And look into my eyes, say: "I am yours, Be mine!" My wish will have come true. And yet When your eyes meet my eyes, they'll bring into The weightlessness of my pure wish the weight Of a human being: someone to help or hurt, Someone to be good to me, to be good to, Someone to cry when I am angry That she doesn't like Elektra, someone to start out on Proust with. A wish, come true, is life. I have my life. When you turn just slide your eyes across my eyes And show in a look flickering across your face As lightly as a leaf's shade, a bird's wing, That there is no one in the world quite like me, That if only . . . If only . . . That will be enough. But I've pretended long enough: I walk faster And come close, touch with the tip of my finger The nape of her neck, just where the gold Hair stops, and the champagne-colored dress begins. My finger touches her as the gingko's shadow Touches her. Because, after all, it is my wife In a new dress from Bergdorf's, walking toward the park. She cries out, we kiss each other, and walk arm in arm Through the sunlight that's much too good for New York, The sunlight of our own house in the forest. Still, though, the poor things need it . . . We've no need To start out on Proust, to ask each other about Strauss. We first helped each other, hurt each other, years ago. After so many changes made and joys repeated, Our first bewildered, transcending recognition Is pure acceptance. We can't tell our life From our wish. Really I began the day Not with a man's wish: "May this day be different," But with the birds' wish: "May this day Be the same day, the day of my life."
From The Complete Poems. Copyright © 1969 by Mrs. Randall Jarrell. Used with permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
When we made love you had
the dense body of a Doberman
and the square head of a Rottweiler.
With my eyes closed I saw:
a light green plate with seared scallops
and a perfect fillet of salmon on a cedar plank.
Now I am safe in the deep V of a weekday
wanting to tell you how the world
is full of street signs and strollers
and pregnant women in spandex.
The bed and desk both want me.
The windows, the view, the idea of Paris.
With my minutes, I chip away at the idiom,
an unmarked pebble in a fast current. Later,
on my way to the store, a boy with a basketball
yells, You scared? to someone else, and the things
on the list to buy come home with me.
And the baby. And your body.
From Museum of Accidents by Rachel Zucker. Copyright © 2010 by Rachel Zucker. Used by permission of Wave Books.
High-heels were struggling with a full-length dress So that, between the wind and the terrain, At times a shining stocking would be seen, And gone too soon. We liked that foolishness. Also, at times a jealous insect's dart Bothered out beauties. Suddenly a white Nape flashed beneath the branches, and this sight Was a delicate feast for a young fool's heart. Evening fell, equivocal, dissembling, The women who hung dreaming on our arms Spoke in low voices, words that had such charms That ever since our stunned soul has been trembling.
Les Ingénus
Les hauts talons luttaient avec les longues jupes, En sorte que, selon le terrain et le vent, Parfois luisaient des bas de jambes, trop souvent Interceptés--et nous aimions ce jeu de dupes. Parfois aussi le dard d'un insecte jaloux Inquiétait le col des belles sous les branches, Et c'était des éclairs soudains de nuques blanches, Et ce régal comblait nos jeunes yeux de fous. Le soir tombait, un soir équivoque d'automne: Les belles, se pendant rêveuses à nos bras, Dirent alors des mots si spécieux, tout bas, Que notre âme depuis ce temps tremble et s'étonne.
Translation from Modern Poets of France: A Bilingual Anthology, edited and translated by Louis Simpson, published by Story Line Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Louis Simpson. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
What was it like before the doctor got there? Till then, we were in the back seat of the warm dark bubble of the old Buick. We were where we’d never not been, no matter where we were. And when the doctor got there? Everything outside was in a rage of wind and sleet, we were children, brothers, safe in the back seat, for once not fighting, just listening, watching the storm. Weren’t you afraid that something bad might happen? Our father held the wheel with just two fingers even though the car skidded and fishtailed and the chains clanged raggedly over ice and asphalt. Weren’t you afraid at all? Dad sang for someone to fly him to the moon, to let him play among the stars, while Mom held up the lighter to another Marlboro. But when the doctor started speaking . . . The tip of the Marlboro was a bright red star. Her lips pursed and she released a ring of Saturn, which dissolved as we caught at it, as my dad sang Mars. When you realized what the doctor was saying . . . They were closer to the storm in the front seat. The high beams, weak as steam against the walled swirling, only illuminated what we couldn’t see. When he described it, the tumor in the brain and what it meant . . . See, we were children. Then we weren’t. Or my brother wasn’t. He was driving now, he gripped the steering wheel with both hands and stared hard at the panicked wipers. What did you feel? Just sleet, the slick road, the car going way too fast, no brother beside me in the back seat, no singing father, no mother, no ring of Saturn to catch at as it floats.
Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright © 2002 by Alan Shapiro. All rights reserved.
You weren’t well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.
I didn’t for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You’d been out—at work maybe?—
having a good day, almost energetic.
We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we’d lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of the narrative
by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?
So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of —warm brown tea—we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.
Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.
From Sweet Machine, published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 1998 by Mark Doty. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
It may not be the ghostly ballet of our avoidances that they’ll remember, nor the long sulks of those last months, nor the voices chilly with all the anger we were careful mostly not to show in front of them, nor anything at all that made our choice to live apart seem to us both not only unavoidable but good, but just. No, what I think will haunt them is precisely what we’ve chosen to forget: those too infrequent (though even toward the end still possible) moments when, the children upstairs, the dinner cooking, one of us would all at once start humming an old tune and we’d dance, as if we did so always, in a swoon of gliding all through the house, across the kitchen, down the hall and back, we’d sway together, we’d twirl, we’d dip and cha- cha and the children would hear us and be helpless not to come running down to burrow in between us, into the center of the dance that now, I think, will haunt them for the very joy itself, for joy that was for them, for all of us together, something better than joy, and yet for you and me, ourselves, alone, apart, still not enough.
Copyright © 2005 by Alan Shapiro. From Tantalus In Love. Reprinted with permission of Houghton Mifflin.
for Coleman Hawkins
The structure of landscape is infinitesimal, Like the structure of music, seamless, invisible. Even the rain has larger sutures. What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together, Is faith, it appears—faith of the eye, faith of the ear. Nothing like that in language, However, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms Blown by the wind. April, and anything’s possible. Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang. A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India And back—on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on foot. Ten thousand miles it took him, from 629 to 645, Mountains and deserts, In search of the Truth, the heart of the heart of Reality, The Law that would help him escape it, And all its attendant and inescapable suffering. And he found it. These days, I look at things, not through them, And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get. The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral, The neighbor’s back porch light bulbs glow like anemones. Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead. This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark, when everything starts to shine out, And aphorisms skulk in the trees, Their wings folded, their heads bowed. Every true poem is a spark, and aspires to the condition of the original fire Arising out of the emptiness. It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite. It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by. Shooting stars. April’s identical, celestial, wordless, burning down. Its light is the light we commune by. Its destination’s our own, its hope is the hope we live with. Wang Wei, on the other hand, Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains, and lived there, Off and on, for the rest of his life. He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it, A part of nature himself, he thought. And who would say no To someone so bound up in solitude, in failure, he thought, and suffering. Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small Dollop of butter hazily at the western edge. Getting too old and lazy to write poems, I watch the snowfall From the apple trees. Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.
Excerpted from A Short History of the Shadow by Charles Wright. Copyright © 2002 by Charles Wright. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. All rights reserved.
