Verbal Armor

After Years

2010-10-18T05:12:00.000-07:00

Ted Kooser

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

The Triumph of Time

2010-05-23T18:24:00.000-07:00

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Before our lives divide for ever,
While time is with us and hands are free,
(Time, swift to fasten and swift to sever
Hand from hand, as we stand by the sea)
I will say no word that a man might say
Whose whole life's love goes down in a day;
For this could never have been; and never,
Though the gods and the years relent, shall be.

Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour,
To think of things that are well outworn?
Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower,
The dream foregone and the deed forborne?
Though joy be done with and grief be vain,
Time shall not sever us wholly in twain;
Earth is not spoilt for a single shower;
But the rain has ruined the ungrown corn.

It will grow not again, this fruit of my heart,
Smitten with sunbeams, ruined with rain.
The singing seasons divide and depart,
Winter and summer depart in twain.
It will grow not again, it is ruined at root,
The bloodlike blossom, the dull red fruit;
Though the heart yet sickens, the lips yet smart,
With sullen savour of poisonous pain.

I have given no man of my fruit to eat;
I trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine.
Had you eaten and drunken and found it sweet,
This wild new growth of the corn and vine,
This wine and bread without lees or leaven,
We had grown as gods, as the gods in heaven,
Souls fair to look upon, goodly to greet,
One splendid spirit, your soul and mine.

In the change of years, in the coil of things,
In the clamour and rumour of life to be,
We, drinking love at the furthest springs,
Covered with love as a covering tree,
We had grown as gods, as the gods above,
Filled from the heart to the lips with love,
Held fast in his hands, clothed warm with his wings,
O love, my love, had you loved but me!

We had stood as the sure stars stand, and moved
As the moon moves, loving the world; and seen
Grief collapse as a thing disproved,
Death consume as a thing unclean.
Twain halves of a perfect heart, made fast
Soul to soul while the years fell past;
Had you loved me once, as you have not loved;
Had the chance been with us that has not been.

I have put my days and dreams out of mind,
Days that are over, dreams that are done.
Though we seek life through, we shall surely find
There is none of them clear to us now, not one.
But clear are these things; the grass and the sand,
Where, sure as the eyes reach, ever at hand,
With lips wide open and face burnt blind,
The strong sea-daisies feast on the sun.

The low downs lean to the sea; the stream,
One loose thin pulseless tremulous vein,
Rapid and vivid and dumb as a dream,
Works downward, sick of the sun and the rain;
No wind is rough with the rank rare flowers;
The sweet sea, mother of loves and hours,
Shudders and shines as the grey winds gleam,
Turning her smile to a fugitive pain.

Mother of loves that are swift to fade,
Mother of mutable winds and hours.
A barren mother, a mother-maid,
Cold and clean as her faint salt flowers.
I would we twain were even as she,
Lost in the night and the light of the sea,
Where faint sounds falter and wan beams wade,
Break, and are broken, and shed into showers.

The loves and hours of the life of a man,
They are swift and sad, being born of the sea.
Hours that rejoice and regret for a span,
Born with a man's breath, mortal as he;
Loves that are lost ere they come to birth,
Weeds of the wave, without fruit upon earth.
I lose what I long for, save what I can,
My love, my love, and no love for me!

It is not much that a man can save
On the sands of life, in the straits of time,
Who swims in sight of the great third wave
That never a swimmer shall cross or climb.
Some waif washed up with the strays and spars
That ebb-tide shows to the shore and the stars;
Weed from the water, grass from a grave,
A broken blossom, a ruined rhyme.

There will no man do for your sake, I think,
What I would have done for the least word said.
I had wrung life dry for your lips to drink,
Broken it up for your daily bread:
Body for body and blood for blood,
As the flow of the full sea risen to flood
That yearns and trembles before it sink,
I had given, and lain down for you, glad and dead.

Yea, hope at highest and all her fruit,
And time at fullest and all his dower,
I had given you surely, and life to boot,
Were we once made one for a single hour.
But now, you are twain, you are cloven apart,
Flesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart;
And deep in one is the bitter root,
And sweet for one is the lifelong flower.

To have died if you cared I should die for you, clung
To my life if you bade me, played my part
As it pleased you--these were the thoughts that stung,
The dreams that smote with a keener dart
Than shafts of love or arrows of death;
These were but as fire is, dust, or breath,
Or poisonous foam on the tender tongue
Of the little snakes that eat my heart.

I wish we were dead together to-day,
Lost sight of, hidden away out of sight,
Clasped and clothed in the cloven clay,
Out of the world's way, out of the light,
Out of the ages of worldly weather,
Forgotten of all men altogether,
As the world's first dead, taken wholly away,
Made one with death, filled full of the night.

How we should slumber, how we should sleep,
Far in the dark with the dreams and the dews!
And dreaming, grow to each other, and weep,
Laugh low, live softly, murmur and muse;
Yea, and it may be, struck through by the dream,
Feel the dust quicken and quiver, and seem
Alive as of old to the lips, and leap
Spirit to spirit as lovers use.

Sick dreams and sad of a dull delight;
For what shall it profit when men are dead
To have dreamed, to have loved with the whole soul's might,
To have looked for day when the day was fled?
Let come what will, there is one thing worth,
To have had fair love in the life upon earth:
To have held love safe till the day grew night,
While skies had colour and lips were red.

Would I lose you now? would I take you then,
If I lose you now that my heart has need?
And come what may after death to men,
What thing worth this will the dead years breed?
Lose life, lose all; but at least I know,
O sweet life's love, having loved you so,
Had I reached you on earth, I should lose not again,
In death nor life, nor in dream or deed.

Yea, I know this well: were you once sealed mine,
Mine in the blood's beat, mine in the breath,
Mixed into me as honey in wine,
Not time, that sayeth and gainsayeth,
Nor all strong things had severed us then;
Not wrath of gods, nor wisdom of men,
Nor all things earthly, nor all divine,
Nor joy nor sorrow, nor life nor death.

I had grown pure as the dawn and the dew,
You had grown strong as the sun or the sea.
But none shall triumph a whole life through:
For death is one, and the fates are three.
At the door of life, by the gate of breath,
There are worse things waiting for men than death;
Death could not sever my soul and you,
As these have severed your soul from me.

You have chosen and clung to the chance they sent you,
Life sweet as perfume and pure as prayer.
But will it not one day in heaven repent you?
Will they solace you wholly, the days that were?
Will you lift up your eyes between sadness and bliss,
Meet mine, and see where the great love is,
And tremble and turn and be changed? Content you;
The gate is strait; I shall not be there.

But you, had you chosen, had you stretched hand,
Had you seen good such a thing were done,
I too might have stood with the souls that stand
In the sun's sight, clothed with the light of the sun;
But who now on earth need care how I live?
Have the high gods anything left to give,
Save dust and laurels and gold and sand?
Which gifts are goodly; but I will none.