I never knew them all, just hummed and thrummed my fingers with the radio, driving five hundred miles to Austin. Her arms held all the songs I needed. Our boots kept time with fiddles and the charming sobs of blondes, the whine of steel guitars sliding us down in deer-hide chairs when jukebox music was over. Sad music’s on my mind tonight in a jet high over Dallas, earphones on channel five. A lonely singer, dead, comes back to beg me, swearing in my ears she’s mine, rhymes set to music that make her lies seem true. She’s gone and others like her, leaving their songs to haunt us. Letting down through clouds I know who I’ll find waiting at the gate, the same woman faithful to my arms as she was those nights in Austin when the world seemed like a jukebox, our boots able to dance forever, our pockets full of coins.
From Whatever the Wind Delivers by Walt McDonald. Copyright © 1999 by Texas Tech University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publishers. All rights reserved.
Shiny as wax, the cracked veneer Scotch-taped and brittle. I can’t bring my father back. Legs crossed, he sits there brash with a private’s stripe, a world away from the war they would ship him to within days. Cannons flank his face and banners above him like the flag my mother kept on the mantel, folded tight, white stars sharp-pointed on a field of blue. I remember his fists, the iron he pounded, five-pound hammer ringing steel, the frame he made for a sled that winter before the war. I remember the rope in his fist around my chest, his other fist shoving the snow, and downhill we dived, his boots by my boots on the tongue, pines whishing by, ice in my eyes, blinking and squealing. I remember the troop train, steam billowing like a smoke screen. I remember wrecking the sled weeks later and pounding to beat the iron flat, but it stayed there bent and stacked in the barn by the anvil, and I can’t bring him back.
From Blessings the Body Gave, published by Ohio State University Press. Copyright © 1998 by Walt McDonald. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
This salt-stain spot marks the place where men lay down their heads, back to the bench, and hoist nothing that need be lifted but some burden they've chosen this time: more reps, more weight, the upward shove of it leaving, collectively, this sign of where we've been: shroud-stain, negative flashed onto the vinyl where we push something unyielding skyward, gaining some power at least over flesh, which goads with desire, and terrifies with frailty. Who could say who's added his heat to the nimbus of our intent, here where we make ourselves: something difficult lifted, pressed or curled, Power over beauty, power over power! Though there's something more tender, beneath our vanity, our will to become objects of desire: we sweat the mark of our presence onto the cloth. Here is some halo the living made together.
From Source by Mark Doty, published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 2002 by Mark Doty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
I wake up cold, I who Prospered through dreams of heat Wake to their residue, Sweat, and a clinging sheet. My flesh was its own shield: Where it was gashed, it healed. I grew as I explored The body I could trust Even while I adored The risk that made robust, A world of wonders in Each challenge to the skin. I cannot but be sorry The given shield was cracked, My mind reduced to hurry, My flesh reduced and wrecked. I have to change the bed, But catch myself instead Stopped upright where I am Hugging my body to me As if to shield it from The pains that will go through me, As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.
From Collected Poems by Thom Gunn. Copyright © 1994 by Thom Gunn.
Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking through bare rooms over my head, opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an empty house? What could he possibly need there in heaven? Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches? His love for me feels like spilled water running back to its vessel. At this hour, what is dead is restless and what is living is burning. Someone tell him he should sleep now. My father keeps a light on by our bed and readies for our journey. He mends ten holes in the knees of five pairs of boy's pants. His love for me is like sewing: various colors and too much thread, the stitching uneven. But the needle pierces clean through with each stroke of his hand. At this hour, what is dead is worried and what is living is fugitive. Someone tell him he should sleep now. God, that old furnace, keeps talking with his mouth of teeth, a beard stained at feasts, and his breath of gasoline, airplane, human ash. His love for me feels like fire, feels like doves, feels like river-water. At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind and helpless. While the Lord lives. Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone. I've had enough of his love that feels like burning and flight and running away.
From The City In Which I Love You by Li-Young Lee. Copyright © 1990 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with permission of BOA Editions, Ltd. All rights reserved.
I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.
Copyright © 1956, 1957 by Ezra Pound. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this poem may be reproduced in any form without the written consent of the publisher.
Pulling out of the old scarred skin (old rough thing I don't need now I strip off slip out of leave behind) I slough off deadscales flick skinflakes to the ground Shedding toughness peeling layers down to vulnerable stuff And I'm blinking off old eyelids for a new way of seeing By the rock I rub against I'm going to be tender again
From Blues Baby: Early Poems by Harryette Mullen, published by Bucknell University Press. Copyright © 1981, 2002 by Harryette Mullen. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Is it winter again, is it cold again, didn’t Frank just slip on the ice, didn’t he heal, weren't the spring seeds planted didn’t the night end, didn’t the melting ice flood the narrow gutters wasn’t my body rescued, wasn’t it safe didn’t the scar form, invisible above the injury terror and cold, didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden harrowed and planted— I remember how the earth felt, red and dense, in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted, didn’t vines climb the south wall I can’t hear your voice for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground I no longer care what sound it makes when was I silenced, when did it first seem pointless to describe that sound what it sounds like can’t change what it is— didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth safe when it was planted didn’t we plant the seeds, weren’t we necessary to the earth, the vines, were they harvested?
“Section I” is reprinted from October by Louise Glück, published by Sarabande Books, Inc. Copyright © 2004 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by permission of Sarabande Books and the author. All rights reserved.
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye. Published by Far Corner. Reprinted with permission of the author. Copyright © 1995 Naomi Shihab Nye.
The green catalpa tree has turned All white; the cherry blooms once more. In one whole year I haven't learned A blessed thing they pay you for. The blossoms snow down in my hair; The trees and I will soon be bare. The trees have more than I to spare. The sleek, expensive girls I teach, Younger and pinker every year, Bloom gradually out of reach. The pear tree lets its petals drop Like dandruff on a tabletop. The girls have grown so young by now I have to nudge myself to stare. This year they smile and mind me how My teeth are falling with my hair. In thirty years I may not get Younger, shrewder, or out of debt. The tenth time, just a year ago, I made myself a little list Of all the things I'd ought to know, Then told my parents, analyst, And everyone who's trusted me I'd be substantial, presently. I haven't read one book about A book or memorized one plot. Or found a mind I did not doubt. I learned one date. And then forgot. And one by one the solid scholars Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars. And smile above their starchy collars. I taught my classes Whitehead's notions; One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's. Lacking a source-book or promotions, I showed one child the colors of A luna moth and how to love. I taught myself to name my name, To bark back, loosen love and crying; To ease my woman so she came, To ease an old man who was dying. I have not learned how often I Can win, can love, but choose to die. I have not learned there is a lie Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger; That my equivocating eye Loves only by my body's hunger; That I have forces true to feel, Or that the lovely world is real. While scholars speak authority And wear their ulcers on their sleeves, My eyes in spectacles shall see These trees procure and spend their leaves. There is a value underneath The gold and silver in my teeth. Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives, We shall afford our costly seasons; There is a gentleness survives That will outspeak and has its reasons. There is a loveliness exists, Preserves us, not for specialists.
From Heart's Needle by W. D. Snodgrass, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright © 1957, 1959 by W. D. Snodgrass. Used with permission.
I said I will find what is lowly and put the roots of my identity down there: each day I'll wake up and find the lowly nearby, a handy focus and reminder, a ready measure of my significance, the voice by which I would be heard, the wills, the kinds of selfishness I could freely adopt as my own: but though I have looked everywhere, I can find nothing to give myself to: everything is magnificent with existence, is in surfeit of glory: nothing is diminished, nothing has been diminished for me: I said what is more lowly than the grass: ah, underneath, a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss: I looked at it closely and said this can be my habitat: but nestling in I found below the brown exterior green mechanisms beyond the intellect awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe: I found a beggar: he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying him any attention: everybody went on by: I nestled in and found his life: there, love shook his body like a devastation: I said though I have looked everywhere I can find nothing lowly in the universe: I whirled through transfigurations up and down, transfigurations of size and shape and place: at one sudden point came still, stood in wonder: moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent with being!
From The Selected Poems: 1951-1977, Expanded Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1986 by A. R. Ammons.
I want to say that forgiveness keeps on dividing, that hope gives issue to hope, and more, but of course I am saying what is said when in this dark hallway one encounters you, and paws and assaults you—love affairs, fast lies—and you say it back and we blunder deeper, as would any pair of loosed marionettes, any couple of cadavers cut lately from the scaffold, in the secluded hallways of whatever is holding us up now.
From The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Copyright © 1994 by Denis Johnson. Reprinted by permission of the author.
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of racoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.
Copyright © 2001 Jack Gilbert. From The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992, 2001, Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted with permission.
Is nothing real but when I was fifteen, Going on sixteen, like a corny song? I see myself so clearly then, and painfully— Knees bleeding through my usher's uniform Behind the candy counter in the theater After a morning's surfing; paddling frantically To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me, Trundle me clumsily along the beach floor's Gravel and sand; my knees aching with salt. Is that all I have to write about? You write about the life that's vividest. And if that is your own, that is your subject. And if the years before and after sixteen Are colorless as salt and taste like sand— Return to those remembered chilly mornings, The light spreading like a great skin on the water, And the blue water scalloped with wind-ridges, And—what was it exactly?—that slow waiting When, to invigorate yourself, you peed Inside your bathing suit and felt the warmth Crawl all around your hips and thighs, And the first set rolled in and the water level Rose in expectancy, and the sun struck The water surface like a brassy palm, Flat and gonglike, and the wave face formed. Yes. But that was a summer so removed In time, so specially peculiar to my life, Why would I want to write about it again? There was a day or two when, paddling out, An older boy who had just graduated And grown a great blonde moustache, like a walrus, Skimmed past me like a smooth machine on the water, And said my name. I was so much younger, To be identified by one like him— The easy deference of a kind of god Who also went to church where I did—made me Reconsider my worth. I had been noticed. He soon was a small figure crossing waves, The shawling crest surrounding him with spray, Whiter than gull feathers. He had said my name Without scorn, just with a bit of surprise To notice me among those trying the big waves Of the morning break. His name is carved now On the black wall in Washington, the frozen wave That grievers cross to find a name or names. I knew him as I say I knew him, then, Which wasn't very well. My father preached His funeral. He came home in a bag That may have mixed in pieces of his squad. Yes, I can write about a lot of things Besides the summer that I turned sixteen. But that's my ground swell. I must start Where things began to happen and I knew it.
From Questions for Ecclesiastes published by Story Line Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Mark Jarman. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Amidst the too much that we buy and throw away and the far too much we wrap it in, the bear found a few items of special interest--a honeydew rind, a used tampon, the bone from a leg of lamb. He'd rock back lightly onto his rear paws and slash open a plastic bag, and then his nose-- jammed almost with a surfeit of rank and likely information, for he would pause-- and then his whole dowsing snout would insinuate itself a little way inside. By now he'd have hunched his weight forward slightly, and then he'd snatch it back, trailed by some tidbit in his teeth. He'd look around. What a good boy am he. The guardian of the dump was used to this and not amused. "He'll drag that shit every which damn way," he grumbled who'd dozed and scraped a pit to keep that shit where the town paid to contain it. The others of us looked and looked. "City folks like you don't get to see this often," one year-round resident accused me. Some winter I'll bring him down to learn to love a rat working a length of subway track. "Nope," I replied. Just then the bear decamped for the woods with a marl of grease and slather in his mouth and on his snout, picking up speed, not cute (nor had he been cute before, slavering with greed, his weight all sunk to his seated rump and his nose stuck up to sift the rich and fetid air, shaped like a huge, furry pear), but richly fed on the slow-simmering dump, and gone into the bug-thick woods and anecdote.
From Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews, edited by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly. Copyright © 1995 by William Matthews. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.
—Is where space ends called death or infinity? Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions A mere eyelid’s distance between you and me. It took us a long time to discover the number zero. John’s brother is afraid to go outside. He claims he knows the meaning of zero. I want to kiss you. A mathematician once told me you can add infinity to infinity. There is a zero vector, which starts and ends at the same place, its force and movement impossible to record with rays or maps or words. It intersects yet runs parallel with all others. A young man I know wants me to prove the zero vector exists. I tell him I can't, but nothing in my world makes sense without it.
Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
And I am not a pedestal. We are not a handful of harmless scratches on pale pink canvas. Today is not the day to stop looking for the woman to save you. What was once ivory is wood. What was once whalebone is cotton. My coif and corset are duly fastened, and your shirttail is tied in a diamond knot. You may be the giver of unappreciated nicknames and the devoted artist who has given my still life life. But we can never reach each other's standards. You want to condemn me to eternity. I want to make you no more perfect than you used to be. We are not together, we are not alone.
From Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross by Mark Yakich, published by Penguin. Copyright © 2004 by Mark Yakich. Reprinted by permission of Penguin. All rights reserved.
The people of my time are passing away: my wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it’s Ruth we care so much about in intensive care: it was once weddings that came so thick and fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo: now, it’s this that and the other and somebody else gone or on the brink: well, we never thought we would live forever (although we did) and now it looks like we won’t: some of us are losing a leg to diabetes, some don’t know what they went downstairs for, some know that a hired watchful person is around, some like to touch the cane tip into something steady, so nice: we have already lost so many, brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our address books for so long a slow scramble now are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our index cards for Christmases, birthdays, Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies: at the same time we are getting used to so many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip to the ones left: we are not giving up on the congestive heart failure or brain tumors, on the nice old men left in empty houses or on the widows who decide to travel a lot: we think the sun may shine someday when we’ll drink wine together and think of what used to be: until we die we will remember every single thing, recall every word, love every loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to others to love, love that can grow brighter and deeper till the very end, gaining strength and getting more precious all the way. . . .
“In View of the Fact” is reprinted from Bosh and Flapdoodle by A. R. Ammons. Copyright © 2005. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Parked in the fields
All night
So many years ago,
We saw
A lake beside us
When the moon rose.
I remember
Leaving that ancient car
Together. I remember
Standing in the white grass
Beside it. We groped
Our way together
Downhill in the bright
Incredible light
Beginning to wonder
Whether it could be lake
Or fog
We saw, our heads
Ringing under the stars we walked
To where it would have wet our feet
Had it been water
From New Collected Poems by George Oppen, copyright © 1975 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
From Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;
if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each other
as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel—
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,
no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated
apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge
From White Apples and the Taste of Stone. Copyright © 2006 by Donald Hall. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
I believe there is something else
entirely going on but no single
person can ever know it,
so we fall in love.
It could also be true that what we use
everyday to open cans was something
much nobler, that we'll never recognize.
I believe the woman sleeping beside me
doesn't care about what's going on
outside, and her body is warm
with trust
which is a great beginning.