O all fair lovers about the world,
There is none of you, none, that shall comfort me.
My thoughts are as dead things, wrecked and whirled
Round and round in a gulf of the sea;
And still, through the sound and the straining stream,
Through the coil and chafe, they gleam in a dream,
The bright fine lips so cruelly curled,
And strange swift eyes where the soul sits free.

Free, without pity, withheld from woe,
Ignorant; fair as the eyes are fair.
Would I have you change now, change at a blow,
Startled and stricken, awake and aware?
Yea, if I could, would I have you see
My very love of you filling me,
And know my soul to the quick, as I know
The likeness and look of your throat and hair?

I shall not change you. Nay, though I might,
Would I change my sweet one love with a word?
I had rather your hair should change in a night,
Clear now as the plume of a black bright bird;
Your face fail suddenly, cease, turn grey,
Die as a leaf that dies in a day.
I will keep my soul in a place out of sight,
Far off, where the pulse of it is not heard.

Far off it walks, in a bleak blown space,
Full of the sound of the sorrow of years.
I have woven a veil for the weeping face,
Whose lips have drunken the wine of tears;
I have found a way for the failing feet,
A place for slumber and sorrow to meet;
There is no rumour about the place,
Nor light, nor any that sees or hears.

I have hidden my soul out of sight, and said
"Let none take pity upon thee, none
Comfort thy crying: for lo, thou art dead,
Lie still now, safe out of sight of the sun.
Have I not built thee a grave, and wrought
Thy grave-clothes on thee of grievous thought,
With soft spun verses and tears unshed,
And sweet light visions of things undone?

"I have given thee garments and balm and myrrh,
And gold, and beautiful burial things.
But thou, be at peace now, make no stir;
Is not thy grave as a royal king's?
Fret not thyself though the end were sore;
Sleep, be patient, vex me no more.
Sleep; what hast thou to do with her?
The eyes that weep, with the mouth that sings?"

Where the dead red leaves of the years lie rotten,
The cold old crimes and the deeds thrown by,
The misconceived and the misbegotten,
I would find a sin to do ere I die,
Sure to dissolve and destroy me all through,
That would set you higher in heaven, serve you
And leave you happy, when clean forgotten,
As a dead man out of mind, am I.

Your lithe hands draw me, your face burns through me,
I am swift to follow you, keen to see;
But love lacks might to redeem or undo me;
As I have been, I know I shall surely be;
"What should such fellows as I do?" Nay,
My part were worse if I chose to play;
For the worst is this after all; if they knew me,
Not a soul upon earth would pity me.

And I play not for pity of these; but you,
If you saw with your soul what man am I,
You would praise me at least that my soul all through
Clove to you, loathing the lives that lie;
The souls and lips that are bought and sold,
The smiles of silver and kisses of gold,
The lapdog loves that whine as they chew,
The little lovers that curse and cry.

There are fairer women, I hear; that may be;
But I, that I love you and find you fair,
Who are more than fair in my eyes if they be,
Do the high gods know or the great gods care?
Though the swords in my heart for one were seven,
Should the iron hollow of doubtful heaven,
That knows not itself whether night-time or day be,
Reverberate words and a foolish prayer?

I will go back to the great sweet mother,
Mother and lover of men, the sea.
I will go down to her, I and none other,
Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me;
Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast:
O fair white mother, in days long past
Born without sister, born without brother,
Set free my soul as thy soul is free.

O fair green-girdled mother of mine,
Sea, that art clothed with the sun and the rain,
Thy sweet hard kisses are strong like wine,
Thy large embraces are keen like pain.
Save me and hide me with all thy waves,
Find me one grave of thy thousand graves,
Those pure cold populous graves of thine
Wrought without hand in a world without stain.

I shall sleep, and move with the moving ships,
Change as the winds change, veer in the tide;
My lips will feast on the foam of thy lips,
I shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside;
Sleep, and not know if she be, if she were,
Filled full with life to the eyes and hair,
As a rose is fulfilled to the roseleaf tips
With splendid summer and perfume and pride.

This woven raiment of nights and days,
Were it once cast off and unwound from me,
Naked and glad would I walk in thy ways,
Alive and aware of thy ways and thee;
Clear of the whole world, hidden at home,
Clothed with the green and crowned with the foam,
A pulse of the life of thy straits and bays,
A vein in the heart of the streams of the sea.

Fair mother, fed with the lives of men,
Thou art subtle and cruel of heart, men say.
Thou hast taken, and shalt not render again;
Thou art full of thy dead, and cold as they.
But death is the worst that comes of thee;
Thou art fed with our dead, O mother, O sea,
But when hast thou fed on our hearts? or when,
Having given us love, hast thou taken away?

O tender-hearted, O perfect lover,
Thy lips are bitter, and sweet thine heart.
The hopes that hurt and the dreams that hover,
Shall they not vanish away and apart?
But thou, thou art sure, thou art older than earth;
Thou art strong for death and fruitful of birth;
Thy depths conceal and thy gulfs discover;
From the first thou wert; in the end thou art.

And grief shall endure not for ever, I know.
As things that are not shall these things be;
We shall live through seasons of sun and of snow,
And none be grievous as this to me.
We shall hear, as one in a trance that hears,
The sound of time, the rhyme of the years;
Wrecked hope and passionate pain will grow
As tender things of a spring-tide sea.

Sea-fruit that swings in the waves that hiss,
Drowned gold and purple and royal rings.
And all time past, was it all for this?
Times unforgotten, and treasures of things?
Swift years of liking and sweet long laughter,
That wist not well of the years thereafter
Till love woke, smitten at heart by a kiss,
With lips that trembled and trailing wings?

There lived a singer in France of old
By the tideless dolorous midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman, and none but she.
And finding life for her love's sake fail,
Being fain to see her, he bade set sail,
Touched land, and saw her as life grew cold,
And praised God, seeing; and so died he.

Died, praising God for his gift and grace:
For she bowed down to him weeping, and said
"Live"; and her tears were shed on his face
Or ever the life in his face was shed.
The sharp tears fell through her hair, and stung
Once, and her close lips touched him and clung
Once, and grew one with his lips for a space;
And so drew back, and the man was dead.

O brother, the gods were good to you.
Sleep, and be glad while the world endures.
Be well content as the years wear through;
Give thanks for life, and the loves and lures;
Give thanks for life, O brother, and death,
For the sweet last sound of her feet, her breath,
For gifts she gave you, gracious and few,
Tears and kisses, that lady of yours.

Rest, and be glad of the gods; but I,
How shall I praise them, or how take rest?
There is not room under all the sky
For me that know not of worst or best,
Dream or desire of the days before,
Sweet things or bitterness, any more.
Love will not come to me now though I die,
As love came close to you, breast to breast.