Copyright © 2001 by Matthew Rohrer. From Satellite. Reprinted with permission of Verse Press.
If you are lucky in this life, you will get to help your enemy the way I got to help my mother when she was weakened past the point of saying no. Into the big enamel tub half-filled with water which I had made just right, I lowered the childish skeleton she had become. Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed her belly and her chest, the sorry ruin of her flanks and the frayed gray cloud between her legs. Some nights, sitting by her bed book open in my lap while I listened to the air move thickly in and out of her dark lungs, my mind filled up with praise as lush as music, amazed at the symmetry and luck that would offer me the chance to pay my heavy debt of punishment and love with love and punishment. And once I held her dripping wet in the uncomfortable air between the wheelchair and the tub, until she begged me like a child to stop, an act of cruelty which we both understood was the ancient irresistible rejoicing of power over weakness. If you are lucky in this life, you will get to raise the spoon of pristine, frosty ice cream to the trusting creature mouth of your old enemy because the tastebuds at least are not broken because there is a bond between you and sweet is sweet in any language.
Copyright 1998 by Tony Hoagland. Used from Donkey Gospel with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org
Now I see it: a few years To play around while being Bossed around By the taller ones, the ones With the money And more muscle, however Tender or indifferent They might be at being Parents; then off to school And the years of struggle With authority while learning Violent gobs of things one didn’t Want to know, with a few tender And tough teachers thrown in Who taught what one wanted And needed to know; then time To go out and make one’s own Money (on the day or in The night-shift), playing around A little longer (“Seed-time,” “Salad days”) with some Young “discretionary income” Before procreation (which Brings one quickly, too quickly, Into play with some variation Of settling down); then, Most often for most, the despised Job (though some work their way Around this with work of real Delight, life's work, with the deepest Pleasures of mastery); then years Spent, forgotten, in the middle decades Of repair, creation, money Gathered and spent making the family Happen, as one’s own children busily Work their way into and through The cycle themselves, Comic and tragic to see, with some Fine moments playing with them; Then, through no inherent virtue Of one’s own, but only because The oldest ones are busy falling Off the edge of the planet, The years of governing, Of being the dreaded authority One‘s self; then the recognition (Often requiring a stiff drink) that it Will all soon be ending for one’s self, But not before Alzheimer’s comes For some, as Alzheimer’s comes For my father-in-law now (who Has forgotten not only who Shakespeare is but that he taught Shakespeare for thirty years, And who sings and dances amidst The forgotten in the place To which he’s been taken); then An ever-deepening sense of time And how the end might really happen, To really submit, bend, and go (Raging against that night is really An adolescent’s idiot game). Time soon to take my place In the long line of my ancestors (Whose names I mostly never knew Or have recently forgotten) Who took their place, spirit poised In mature humility (or as jackasses Braying against the inevitable) Before me, having been moved By time through time, having done The time and their times. “Nearer my god to thee” I sing On the deck of my personal Titanic, An agnostic vessel in the mind. Born alone, die alone—and sad, though Vastly accompanied, to see The sadness in the loved ones To be left behind, and one more Moment of wondering what, If anything, comes next . . . Never to have been completely Certain what I was doing Alive, but having stayed aloft Amidst an almost sinister doubt. I say to my children Don’t be afraid, be buoyed —In its void the world is always Falling apart, entropy its law —I tell them those who build And master are the ones invariably Merry: Give and take quarter, Create good meals within the slaughter, A place for repose and laughter In the consoling beds of being tender, I tell them now, my son, my daughter.
From The Executive Director of the Fallen World by Liam Rector, published by the University of Chicago Press. Copyright © 2006 by Liam Rector. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
Now I know that everything is a body, so even the snow and the sand and the blood rivered down in the snow, and snowed on again so it's buried is a body. All things are bodies in photos— detail of the left side of a breast and the arm's pit—detail of the sled slumbered under by the storm's leavings. Detail of my sort of so-early half-lit eyelid light that bodies are near to invisible and touch is no longer the sole way of knowing, and outline is all that there is. Detail of your body as it does its morning leaving thing. Detail of what light there is on your skin. Detail of land- scape of let me in please and coffee, warm when the weather's action on this body is less than ideal. Landscape with pear. Landscape with weather and part of a breast in the frame.
From The Available World by Ander Monson. Copyright © 2010 by Ander Monson. Used by permission of Sarabande Books, Inc.
I had a girl, I named her soap. I had a soap, I named her cat. One day I played the accordion on paper, and it sounded like a birth certificate drifting into the sun, a disintegration station in a vast bewildered wilderness— which sounds like a slide whistle at first but later like the back porch flytrap I named jungle. I have never before mentioned these names in the airway, and neither has the girl I named name ever faltered— though the question of remains in the hallway remains: Does one's imagination also disintegrate, or does it flutter forever like a boa constrictor, circling the world or a warthog? The warthog I named babe; the boa constrictor I called pasture. The last time I found myself ensnared in the pastoral, I imagined a rope and escaped by climbing up it. Then I named it laminate, but I called it overwhelming. Me and overwhelming covered in skulls. One superhero to another to another. I boiled a lobster, I named it travel. I had an agent, and I named her mob. Then I took out the garbage and went running with my dog ostensibly to prove my existence, if not also my purchase. I made a purchase, I named it purpose. There is nothing so bright as a toddler on fire. We don't need no water... I named the water deathstar.
From WOLF FACE, published by H_NGM_N Books. Copyright © 2012 by Matt Hart. Reprinted with permission of the author.
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Snow White was nude at her wedding, she's so white the gown seemed to disappear when she put it on. Put me beside her and the proximity is good for a study of chiaroscuro, not much else. Her name aggravates me most, as if I need to be told what's white and what isn't. Judging strictly by appearance there's a future for me forever at her heels, a shadow's constant worship. Is it fair for me to live that way, unable to get off the ground? Turning the tables isn't fair unless they keep turning. Then there's the danger of Russian roulette and my disadvantage: nothing falls from the sky to name me. I am the empty space where the tooth was, that my tongue rushes to fill because I can't stand vacancies. And it's not enough. The penis just fills another gap. And it's not enough. When you look at me, know that more than white is missing.
From Pyramid of Bone by Thylias Moss. Copyright © 1989 by Thylias Moss. Reprinted with permission of the University of Virginia Press. All rights reserved.
I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do. A box made out of leaves. What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless. Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else. I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon. From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale. I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority. Everything casts a shadow. Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything.
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Siken. Used with permission of the author.
We did right by your death and went out, Right away, to a public place to drink, To be with each other, to face it. We called other friends—the ones Your mother hadn’t called—and told them What you had decided, and some said What you did was right; it was the thing You wanted and we’d just have to live With that, that your life had been one Long misery and they could see why you Had chosen that, no matter what any of us Thought about it, and anyway, one said, Most of us abandoned each other a long Time ago and we’d have to face that If we had any hope of getting it right.
From American Prodigal by Liam Rector, published by Story Line Press. Copyright © 1994 by Liam Rector. Reprinted by permission of the author and Story Line Press.
Tonight I get down from my horse, before the door of the house, where I said farewell with the cock's crowing. It is shut and no one responds. The stone bench on which mama gave birth to my older brother, so he could saddle backs I had ridden bare, through lanes, past hedges, a village boy; the bench on which I left my heartsick childhood yellowing in the sun ... And this mourning that frames the portal? God in alien peace, the beast sneezes, as if calling too; noses about, prodding the cobbles. Then doubts, whinnies, his ears all ears. Papa must be up praying, and perhaps he will think I am late. My sisters, humming their simple, bubblish illusions, preparing for the approaching holy day, and now it's almost here. I wait, I wait, my heart an egg at its moment, that gets blocked. Large family that we left not long ago, no one awake now, and not even a candle placed on the altar so that we might return. I call again, and nothing. We fall silent and begin to sob, and the animal whinnies, keeps on whinnying. They're all sleeping forever, and so nicely, that at last my horse dead-tired starts nodding in his turn, and half-asleep, with each pardon, says it's all right, everything is quite all right.
From The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, by César Vallejo, Clayton Eshleman (trans.), © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press.
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron composition by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre. When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . . I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself— to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting my eyes have seen what my hand did.
From Selected Poems by Robert Lowell, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1976, 1977 by Robert Lowell. Used by permission.
So that each
is its own, now—each a fallen, blond stillness.
Closer, above them,
the damselflies pass as they would over water,
if the fruit were water,
or as bees would, if they weren’t
somewhere else, had the fruit found
already a point more steep
in rot, as soon it must, if
none shall lift it from the grass whose damp only
softens further those parts where flesh
goes soft.
There are those
whom no amount of patience looks likely
to improve ever, I always said, meaning
gift is random,
assigned here,
here withheld—almost always
correctly
as it’s turned out: how your hands clear
easily the wreckage;
how you stand—like a building for a time condemned,
then deemed historic. Yes. You
will be saved.
From The Rest of Love by Carl Phillips. Copyright © 2004 by Carl Phillips. Reprinted by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. All rights reserved.
She said, I love you.
He said, Nothing.
(As if there were just one
of each word and the one
who used it, used it up).
In the history of language
the first obscenity was silence.
"The Primer" from Forth A Raven. © 2006 by Christina Davis. Reprinted with the permission of Alice James Books.
There is something dense, united, settled in the depths, repeating its number, its identical sign. How it is noted that stones have touched time, in their refined matter there is an odor of age, of water brought by the sea, from salt and sleep. I'm encircled by a single thing, a single movement: a mineral weight, a honeyed light cling to the sound of the word "noche": the tint of wheat, of ivory, of tears, things of leather, of wood, of wool, archaic, faded, uniform, collect around me like walls. I work quietly, wheeling over myself, a crow over death, a crow in mourning. I mediate, isolated in the spread of seasons, centric, encircled by a silent geometry: a partial temperature drifts down from the sky, a distant empire of confused unities reunites encircling me.
Copyright © 2005 by Pablo Neruda and Clayton Eshelman. From Conductors of the Pit. Used with permission of Soft Skull Press.
You are food. You are here for me to eat. Fatten up, and I will like you better. Your brother will be first, you must wait your turn. Feed him yourself, you will learn to do it. You will take him eggs with yellow sauce, muffins torn apart and leaking butter, fried meats late in the morning, and always sweets in a sticky parade from the kitchen. His vigilance, an ice pick of hunger pricking his insides, will melt in the unctuous cream fillings. He will forget. He will thank you for it. His little finger stuck every day through cracks in the bars will grow sleek and round, his hollow face swell like the moon. He will stop dreaming about fear in the woods without food. He will lean toward the maw of the oven as it opens every afternoon, sighing better and better smells.
From Why the House is Made of Gingerbread by Ava Leavell Haymon. Copyright © 2010 by Ava Leavell Haymon. Used by permission of Louisiana State University Press.
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
neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping
at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in
the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing
down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork
chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following
you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary
fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and
never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add
shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue
automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what
America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you
got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear
on the black waters of Lethe?
—Berkeley, 1955
From Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg, published by Harper & Row. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Used with permission.
Before you kissed me only winds of heaven Had kissed me, and the tenderness of rain— Now you have come, how can I care for kisses Like theirs again? I sought the sea, she sent her winds to meet me, They surged about me singing of the south— I turned my head away to keep still holy Your kiss upon my mouth. And swift sweet rains of shining April weather Found not my lips where living kisses are; I bowed my head lest they put out my glory As rain puts out a star. I am my love's and he is mine forever, Sealed with a seal and safe forevermore— Think you that I could let a beggar enter Where a king stood before?
This poem is in the public domain.
There is no magic any more,
We meet as other people do,
You work no miracle for me
Nor I for you.
You were the wind and I the sea—
There is no splendor any more,
I have grown listless as the pool
Beside the shore.
But though the pool is safe from storm
And from the tide has found surcease,
It grows more bitter than the sea,
For all its peace.
This poem is in the public domain.
What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring, That my songs do not show me at all? For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire, I am an answer, they are only a call. But what do I care, for love will be over so soon, Let my heart have its say and my mind stand idly by, For my mind is proud and strong enough to be silent, It is my heart that makes my songs, not I.
This poem is in the public domain.
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
This poem is in the public domain.
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
This poem is in the public domain.
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
This poem is in the public domain.
Memory: I can take my head and strike it on a wall on Cumberland Island
Where the night tide came crawling under the stairs came up the first
Two or three steps and the cottage stood on poles all night
With the sea sprawled under it as we dreamed of the great fin circling
Under the bedroom floor. In daylight there was my first brassy taste of beer
And Payton Ford and I came back from the Glynn County slaughterhouse
With a bucket of entrails and blood. We tied one end of a hawser
To a spindling porch-pillar and rowed straight out of the house
Three hundred yards into the vast front yard of windless blue water
The rope out slithering its coil the two-gallon jug stoppered and sealed
With wax and a ten-foot chain leader a drop-forged shark-hook nestling.
We cast our blood on the waters the land blood easily passing
For sea blood and we sat in it for a moment with the stain spreading
Out from the boat sat in a new radiance in the pond of blood in the sea
Waiting for fins waiting to spill our guts also in the glowing water.
We dumped the bucket, and baited the hook with a run-over collie pup. The jug
Bobbed, trying to shake off the sun as a dog would shake off the sea.
We rowed to the house feeling the same water lift the boat a new way,
All the time seeing where we lived rise and dip with the oars.
We tied up and sat down in rocking chairs, one eye on the other responding
To the blue-eye wink of the jug. Payton got us a beer and we sat
All morning sat there with blood on our minds the red mark out
In the harbor slowly failing us then the house groaned the rope
Sprang out of the water splinters flew we leapt from our chairs
And grabbed the rope hauled did nothing the house coming subtly
Apart all around us underfoot boards beginning to sparkle like sand
Pulling out the tarred poles we slept propped-up on leaning to sea
As in land-wind crabs scuttling from under the floor as we took runs about
Two more porch-pillars and looked out and saw something a fish-flash
An almighty fin in trouble a moiling of secret forces a false start
Of water a round wave growing in the whole of Cumberland Sound the one ripple.
Payton took off without a word I could not hold him either
But clung to the rope anyway it was the whole house bending
Its nails that held whatever it was coming in a little and like a fool
I took up the slack on my wrist. The rope drew gently jerked I lifted
Clean off the porch and hit the water the same water it was in
I felt in blue blazing terror at the bottom of the stairs and scrambled
Back up looking desperately into the human house as deeply as I could
Stopping my gaze before it went out the wire screen of the back door
Stopped it on the thistled rattan the rugs I lay on and read
On my mother's sewing basket with next winter's socks spilling from it
The flimsy vacation furniture a bucktoothed picture of myself.