I shall never be friends again with roses;
I shall loathe sweet tunes, where a note grown strong
Relents and recoils, and climbs and closes,
As a wave of the sea turned back by song.
There are sounds where the soul's delight takes fire,
Face to face with its own desire;
A delight that rebels, a desire that reposes;
I shall hate sweet music my whole life long.

The pulse of war and passion of wonder,
The heavens that murmur, the sounds that shine,
The stars that sing and the loves that thunder,
The music burning at heart like wine,
An armed archangel whose hands raise up
All senses mixed in the spirit's cup
Till flesh and spirit are molten in sunder--
These things are over, and no more mine.

These were a part of the playing I heard
Once, ere my love and my heart were at strife;
Love that sings and hath wings as a bird,
Balm of the wound and heft of the knife.
Fairer than earth is the sea, and sleep
Than overwatching of eyes that weep,
Now time has done with his one sweet word,
The wine and leaven of lovely life.

I shall go my ways, tread out my measure,
Fill the days of my daily breath
With fugitive things not good to treasure,
Do as the world doth, say as it saith;
But if we had loved each other--O sweet,
Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet,
The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure
To feel you tread it to dust and death--

Ah, had I not taken my life up and given
All that life gives and the years let go,
The wine and honey, the balm and leaven,
The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low?
Come life, come death, not a word be said;
Should I lose you living, and vex you dead?
I never shall tell you on earth; and in heaven,
If I cry to you then, will you hear or know?

Perfection Wasted

2006-06-30T20:13:00.000-07:00

John Updike

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market --
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories
packed in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

Gin

2006-06-29T22:33:00.000-07:00

Meg Kearney

She came to sex as she'd come to gin. Five
years in the convent, what did she know
about gin? Sister Emmanuel said the Devil
himself was suckled on it, and after her
third drink in the Red Kilt she knew he was
inside her like a crazed Wizard of Oz,
pushing and pumping her levers and gears.
Each time she brought the glass to her lips,
Sister's voice whispered, "You couldn't
lift one finger, not one pinky of one hand
if not for the Love of God." But she was
twenty-five and didn't know anything about
love. She knew she wasn't holy, or chaste, or
even sorry. And she knew she was alone when
the man called her beautiful, when the gin
said Baby, relax, enjoy it while you can.

The Wall

2006-06-27T22:31:00.000-07:00

Zbigniew Herbert

We are standing under the wall. Our
youth has been taken off like a shirt from
the condemned men. We wait. Before the
fat bullet will sit down on the nape of the
neck, ten, twenty years pass. The wall is
high and strong. Behind the wall is a tree
and a star. The tree pries at the wall with
its roots. The star nibbles the stone like a
mouse. In a hundred, two hundred years
there will already be a small window.

There Is No City That Does Not Dream

2006-06-26T22:29:00.000-07:00

Anne Michaels

There is no city that does not dream
from its foundations. The lost lake
crumbling in the hands of brickmakers,
the floor of the ravine where light lies broken
with the memory of rivers. All the winters
stored in the geologic
garden. Dinosaurs sleep in the subway
at Bloor and Shaw, a bed of bones
under the rumbling track. The storm
that lit the city with the voltage
of spring, when we were eighteen
on the clean earth. The ferry ride in the rain,
wind wet with wedding music and everything that
sings in the carbon of stone and bone
like a page of love, wind-lost from a hand, unread.

Envoy of the Boat

2006-06-25T22:27:00.000-07:00

Larissa Szporluk

He loves what he cannot love,
lapping toward it, with the love
that exists between lakes, wanting each other
so much, wanting just to meet
inside themselves, taste the fish,
how deep is your gulch,
how vocal the fowl that visit you?
With unexpected tenderness,
that's how he lives, watching,
dreaming at night they grow close,
the forlorn part of their bodies
upswelling with swell, each pore frothed too,
morning forgotten, the message, war,
more sky in his mouth than water.

A Few Things to Consider

2006-06-24T22:25:00.000-07:00

Sandra Cisneros

First there is the scent of barley
to remember. Barley and rain.
The smooth terrain to recollect and savor.

Unforgiving whiteness of the room.
Ambiguity of linen. Purity.
Mute and still as photographs on the moon.

Everything here must be analyzed.
Catalogued. Studied twice.
A painstaking arrangement, almost vain.

Brandy glass with its one amber eye
on the bedside table. Shirt
draped across the chair. Woolen
trousers folded neatly in a square.
Little clock repeating--
precise, precise.

Not a stray whisker.
No comb full of dead hair.
No cup filled with coins and cuff
links and fingernail clippers.
A scrupulous chess game.
Formal. Concise.

There is much to learn.
Grace of the neck to memorize.
Heliotrope of sleep.
Hieroglyph of bones to decipher.
Love, if at all, comes later.

For now, the hands take to their dialogue.
Gullible as foreigners.
A greedy chattering, endlessly on nothing.
Nothing at all.

Toast

2006-06-23T22:24:00.000-07:00

Leonard Nathan

There was a woman in Ithaca
who cried softly all night
in the next room and helpless
I fell in love with her under the blanket
of snow that settled on all the roofs
of the town, filling up
every dark depression.

Next morning
in the motel coffee shop
I studied all the made-up faces
of women. Was it the middle-aged blonde
who kidded the waitress
or the young brunette lifting
her cup like a toast?

Love, whoever you are,
your courage was my companion
for many cold towns
after the betrayal of Ithaca,
and when I order coffee
in a strange place, still
I say, lifting, this is for you.

What Work Is

2006-06-22T14:30:00.000-07:00

Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

Today and Two Thousand Years from Now

2006-06-22T14:29:00.001-07:00

Philip Levine

The job is over. We stand under the trees
waiting to be told what to do,
but the job is over.

The darkness pours between the branches above,
but the moon's not yet
on its walk

through the night sky trailed by stars.
Suddenly a match flares, I see
there are only us two,

you and me, alone together in the great room
of the night world, two laborers
with nothing to do,

so I lean to the little flame and light my Lucky
and thank you, comrade, and again
we are in the dark.

Let me now predict the future. Two thousand years
from now we two will be older,
wiser, having escaped

the fleeting incarnations of workingmen.
We will have risen from the earth
of southern Michigan

through the tangled roots of Chinese elms
or ancient rosebushes to take
the tainted air

into our leaves and send it back, purified,
down the same trail we took
to escape the dark.

Two thousand years passed in a flash to shed
no more light than a wooden match
gave under the trees

when you and I were lost kids, more scared than
now, but warm, useless, with names
and different faces.