Payton came back with three men from a filling station and glanced at me
Dripping water inexplicable then we all grabbed hold like a tug-of-war.
We were gaining a little from us a cry went up from everywhere
People came running. Behind us the house filled with men and boys.
On the third step from the sea I took my place looking down the rope
Going into the ocean, humming and shaking off drops. A houseful
Of people put their backs into it going up the steps from me
Into the living room through the kitchen down the back stairs
Up and over a hill of sand across a dust road and onto a raised field
Of dunes we were gaining the rope in my hands began to be wet
With deeper water all other haulers retreated through the house
But Payton and I on the stairs drawing hand over hand on our blood
Drawing into existence by the nose a huge body becoming
A hammerhead rolling in beery shallows and I began to let up
But the rope strained behind me the town had gone
Pulling-mad in our house far away in a field of sand they struggled
They had turned their backs on the sea bent double some on their knees
The rope over their shoulders like a bag of gold they strove for the ideal
Esso station across the scorched meadow with the distant fish coming up
The front stairs the sagging boards still coming in up taking
Another step toward the empty house where the rope stood straining
By itself through the rooms in the middle of the air. "Pass the word,"
Payton said, and I screamed it "Let up, good God, let up!" to no one there.
The shark flopped on the porch, grating with salt-sand driving back in
The nails he had pulled out coughing chunks of his formless blood.
The screen door banged and tore off he scrambled on his tail slid
Curved did a thing from another world and was out of his element and in
Our vacation paradise cutting all four legs from under the dinner table
With one deep-water move he unwove the rugs in a moment throwing pints
Of blood over everything we owned knocked the buckteeth out of my picture
His odd head full of crashed jelly-glass splinters and radio tubes thrashing
Among the pages of fan magazines all the movie stars drenched in sea-blood
Each time we thought he was dead he struggled back and smashed
One more thing in all coming back to die three or four more times after death.
At last we got him out logrolling him greasing his sandpaper skin
With lard to slide him pulling on his chained lips as the tide came,
Tumbled him down the steps as the first night wave went under the floor.
He drifted off head back belly white as the moon. What could I do but buy
That house for the one black mark still there against death a forehead-
toucher in the room he circles beneath and has been invited to wreck?
Blood hard as iron on the wall black with time still bloodlike
Can be touched whenever the brow is drunk enough. All changes. Memory:
Something like three-dimensional dancing in the limbs with age
Feeling more in two worlds than one in all worlds the growing encounters.
James Dickey "The Shark's Parlor" from The Whole Motion © 1992 by James Dickey. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press
This is what our dying looks like.
You believe in the sun. I believe
I can’t love you. Always be closing,
Said our favorite professor before
He let the gun go off in his mouth.
I turned 29 the way any man turns
In his sleep, unaware of the earth
Moving beneath him, its plates in
Their places, a dated disagreement.
Let’s fight it out, baby. You have
Only so long left—a man turning
In his sleep—so I take a picture.
I won’t look at it, of course. It’s
His bad side, his Mr. Hyde, the hole
In a husband’s head, the O
Of his wife’s mouth. Every night,
I take a pill. Miss one, and I’m gone.
Miss two, and we’re through. Hotels
Bore me, unless I get a mountain view,
A room in which my cell won’t work,
And there’s nothing to do but see
The sun go down into the ground
That cradles us as any coffin can.
Copyright © 2010 by Jericho Brown. Used by permission of the author.
1 Thank god he stuck his tongue out. When I was twelve I was in danger of taking my body seriously. I thought the ache in my nipple was priceless. I thought I should stay very still and compare it to a button, a china saucer, a flash in a car side-mirror, so I could name the ache either big or little, then keep it forever. He blew no one a kiss, then turned into a maw. After I saw him, when a wish moved in my pants. I nurtured it. I stalked around my room kicking my feet up just like him, making a big deal of my lips. I was my own big boy. I wouldn't admit it then, but be definitely cocks his hip as if he is his own little girl. 2 People ask me--I make up interviews while I brush my teeth--"So, what do you remember best about your childhood?" I say mostly the drive toward Chicago. Feeling as if I'm being slowly pressed against the skyline. Hoping to break a window. Mostly quick handfuls of boys' skin. Summer twilights that took forever to get rid of. Mostly Mick Jagger. 3 How do I explain my hungry stare? My Friday night spent changing clothes? My love for travel? I rewind the way he says "now" with so much roof of the mouth. I rewind until I get a clear image of myself: I'm telling the joke he taught me about my body. My mouth is stretched open so I don't laugh. My hands are pretending to have just discovered my own face. My name is written out in metal studs across my little pink jumper. I've got a mirror and a good idea of the way I want my face to look. When I glance sideways my smile should twitch as if a funny picture of me is taped up inside the corner of my eye. A picture where my hair is combed over each shoulder, my breasts are well-supported, and my teeth barely show. A picture where I'm trying hard to say "beautiful." He always says "This is my skinny rib cage, my one, two chest hairs." That's all he ever says. Think of a bird with no feathers or think of a hundred lips bruising every inch of his skin. There are no pictures of him hoping he said the right thing.
Copyright © 2001 by Catie Rosemurgy. Reprinted from My Favorite Apocalypse with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. All rights reserved.
I've died enough by now I trust just what's imperfect or ruined. I mean God, God who is in the stop sign asking to be shotgunned, the ocean that evaporates even as we float. God the bent nail & broken lock, and God the hangnail. The hangnail. And a million others might be like me, our hopes a kind of illegal entry, a belief in smashed windows, every breakage like breaking & entering into a concert hall, the place my friend & I crawled into an air shaft, & later fell asleep. After breakage there is always sleep. We woke to gospel hymns from the dressing room below, songs commending embrace to the fists, & return to the prodigal. And hasn't my luck always been a shadow, stepping out, stretching? I mean I trust what breaks. A broken bone elicits condolence, and the phone call sounds French if the transmission fritzes, and our brains--our blessed, desirable brains--are composed of infinitesimal magnets, millions of them a billionth-of-a-milligram in weight, so they make us knock our heads against hard walls. When we pushed through the air vent, the men singing seemed only a little surprised, just slightly freaked, three of them in black tuxes, & the fourth in red satin, crimson, lit up like a furnace trimmed with paisley swirls, the furnace of a planet, or of a fatalistic ocean liner crisscrossing a planet we've not discovered yet, a fire you might love to be thrown into. That night they would perform the songs half the country kept on its lips half of every day. Songs mostly praising or lamenting or accusing some loved one of some beautiful, horrendous betrayal or affection. But dressing, between primping & joking about their thinning afros, they sang of Jesus. Jesus, who said, "Split a stick, & you shall find me inside." It was the winter we put on asbestos gloves, & flameproof stuck our hands in the fireplace, adjusting logs. Jesus, we told them, left no proof of having sung a single note. And that, said the lead singer, is why we are all sinners. What he meant was we are all like the saints on my neighbors' lawns-- whose plaster shoulders & noses, chipped cloaks & tiaras, have to be bundled in plastic sheets, each winter, blanketed from the wind & the cold. That was what he meant, though I couldn't know it then.
From Wise Poison by David Rivard, published by Graywolf Press. Copyright © 1996 David Rivard. Used with permission.
No sensation of falling, which suggests that this condition may be flight.
My eyes might be open or not. My coffee poured into a cup or
onto the countertop. This, a ball of saved rubberbands or the thick clot of tremors
I usually keep deep in the drawer that I can trust will stick
when I absent-mindedly forget, and try to open it.
What would it mean for a body to yield?
A use.
That is to say, dew moistens the grass and is gone.
The body moves from out of its past with each glimpse of its own
disappearance, cumulatively. With each drop of rain the earth’s atmosphere pelts
its grove of tall cedars and saplings
with equal force. A body
negating itself as an object possessable. To hold one’s breath would be to drown
in order to avoid drowning.
Copyright © 2011 by Rusty Morrison. Used with permission of the author.
If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, “It’s beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,”
I’d love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, “I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them.”
From The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan, published by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright © 1989 by Richard Brautigan. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.
The tide ebbs and reveals orange and purple sea stars. I have no theory of radiance, but after rain evaporates off pine needles, the needles glisten. In the courtyard, we spot the rising shell of a moon, and, at the equinox, bathe in its gleam. Using all the tides of starlight, we find vicissitude is our charm. On the mud flats off Homer, I catch the tremor when waves start to slide back in; and, from Roanoke, you carry the leafing jade smoke of willows. Looping out into the world, we thread and return. The lapping waves cover an expanse of mussels clustered on rocks; and, giving shape to what is unspoken, forsythia buds and blooms in our arms.
Copyright © 2011 by Arthur Sze. Used with permission of the author.
A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms. In a month, you will forget, then remember when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind. I will remember when I brake to a stop, and a hubcap rolls through the intersection. An angry man grinds pepper onto his salad; it is how you nail a tin amulet ear into the lintel. If, in deep emotion, we are possessed by the idea of possession, we can never lose to recover what is ours. Sounds of an abacus are amplified and condensed to resemble sounds of hail on a tin roof, but mind opens to the smell of lightening. Bodies were vaporized to shadows by intense heat; in memory people outline bodies on walls.
From The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, published by Copper Canyon Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Arthur Sze. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368.
A black biplane crashes through the window of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down, removing his leather hood. He hands me my grandmother's jade ring. No, it is two robin's eggs and a telephone number: yours.
From The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems by Gregory Orr. Copyright © 2002 by Gregory Orr. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved.
This is what was bequeathed us: This earth the beloved left And, leaving, Left to us. No other world But this one: Willows and the river And the factory With its black smokestacks. No other shore, only this bank On which the living gather. No meaning but what we find here. No purpose but what we make. That, and the beloved’s clear instructions: Turn me into song; sing me awake.
From How Beautiful the Beloved by Gregory Orr. Copyright © 2009 by Gregory Orr. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Will answers be found like seeds planted among rows of song? Will mouths recognize the hunger in their voices, all mouths in unison, the ah in harmony, the way words of hope are more than truth when whispered? Will we turn to each other and ask, how long has it been ... how long since? A world now, a world then and each is seeking a foothold, trying to remember when we looked at one another and found—A world again—Surely what we long for is at the wheel contending. Surely, we’ll soon hear its unearthly groan.
From Tocqueville by Khaled Mattawa, published by New Issues Poetry & Prose. Copyright © 2010 Khaled Mattawa. Used with permission of New Issues Poetry & Prose.
The downward turning touch the cry of time fire falling without sound plunge my hand in the wound children marching and dying all that I do is a crime because I do not reach their mouths silently crying my boychild reaches with his mouth it is easy, being a mother his skin is tender and soft kisses stitch us together we love as long as we may then come years without kisses when he will turn away not to waste breath when I too will fall embracing a pillow at night touching the stone of exile reaching my hand to death
From The Mother/Child Papers by Alicia Suskin Ostriker. Copyright © 2009 by Alicia Suskin Ostriker. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved.
Not for all the whiskey in heaven Not for all the flies in Vermont Not for all the tears in the basement Not for a million trips to Mars Not if you paid me in diamonds Not if you paid me in pearls Not if you gave me your pinky ring Not if you gave me your curls Not for all the fire in hell Not for all the blue in the sky Not for an empire of my own Not even for peace of mind No, never, I'll never stop loving you Not till my heart beats its last And even then in my words and my songs I will love you all over again
From All the Whiskey in Heaven by Charles Bernstein. Copyright © 2010 by Charles Bernstein. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
consciousness in itself of itself carrying 'the principle of the actual' being actual itself ((but maybe this is a love poem Mary) ) nevertheless neither the power of the self nor the racing car nor the lilly is sweet but this
From New and Collected Poems by George Oppen. Copyright © 1975 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions. All rights reserved.
I was forcing a wasp to the top of a window where there was some sky and there were tiger lilies outside just to love him or maybe only simply a kiss for he was hurrying home to fight a broom and I was trying to open a door with one hand while the other was swinging tomatoes, and you could even smell the corn for corn travels by wind and there was the first hint of cold and dark though it was nothing compared to what would come, and someone should mark the day, I think it was August 20th, and that should be the day of grief for grief begins then and the corn man starts to shiver and crows too and dogs who hate the wind though grief would come later and it was a relief to know I wasn't alone, but be as it may, since it was cold and dark I found myself singing the brilliant love songs of my other religion.
Copyright © 2012 by Gerald Stern. Used with permission of the author.
after James Wright
Startled by my breath it bolts
to the other end of the field.
The horizon’s brow rasps
against a green cloud
which seems both
desperate and sincere.
Into a dead tree
a flame of bird
drives its burning beak.
And somewhere out here
I have come to terms
with my brother’s suicide.
I wish the god of this place
would put me in its mouth
until I dissolve, until
the field doesn’t end
and I am broken open
like a shotgun,
swabbed clean.
Copyright © 2012 by Matt Rasmussen. Used with permission of the author.
I always thought death would be like traveling in a car, moving through the desert, the earth a little darker than sky at the horizon, that your life would settle like the end of a day and you would think of everyone you ever met, that you would be the invisible passenger, quiet in the car, moving through the night, forever, with the beautiful thought of home.
Copyright © 2011 by Carl Adamshick. Used with permission of the author.
Away from leaf touch, from twig. Away from the markings and evidence of others. Beyond the shale night filling with rain. Beyond the sleepy origin of sadness. Back, back into the ingrown room. The place where everything loved is placed, assembled for memory. The delicate hold and tender rearrangement of what is missing, like certain words, a color reflected off water a few years back. Apricots and what burns. It has obtained what it is. Sweet with a stone. Sweet with the concession of a few statements, a few lives it will touch without bruising.
First published in American Poet. Copyright © 2010 by Carl Adamshick. From Curses and Wishes (Louisiana State University Press, 2011). Used by permission of the author.
The fist clenched round my heart loosens a little, and I gasp brightness; but it tightens again. When have I ever not loved the pain of love? But this has moved past love to mania. This has the strong clench of the madman, this is gripping the ledge of unreason, before plunging howling into the abyss. Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.
"The Fist" from Collected Poems: 1948-1984 by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 1986 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Between the blinds Past the coded locks
Past the slanted gold bars of the day
Smelling of all-night salt rain on the docks
Of grief Of birth Of bergamot Of May
In the wind that lifts the harbor litter
Wet against my fingers in a dream
Salvaging among the tideline's bitter
gleanings Generous Exigent Lush and lean
Your voice A tune I thought I had forgotten
The taste of cold July brook on my tongue
A fire built on thick ice in the winter
The place where lost and salvaged meet and fit
The cadences a class in grief is taught in
The sound when frozen rivers start to run
Copyright © 2013 by Suzanne Gardinier. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on March 4, 2013.