Heaven

2006-06-22T14:29:00.000-07:00

Philip Levine

If you were twenty-seven
and had done time for beating
your ex-wife and had
no dreams you remembered
in the morning, you might
lie on your bed and listen
to a mad canary sing
and think it all right to be
there every Saturday
ignoring your neighbors, the streets,
the signs that said join,
and the need to be helping.
You might build, as he did,
a network of golden ladders
so that the bird could roam
on all levels of the room;
you might paint the ceiling blue,
the floor green, and shade
the place you called the sun
so that things came softly to order
when the light came on.
He and the bird lived
in the fine weather of heaven;
they never aged, they
never tired or wanted
all through that war,
but when it was over
and the nation had been saved,
he knew they'd be hunted.
He knew, as you would too,
that he'd be laid off
for not being braver
and it would do no good
to show how he had taken
clothespins and cardboard
and made each step safe.
It would do no good
to have been one of the few
that climbed higher and higher
even in time of war,
for now there would be the poor
asking for their share,
and hurt men in uniforms,
and no one to believe
that heaven was really here.

To The One Upstairs

2006-06-21T22:44:00.000-07:00

Charles Simic

Boss of all bosses of the universe.
Mr. know-it-all, wheeler-dealer, wire-puller,
And whatever else you're good at.
Go ahead, shuffle your zeros tonight.
Dip in ink the comets' tails.
Staple the night with starlight.

You'd be better off reading coffee dregs,
Thumbing the pages of the Farmer's Almanac.
But no! You love to put on airs,
And cultivate your famous serenity
While you sit behind your big desk
With zilch in your in-tray, zilch
In your out-tray,
And all of eternity spread around you.

Doesn't it give you the creeps
To hear them begging you on their knees,
Sputtering endearments,
As if you were an inflatable, life-size doll?
Tell them to button up and go to bed.
Stop pretending you're too busy to take notice.

Your hands are empty and so are your eyes.
There's nothing to put your signature to,
Even if you knew your own name,
Or believed the ones I keep inventing,
As I scribble this note to you in the dark.

Late September

2006-06-21T22:43:00.000-07:00

Charles Simic

The mail truck goes down the coast
Carrying a single letter.
At the end of a long pier
The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then
And forgets to put it down.
There is a menace in the air
Of tragedies in the making.

Last night you thought you heard television
In the house next door.
You were sure it was some new
Horror they were reporting,
So you went out to find out.
Barefoot, wearing just shorts.
It was only the sea sounding weary
After so many lifetimes
Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere
And never getting anywhere.

This morning, it felt like Sunday.
The heavens did their part
By casting no shadow along the boardwalk
Or the row of vacant cottages,
Among them a small church
With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close
As if they, too, had the shivers.

The Old World

2006-06-21T22:40:00.000-07:00

Charles Simic

I believe in the soul; so far
It hasn't made much difference.
I remember an afternoon in Sicily.
The ruins of some temple.
Columns fallen in the grass like naked lovers.

The olives and goat cheese tasted delicious
And so did the wine
With which I toasted the coming night,
The darting swallows,
The Saracen wind and moon.

It got darker. There was something
Long before there were words:
The evening meal of shepherds . . .
A fleeting whiteness among the trees . . .
Eternity eavesdropping on time.

The goddess going to bathe in the sea.
She must not be followed.
These rocks, these cypress trees,
May be her old lovers.
Oh to be one of them, the wine whispered to me.

Errata

2006-06-21T22:36:00.000-07:00

Charles Simic

Where it says snow
read teeth-marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police-whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant's bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn't bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer-bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name

Clouds Gathering

2006-06-21T22:35:00.000-07:00

Charles Simic

It seemed the kind of life we wanted.
Wild strawberries and cream in the morning.
Sunlight in every room.
The two of us walking by the sea naked.

Some evenings, however, we found ourselves
Unsure of what comes next.
Like tragic actors in a theater on fire,
With birds circling over our heads,
The dark pines strangely still,
Each rock we stepped on bloodied by the sunset.

We were back on our terrace sipping wine.
Why always this hint of an unhappy ending?
Clouds of almost human appearance
Gathering on the horizon, but the rest lovely
With the air so mild and the sea untroubled.

The night suddenly upon us, a starless night.
You lighting a candle, carrying it naked
Into our bedroom and blowing it out quickly.
The dark pines and grasses strangely still.

Not Love Perhaps

2006-06-20T17:57:00.000-07:00

A.S.J. Tessimond

This is not Love, perhaps,
Love that lays down its life,
that many waters cannot quench,
nor the floods drown,
But something written in lighter ink,
said in a lower tone, something, perhaps, especially our own.

A need, at times, to be together and talk,
And then the finding we can walk
More firmly through dark narrow places,
And meet more easily nightmare faces;
A need to reach out, sometimes, hand to hand,
And then find Earth less like an alien land;
A need for alliance to defeat
The whisperers at the corner of the street.

A need for inns on roads, islands in seas,
Halts for discoveries to be shared,
Maps checked, notes compared;
A need, at times, of each for each,
Direct as the need of throat and tongue for speech.

One Almost Might

2006-06-20T17:52:00.000-07:00

A.S.J. Tessimond

Wouldn’t you say,
Wouldn’t you say: one day,
With a little more time or a little more patience, one might
Disentangle for separate, deliberate, slow delight
One of the moment’s hundred strands, unfray
Beginnings from endings, this from that, survey
Say a square inch of the ground one stands on, touch
Part of oneself or a leaf or a sound (not clutch
Or cuff or bruise but touch with finger-tip, ear-
Tip, eyetip, creeping near yet not too near);
Might take up life and lay it on one’s palm
And, encircling it in closeness, warmth and calm,
Let it lie still, then stir smooth-softly, and
Tendril by tendril unfold, there on one’s hand...

One might examine eternity’s cross-section
For a second, with slightly more patience, more time for reflection?

Day Dream

2006-06-20T17:44:00.000-07:00

A.S.J. Tessimond

One day people will touch and talk perhaps
easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as
sunlight,
And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted,
Unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers,
Unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea,
And work will be simple and swift
as a seagull flying,
And play will be casual and quiet
as a seagull settling,
And the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder
or care or notice,
And people will smile without reason,
Even in winter, even in the rain.

Voyages

2006-06-19T22:47:00.000-07:00

Hart Crane

I.

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.

II.

--And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers' hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,--
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,--
Hasten, while they are true,--sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

III.

Infinite consanguinity it bears
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking! and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,-
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands...

IV.

Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings
Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe
Chilled albatross's white immutability)
No stream of greater love advancing now
Than, singing, this mortality alone
Through clay aflow immortally to you.

All fragrance irrefragably, and claim
Madly meeting logically in this hour
And region that is ours to wreathe again,
Portending eyes and lips and making told
The chancel port and portion of our June-

Shall they not stem and close in our own steps
Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I
Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?

In signature of the incarnate word
The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling
.Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown
And widening noon within your breast for gathering
All bright insinuations that my years have caught
For islands where must lead inviolably
Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes-
In this expectant, still exclaim receive
The secret oar and petals of all love.

V.

Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,
Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast
Together in one merciless white blade-
The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.

-As if too brittle or too clear to touch!
The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.
One frozen trackless smile . . . What words
Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we

Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword
Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,
Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved
And changed . "There's

Nothing like this in the world," you say,
is Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look
Too, into that godless cleft of sky
Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.

"-And never to quite understand!" No,
In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
Nothing so flagless as this piracy.

But now
Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.
Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.

VI.

Where icy and bright dungeons lift
Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
And ocean rivers, churning, shift
Green borders under stranger skies,

Steadily as a shell secretes
Its beating leagues of monotone,
Or as many waters trough the sun's
Red kelson past the cape's wet stone;

0 rivers mingling toward the sky
And harbor of the phoenix' breast
My eyes pressed black against the prow,
-Thy derelict and blinded guest

Waiting, afire, what name, unspoken
I cannot claim: let thy waves rear
More savage than the death of kings,
Some splintered garland for the seer.

Beyond siroccos harvesting
The solstice thunders, crept away,
Like a cliff swinging or a sail
Flung into April's inmost day-

Creation's blithe and petalled word
To the lounged goddess when she rose
Conceding dialogue with eyes
That smile unsearchable repose-

Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,
-Unfolded floating dais before
Which rainbows twine continual hair
Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!

The imaged Word, it is, that holds
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.

Application to the Arts Council for a grant to write this poem

2006-06-18T14:44:00.000-07:00

Christopher Meredith

Sir/Madam
The poem (hereinafter called The Poem)
will consist of approximately 35-45 lines.
In the opening two or three lines
a startling image will be broached.
All nouns at this stage will be concrete
and multisyllabic latinate words
will be avoided.
The immediacy this generates
may well pull the reader (hereinafter
The Reader) through The Poem
with a sense of its integrity,
though it may not necessarily be comprehensible.
This will be facilitated by a firm but
unobtrusive control of rhythm and line
breaks.
More images will follow.
They will establish an atmosphere, a milieu
both oblique and bleak,
perhaps outdoors: a Landscape, some Weather.
Some small detail will suggest the larger world
(e.g., a thumbnail scraping at dried paint
standing for the crisis of lost meaning etc.).
Point of view will be crucial to The Poem.
Late on and subtly it will emerge
That there is an I
about whom (or who) The Reader must be
cautious. (I may not be the author, etc.)
Near the end there will be a shift –
perhaps there is a sudden change of tense.
Earlier images recur, perhaps a little altered,
(e.g. the sky is dark, a thumbnail picks at dried blood)
reflecting and refracting all that has been said.

Your fund provides an excellent opportunity
to embark on The Poem. I have approached
my employers, who are sympathetic, for release.
I believe you favour most those projects
devoted to capital investment.
This is one such. If successful, I plan
to build a house for all eternity.
(My CV is enclosed.)

A Tone Poem

2006-06-17T15:06:00.000-07:00

John Ashbery

It is no longer night. But there is a sameness
Of intention, all the same, in the ways
We address it, rude
Color of what an amazing world,
As it goes flat, or rubs off, and this
Is a marvel, we think, and are careful not to go past it.

But it is the same thing we are all seeing,
Our world. Go after it,
Go get it boy, says the man holding the stick.
Eat, says the hunger, and we plunge blindly in again,
Into the chamber behind the thought.
We can hear it, even think it, but can't get disentangled
from our brains.
Here, I am holding the winning ticket. Over here.
But it is all the same color again, as though the climate
Dyed everything the same color. It's more practical,
Yet the landscape, these billboards, age as rapidly as before.

The Ticket

2006-06-17T15:05:00.000-07:00

John Ashbery

The experience of writing you these love letters ...
Fences not concluding, nothing, no even, water in your eye, seeming anything
The garden in mist, perhaps, but egocentricity makes up for that, the winter locusts, whitened
Her hand not leading anywhere. Her head into the yard, maples, a stump seen through a gauze of bottles, ruptures--
You had no permission, to carry anything out, working to carry out the insane orders given you to raze
The box, red, funny going underground
And, being no reason suspicious, mud of the day, the plaid--I was near you where you want to be
Down in the little house writing you.

Though afterwards tears seem skunks
And the difficult position we in to light the world
Of awe, mush raging, the stump again
And as always before
The scientific gaze, perfume, millions, tall laugh
That was ladder though not of uncertain, innocuous truths, the felt branch--
To a ditch of wine and tubs, spraying the poster with blood, telegraph, all the time
Automatically taking the things in, that had not been spoiled, sordid.

The Ecclesiast

2006-06-17T15:04:00.000-07:00

John Ashbery

"Worse than the sunflower," she had said.
But the new dimension of truth had only recently
Burst in on us. Now it was to be condemned.
And in vagrant shadow her mothball truth is eaten.
In cool, like-it-or-not shadow the humdrum is consumed.
Tired housewives begat it some decades ago,
A small piece of truth that is it was honey to the lips
Was also millions of miles from filling the place reserved for it.
You see how honey crumbles your universe
Which seems like an institution – how many walls?

Then everything, in her belief, was to be submerged
And soon. There was no life you could live out to its end
And no attitude which, in the end, would save you.
The monkish and the frivolous alike were to be trapped
in death's capacious claw
But listen while I tell you about the wallpaper –
There was a key to everything in that oak forest
But a sad one. Ever since childhood there
Has been this special meaning to everything.
You smile at your friend's joke, but only later, through tears.

For the shoe pinches, even though it fits perfectly.
Apples were made to be gathered, also the whole host of the
world’s ailments and troubles.
There is no time like the present for giving in to this temptation.
Once the harvest is in and the animals put away for the winter
To stand at the uncomprehending window cultivating the desert
With salt tears which will never do anyone any good.
My dearest I am as a galleon on salt billows.
Perfume my head with forgetting all around me.

For some day these projects will return.
The funereal voyage over ice-strewn seas is ended.
You wake up forgetting. Already
Daylight shakes you in the yard.
The hands remain empty. They are constructing an osier basket
Just now, and across the sunlight darkness is taking root anew
In intense activity. You shall never have seen it just this way
And that is to be your one reward.

Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living.
The night is cold and delicate and full of angels
Pounding down the living. The factories are all lit up,
The chime goes unheard.
We are together at last, though far apart.

Street Musicians

2006-06-17T15:03:00.000-07:00

John Ashbery

One died, and the soul was wrenched out
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on
The same corners, volumetrics, shadows
Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever
Called, through increasingly suburban airs
And ways, with autumn falling over everything:
Of an obscure family being evicted
Into the way it was, and is. The other beached
Glimpses of what the other was up to:
Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.