I caught sight of it at a bus stop:
a white T-shirt, though
it was partly covered by
the turning form of a lanky youth massed
with other human forms intent upon
boarding the bus on which
I was riding, tucked in a corner seat on
the last row of seats on the bus, the right side, sheltered,
watching the surge as it entered the double rear doors that
soon welcomed as a bottleneck the half dozen
new passengers — tall, he walked back along the aisle until he stood
maybe a dozen feet from me, holding a rail
with one hand (the right), the other arm dangling, his hips relaxed,
every color — hair, eyebrows, lashes, half-day beard shadow,
heavy cotton pants, a
jacket dangling from the dangling left arm — black except for his
white T-shirt, unornamented, the folds from his twist
as he stood, deep drapery folds, the cotton heavier than ordinary
for such a garment, the trim at waist and short sleeves the same material rolled,
eye-catching for its clean bright whiteness, hinting at his beauty, and
beautiful in its self: a white T-shirt, an
object, he
would move slightly, the creases deepen
as the twist deepened
slightly —
at Castro, Market and 17th streets
he got off, many did, many boarded, his eyes, a light brown, met mine through
the bus window for a moment, the T-shirt at his neck white,
an object still
Copyright © 2013 by Lewis Ellingham. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on March 5, 2013. Browse the Poem-a-Day archive.
You sit at a window and listen to your father
crossing the dark grasses of the fields
toward you, a moon soaking through his shoes as he shuffles the wind
aside, the night in his hands like an empty bridle.
How long have we been this way, you ask him.
It must be ages, the wind answers. It must be the music of the wind
turning your fingers to glass, turning the furniture of childhood
to the colors of horses, turning them away.
Your father is still crossing the acres, a light on his tongue
like a small coin from an empire that has always been ruined.
Now the dark flocks are drifting through his shoulders
with an odor of lavender, an odor of gold. Now he has turned
as though to go, but only knelt down with the heavy oars
of October on his forearms, to begin the horrible rowing.
You sit in a chair in the room. The wind lies open
on your lap like the score of a life you did not measure.
You rise. You turn back to the room and repeat what you know:
The earth is not a home. The night is not an empty bridle
in the hands of a man crossing a field with a new moon
in his old wool. We abandon the dead. We abandon them.
Copyright © 2013 by Joseph Fasano. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on February 20, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
I bathe my television in total attention I give it my corneas
I give it my eardrums I give it my longing
In return I get pictures of girls fighting and men flying
and women in big houses with tight faces blotting down tears
with tiny knuckles Sometimes my mother calls
and I don't answer Sometimes a siren sings past the window
and summer air pushes in dripping with the scent
of human sweat But what do I care I've given my skin
to the TV I've given it my tastes In return it gives me so many
different sounds to fill the silence where the secrets
of my life flash by like ad space for the coming season
Copyright © 2013 by Brynn Saito. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on April 5, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
I am yours as the summer air at evening is
Possessed by the scent of linden blossoms,
As the snowcap gleams with light
Lent it by the brimming moon.
Without you I'd be an unleafed tree
Blasted in a bleakness with no Spring.
Your love is the weather of my being.
What is an island without the sea?
Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Poems, 1948–2003 by Daniel Hoffman. Copyright © 2003 by Daniel Hoffman.
This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on April 3, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
I carry myself out into the rainswept blur.
I lift my pleasant voice over the coming flood.
I have nothing to do that I’m going to do.
I keep meaning to purchase a dog. I keep waiting
to email you back. When I see you again will
I know who you are? Once I wove you a mask
of rattan and hair. Once I carved you a mask
of painted wood. I brushed my wooden leg
against your wooden leg. We had learned to imitate
each other’s breath. When I see you again will
you know who I am? Will you place your words back
into my open mouth? Once I held you for years
in the stones of my eyes. You were an ineluctable act of God.
Into the drainage ditch we hurled our toys.
Copyright © 2013 by Michael Dumanis. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on April 2, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?
From The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan, published by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright © 1989 by Richard Brautigan. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.
Three crates of Private Eye Lettuce, the name and drawing of a detective with magnifying glass on the sides of the crates of lettuce, form a great cross in man's imagination and his desire to name the objects of this world. I think I'll call this place Golgotha and have some salad for dinner.
From The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan, published by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright © 1989 by Richard Brautigan. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.
A few hours after Des Moines the toilet overflowed. This wasn't the adventure it sounds. I sat with a man whose tattoos weighed more than I did. He played Hendrix on mouth guitar. His Electric Ladyland lips weren't fast enough and if pitch and melody are the rudiments of music, this was just memory, a body nostalgic for the touch of adored sound. Hope's a smaller thing on a bus. You hope a forgotten smoke consorts with lint in the pocket of last resort to be upwind of the human condition, that the baby sleeps and when this never happens, that she cries with the lullaby meter of the sea. We were swallowed by rhythm. The ultra blond who removed her wig and applied fresh loops of duct tape to her skull, her companion who held a mirror and popped his dentures in and out of place, the boy who cut stuffing from the seat where his mother should have been— there was a little more sleep in our thoughts, it was easier to yield. To what, exactly— the suspicion that what we watch watches back, cornfields that stare at our hands, downtowns that hold us in their windows through the night? Or faith, strange to feel in that zoo of manners. I had drool on my shirt and breath of the undead, a guy dropped empty Buds on the floor like gravity was born to provide this service, we were white and black trash who'd come in an outhouse on wheels and still some had grown— in touching the spirited shirts on clotheslines, after watching a sky of starlings flow like cursive over wheat—back into creatures capable of a wish. As we entered Arizona I thought I smelled the ocean, liked the lie of this and closed my eyes as shadows puppeted against my lids. We brought our failures with us, their taste, their smell. But the kid who threw up in the back pushed to the window anyway, opened it and let the wind clean his face, screamed something I couldn't make out but agreed with in shape, a sound I recognized as everything I'd come so far to give away.
From Insomnia Diary by Bob Hicok. Copyright © 2004 by Bob Hicok. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved.
Dear murderous world, dear gawking heart, I never wrote back to you, not one word wrenched itself free of my fog-draped mind to dab in ink the day's dull catalog of ruin. Take back the ten-speed bike which bent like a child's cheap toy beneath me. Accept as your own the guitar that was smashed over my brother, who writes now from jail in Savannah, who I cannot begin to answer. Here is the beloved pet who died at my feet and there, outside my window, is where my mother buried it in a coffin meant for a newborn. Upon my family, raw and vigilant, visit numbness. Of numbness I know enough. And to you I've now written too much, dear cloud of thalidomide, dear spoon trembling at the mouth, dear marble-eyed doll never answering back.
From The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World by Paul Guest. Copyright © 2003 by Paul Guest. Reprinted by permission of New Issues Press. All rights reserved.
Someone went away / but once they were here / so I don't die / instead I see a movie / the one about a boy / falling into / the green screen / sky lit up / phosphorescent / spiders and chandeliers / like that one time / near an island / out on the lash / I fell out of you / you laughed / your eyes closed / spread wide / standing open / I asked you / who are you / pretending I am / I did / you said / I'm pretending you / are you / drawing a jacked up heart / across my hand / in every airport / rocking this depression electric / I dry swallow / a video pill / we smoke glitter / until my suit sounds good / I long to be alive / when the world ends / so in love / with someone / I end up / ending everyone
Copyright © 2012 by Ben Kopel. Used with permission of the author.