So I cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself
In November, with the spaces among the days
More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.
Our question of a place of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
In coves with the water always seeping up, and left
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

Posture of Unease

2006-06-17T15:02:00.000-07:00

John Ashbery

It all seems like dirt now.
There is a film of dust on the lucid morning
Of an autumn landscape, that must be worse
Where it's tightening up,
Where not everything has its own two feet to stand on.

It gets more and more simplistic:
Good and bad, evil and bad; what else do we know?
Flavors that keep us from caring too long.

But there was that train of thought
That satisfied one nicely: how one was going to climb down
Out of here, hopefully
To arrive on a perfectly flat spit of sand
Level with the water.

And everything would look new and worn again.
Suddenly, a shout, a convincing one.
People in twos and threes turn up, and
There's more to it than that.

But for all you I
Have neglected, ignored,
Left to stew in your own juices,
Not been that friend that is approaching,
I ask forgiveness, a song new like rain.
Please sing it to me.

Two Scenes

2006-06-17T14:56:00.000-07:00

John Ashbery

I
We see us as we truly behave:
From every corner comes a distinctive offering.
The train comes bearing joy;
The sparks it strikes illuminate the table.
Destiny guides the water-pilot, and it is destiny.
For long we hadn't heard so much news, such noise.
The day was warm and pleasant.
"We see you in your hair,
Air resting around the tips of mountains."

II
A fine rain anoints the canal machinery.
This is perhaps a day of general honesty
Without example in the world's history
Though the fumes are not of a singular authority
And indeed are dry as poverty.
Terrific units are on an old man
In the blue shadow of some paint cans
As laughing cadets say, "In the evening
Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is."

Illustration

2006-06-17T14:27:00.000-07:00

John Ashbery

I
A novice was sitting on a cornice
High over the city. Angels

Combined their prayers with those
Of the police, begging her to come off it.

One lady promised to be her friend.
"I do not want a friend," she said.

A mother offered her some nylons
Stripped from her very legs. Others brought

Little offerings of fruit and candy,
The blind man all his flowers. If any

Could be called successful, these were,
For that the scene should be a ceremony

Was what she wanted. "I desire
monuments," she said. "I want to move

Figuratively, as waves caress
The thoughtless shore. You people I know

Will offer me every good thing
I do not want. But please remember

I died accepting them." With that, the wind
Unpinned her bulky robes, and naked

As a roc's egg, she drifted softly downward
Out of the angels' tenderness and the minds of men.

II
Much that is beautiful must be discarded
So that we may resemble a taller

Impression of ourselves. Moths climb in the flame,
Alas, that wish only to be the flame:

They do not lessen in our stature.
We twinkle under the weight

Of indiscretions. But how could we tell
That of the truth we know, she was

The somber vestment? For that night, rockets sighed
Elegantly over the city, and there was feasting:

There is so much in that moment!
So many attitudes toward that flame,

We might have soared from earth, watching her glide
Aloft, in her peplum of bright leaves.

But she, of course, was only an effigy
of indifference, a miracle

Not meant for us, as the leaves are not
Winter's because it is the end.

Driving

2006-06-16T17:55:00.000-07:00

Diana Ben-Lev

1

The summer our marriage failed
we picked sage to sweeten our hot dark car.

We sat in the yard with heavy glasses of iced tea,
talking about which seeds to sow

when the soil was cool. Praising our large, smooth spinach
leaves, free this year of Fusarium wilt,

downy mildew, blue mold. And then we spoke of flowers,
and there was a joke, you said, about old florists

who were forced to make other arrangements.
Delphiniums flared along the back fence.

All summer it hurt to look at you.

2

I heard a woman on the bus say, "He and I were going
in different directions." As if it had something to do

with a latitude or a pole. Trying to write down
how love empties itself from a house, how a view

changes, how the sign for infinity turns into a noose
for a couple. Trying to say that weather weighed

down all the streets we traveled on, that if gravel sinks,
it keeps sinking. How can I blame you who kneeled day

after day in wet soil, pulling slugs from the seedlings?
You who built a ten-foot arch for the beans, who hated

a bird feeder left unfilled. You who gave
carrots to a gang of girls on bicycles.

3

On our last trip we drove through rain
to a town lit with vacancies.

We'd come to watch whales. At the dock we met
five other couples—all of us fluorescent,

waterproof, ready for the pitch and frequency
of the motor that would lure these great mammals

near. The boat chugged forward—trailing a long,
creamy wake. The captain spoke from a loudspeaker:

In winter gray whales love Laguna Guerrero; it's warm
and calm, no killer whales gulp down their calves.

Today we'll see them on their way to Alaska. If we
get close enough, observe their eyes—they're bigger

than baseballs, but can only look down. Whales can
communicate at a distance of 300 miles—but it's

my guess they're all saying, Can you hear me?
His laughter crackled. When he told us Pink Floyd is slang

for a whale's two-foot penis, I stopped listening.
The boat rocked, and for two hours our eyes

were lost in the waves—but no whales surfaced, blowing
or breaching or expelling water through baleen plates.

Again and again you patiently wiped the spray
from your glasses. We smiled to each other, good

troopers used to disappointment. On the way back
you pointed at cormorants riding the waves—

you knew them by name: the Brants, the Pelagic,
the double-breasted. I only said, I'm sure

whales were swimming under us by the dozens.

4

Trying to write that I loved the work of an argument,
the exhaustion of forgiving, the next morning,

washing our handprints off the wineglasses. How I loved
sitting with our friends under the plum trees,

in the white wire chairs, at the glass table. How you
stood by the grill, delicately broiling the fish. How

the dill grew tall by the window. Trying to explain
how camellias spoil and bloom at the same time,

how their perfume makes lovers ache. Trying
to describe the ways sex darkens

and dies, how two bodies can lie
together, entwined, out of habit.

Finding themselves later, tired, by a fire,
on an old couch that no longer reassures.

The night we eloped we drove to the rainforest
and found ourselves in fog so thick

our lights were useless. There's no choice,
you said, we must have faith in our blindness.

How I believed you. Trying to imagine
the road beneath us, we inched forward,

honking, gently, again and again.

I Am the North Pole

2006-06-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

Tzu Yeh, 3rd-4th century

I cannot sleep
for the blaze of the full moon.
I thought I heard here and there
a voice calling,
hopelessly I answer 'Yes'
to the empty air.

It is night again.
I let down my silken hair
over my shoulders
and open my thighs
over my lover.
'Tell me, is there any part of me
that is not lovable?'

I had not fastened my sash over my gown
when you asked me to look out the window.
If my skirt fluttered open,
blame the spring wind.

The bare branches tremble
in the sudden breeze.
The twilight deepens.
My lover loves me,
and I am proud of my young beauty.

I am the North Pole
steady for a thousand years.
Your sun-like heart
goes east in the morning
and west in the evening.

To the Tune of a Phoenix Hairpin

2006-06-15T14:34:00.000-07:00

T'ang Wan, 12th century

The world's love runs thin.
Human love turns evil.
Rain strips, in the yellow twilight,
the flowers from the branches.

The dawn wind will dry my tear stains.
I try to write down the trouble of my heart.
I can only speak obliquely, exhausted.
It is hard, hard.
We are each of us all alone.

Today is not yesterday.
My troubled mind sways
like the rope of a swing.
A horn sounds in the cold depth of the night.

Afraid of people's questions
I will swallow my tears
and pretend to be happy.
Deceit. Deceit. Deceit.

The Girls of Llanbadarn

2006-06-14T17:34:00.000-07:00

Dafydd ap Gwilym
Translated from Welsh by Joseph P. Clancy

Passion doubles me over,
Plague take all the parish girls,
Because, frustrated trysting,
I've not had a single one,
Not lovely longed-for virgin,
Not a wench or witch or wife.

What's the hindrance, what mischief,
What flaw, that I'm not desired?
What harm if a slim-browed girl
Has me in a dark forest?
No shame for her to see me
Lying in a bed of leaves.
Not a time I wasn't loving,
Never's been so binding a spell
Surpassing Garwy's passion,
One or two each single day,
And for all that, no nearer
To finding a friendly one.

No Sunday in Llanbadarn
I'd not be, as some would swear,
Facing a dainty maiden,
The nape of my neck to God.
And when I've long looked over
The parish across my plume,
Says one radiant clear-voiced dear
To her pert pretty neighbor:
'That lad pale-faced as a flirt,
Decked in his sister's tresses,
Lascivious are his eyes'
Slanting glances: he's shameless.'
'Is that what he had in mind?'
Says the one who is next her,
'He'll never have an answer:
To the devil, foolish thing.'

Cruel the bright girl's cursing,
Poor pay for a love-dazed man.
I'm compelled to call a halt
To these ways, to such nightmares.
I'm forced to become like one
Who's a hermit, an outlaw.
Too much looking, stern lesson,
Behind me, a sorry sight,
Leaves me, lover of strong song,
Head bowed, with no companion.

A Man Said to the Universe

2006-06-13T19:33:00.000-07:00

Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

Just Now

2006-06-12T11:42:00.000-07:00

Ted Kooser

Just now, if I look back down
the cool street of the past, I can see
streetlamps, one for each year,
lighting small circles of time
into which someone will step
if I squint, if I try hard enough--
circles smaller and smaller,
leading back to the one faint point
at the start, like a star.
So many of them are empty now,
those circles of roadside and grass.
In one, the moth of some feeling
still flutters, unspoken,
the cold darkness around it enormous.

Meditations in an Emergency

2006-06-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

Frank O'Hara

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I like under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes - I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing? Uh huh.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it is my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! You are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

St. Serapon, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I've tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus - the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, "to keep the filth of life away", yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead. There won't be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

The Whale in the Blue Washing Machine

2006-06-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

John Haines

There are depths even in a household
where a whale can live...

His warm bulk swims from room
to room, floating by on the stairway,
searching the drafts, the cold
currents of water and liberation.

He comes to the surface hungry,
sniffs at the table,
and sinks, his wake rocking the chairs.

His pulsebeat sounds at night
when the washer spins and the dryer
clanks on stray buttons...

Alone in the kitchen darkness,
looking through steamy windows
at the streets draining away in fog;

watching and listening
for the wail of an unchained buoy,
the steep fall of his wave.

A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts

2006-06-09T11:38:00.000-07:00

Wallace Stevens

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur --

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten on the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone --
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Notes to Clark Kent

2006-06-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

Lucille Clifton

if i should

enter the house and speak
with my own voice, at last,
about its awful furnitutre,
pulling apart the covering
over the dusty bodies; the randy
father, the husband holding ice
in his hand like a blessing,
the mother bleeding into herself
and the small imploding girl,
i say if i should walk into
that web, who will come flying
after me, leaping tall buildings?
you?

further note to clark

do you now how hard it is for me?
do you know what you're asking?

what i can promise to be is water,
water plain and direct as Niagara.
unsparing of myself, unsparing of
the cliff i batter, but also unsparing
of you, tourist. the question for me is
how long can i cling to this edge?
the question for you is
what have you ever traveled toward
more than your own safety?

final note to clark

they had it wrong,
the old comics.
you are only clark kent
after all. oh,
mild mannered mister,
why did i think you could fix it?
how you must have wondered
to see me taking chances,
dancing on the edge of words,
pointing out the bad guys,
dreaming your x-ray vision
could see the beauty in me.
what did i expect? what
did i hope for? we are who we are,
two faithful readers,
not wonder woman and not superman.

note passed to superman

sweet jesus superman,
if i had seen you
dressed in your blue suit
i would have known you.
maybe that choir boyclark
can stand around
listening to stories
but not you, not with
metropolis to save
and every crook in town
filthy with kryptonite.
lord, man of steel
i understand the cape,
the leggings, the whole
ball of wax.
you can trust me,
there is no planet stranger
than the one i'm from.

Pretty White Dress

2006-06-07T11:31:00.000-07:00

Simone Muench

Hey ladybird lurking,
what's a fuzzy to you

and a fizzy to him?
Calligraphy or filigree

on the shield of a Viking.
He's aloof as a sawtooth.

He can't yodel or sing.
He's a killer Godzilla,

a teapot signaling steam.
A telltale heart, a deadly dart.

It's a Harlequin romance,
a dizzy and a doozy of a dance.

He's a dense lens, a frigate
on a frozen ocean.

You're a whirl of a girl, pearl
and vertigo, marbled star.

He's a conversation in the dark
ardor or a parked car,

smelling of mint and gin
in a seaside citadel

gliding down your pretty
white dress with a pen.

Under Grey Skies

2006-06-06T11:29:00.000-07:00

S. Cornish Watkins

Under grey skies we stood that night
We two, and saw below us there,
The city twinkling light on light,
Behind the long road glimmered bare.
Twixt shadowing hedges faint and white
And heavy hung the silent air.

Dimly I saw thy fair pale face
Uplifted like a slender flower
In some forgotten garden place
That at the solemn twilight hour
Through leaves that cross and interlace
Craves from the night her dewy dower.

And all my heart went out to thine
And the lips trembled as to show
The fire of love that might not shine
For through the glamour and the glow
I felt the clear eyes turn on mine
That knew not love and could not know.

Under grey skies I stand again
And far beneath me down the hill
Gas limps glimmer through the rain
As it was then, the night is chill
And no one know the secret pain
That holds a sad heart lonely still.

Goose's Jack: Over the Hill?

2006-06-05T11:25:00.000-07:00

J. Allyn Rosser

No one in the folk-lore sense climbs to the top of a hill for water unless that water has a special significance. -Lewis Spence

Something, then--a stain on her dress,
a bee in her bonnet, the last stick
of gum unshared--something has been
left out. Perhaps he wasn't all he's been
cracked up to be. On this point
the text is clearly ambiguous.
But you're not going to tell me
Jack simply "fell" down. Okay,
let's say she never actually pushed him.
The word fell is the ticket here.
Fell: fierce. Fell, closely echoing
fail. Jack failed to find water.
He failed fiercely, the way they do.
I'm not saying I don't sympathize.
But you can't overlook the fact
that fell slant-rhymes ever so wantonly
with Jill, suggesting that Jack has connected Jill and fail
inextricably in his man-mind,
that feckless projector of choppy
home movies where the heads
of the beloved are cut off,
their least fetching sides exposed.
So if Jack is the determinist hero
of Jill's self-actualized world-view,
it follows that Jack was not totally
at fault in his wish-fulfilling
falling. It is readily inferable
that what really went down
was Jack's confidence in his
water-finding abilities:
a slip of the old divining rod,
a "tumble" curtailed. Of course
we can only speculate.

Envoy of the Boat

2006-06-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

The Man Who Wouldn't Plant Willow Trees

2006-06-03T11:24:00.000-07:00

A.E. Stallings

Willows are messy trees. Hair in their eyes,
they weep like women after too much wine
and not enough love. They litter a lawn with leaves
Like the butts of regrets smoked down to the filter.

They are always out of kilter. Thirsty as drunks,
They'll sink into a sewer with their roots.
They have no pride. There's never enough sorrow.
A breeze threatens and they shake with sobs.

Willows are slobs, and must be cleaned up after.
They'll bust up pipes just looking for a drink.
Their fingers tremble, but make wicked switches.
They claim they are sorry, but they whisper it.

The Youngest Daughter

2006-06-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

Cathy Song

The sky has been dark
for many years.
My skin has become as damp
and pale as rice paper
and feels the way
mother's used to before the drying sun
parched it out there in the fields.

Lately, when I touch my eyelids,
my hands react as if
I had just touched something
hot enough to burn.
My skin, aspirin colored,
tingles with migraine. Mother
has been massaging the left side of my face
especially in the evenings
when the pain flares up.

This morning
her breathing was graveled,
her voice gruff with affection
when I wheeled her into the bath,
She was in a good humor,
making jokes about her great breasts,
floating in the milky water
like two walruses,
flaccid and whiskered around the nipples.
I scrubbed them with a sour taste
in my mouth, thinking
six children and an old man
have sucked from these brown nipples.

I was almost tender
when I came to the blue bruises
that freckle her body,
places where she has been injecting insulin
for thirty years. I soaped her slowly,
she sighed deeply, her eyes closed.
It seems it has always
been like this: the two of us
in this sunless room,
the splashing of the bathwater.

In the afternoons
when she has rested,
she prepares our ritual of tea and rice,
garnished with a shred of gingered fish,
a slice of pickled turnip,
a token for my white body.
We eat in the familiar silence.
She knows I am not to be trusted,
even now planning my escape.
As I toast to her health
with the tea she has poured,
a thousand cranes curtain the window,
fly up in a sudden breeze.

Curiosity

2006-06-01T11:20:00.000-07:00

Alastair Reed

may have killed the cat; more likely
the cat was just unlucky, or else curious
to see what death was like, having no cause
to go on licking paws, or fathering
litter on litter of kittens, predictably.
Nevertheless, to be curious
is dangerous enough. To distrust
what is always said, what seems,
to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,
leave home, smell rats, have hunches
do not endear cats to those doggy circles
where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches
are the order of things, and where prevails
much wagging of incurious heads and tails.
Face it. Curiosity
will not cause us to die --
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see
the other side of the hill
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all.
Only the curious
have, if they live, a tale
worth telling at all.

Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,
are changeable, marry too many wives,
desert their children, chill all dinner tables
with tales of their nine lives.
Well, they are lucky. Let them be
nine-lived and contradictory,
curious enough to change, prepared to pay
the cat price, which is to die
and die again and again,
each time with no less pain.

A cat minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do.

The Two-Headed Calf

2006-05-31T08:22:00.000-07:00

Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

The Rat

2006-05-30T08:23:00.000-07:00

Don Paterson

A young man wrote a poem about a rat.
It was the best poem ever written about a rat.
To read it was to ask the rat to perch
on the arm of your chair until you turned the page.
So we wrote to him, but heard nothing; we called,
and called again; then finally we sailed
to the island where he kept the only shop
and rapped his door until he opened up.

We took away his poems. Our hands shook
with excitement. We read them on lightboxes,
under great lamps. They were not much good.
So then we offered what advice we could
on his tropes and turns, his metrical comportment,
on the wedding of the word to the event,
and suggested that he might read this or that.
We said Now: write us more poems like The Rat.

All we got was cheek from him. Then silence.
We gave up on him. Him with his green arrogance
and ingratitude and his one lucky strike.
But today I read The Rat again. Its reek
announced it; then I saw its pisshole stare;
line by line it strained into the air.
Then it hissed. For all the craft and clever-clever
you did not write me, fool. Nor will you ever.

Reasons

2006-05-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

Jeff Chang

Because the cap fell off the pen.
Because the Sunday paper got wet
and the icebox was empty.

Because the auditorium was too quiet
and the walk-in closet was too crowded.
Because the dirty path didn't lead anywhere.

Because the dog chewed through the leash
and because of the hole in the wire fence.
Because the bus was on time for once
and roared into the bright light.

Because the oars of the rowboat
had slipped into the lake.

Because the taffy factory
was closed for the season and because
every balloon in the county

popped simultaneously.
Because the night watchman was afraid of the dark.
Because of the implausibility of the movie

and because the stuffed bear
had lost an eye and the ukulele
was missing a string.

Because the search party
had put away their flashlights.
Because the stuffed peppers were getting cold
and because the rainfall kept reinventing itself.

Because you are always right
and I am always somewhere else.

Brendon Gallacher

2006-05-28T21:13:00.000-07:00

Jackie Kay

He was seven and I was six, my Brendon Gallacher.
He was Irish and I was Scottish, my Brendon Gallacher.
His father was in prison; he was a cat burglar.
My father was a communist party full-time worker.
He had six brothers and I had one, my Brendon Gallacher.

He would hold my hand and take me by the river
where we'd talk all about his family being poor.
He'd get his mum out of Glasgow when he got older.
A wee holida some place nice. Some place far.
I'd tell my mum all about my Brendon Gallacher

how his mum drank and and his daddy was a cat burglar.
And she'd say, 'Why not have him round to dinner?'
No, no, I'd say, he's not big holes in his trousers.
I like meeting him by the burn in the open air.
Then one day after we'd been friends for two years,

One day when it was pouring and I was indoors,
My mum says to me, 'I was talking to Mrs. Moir
who lives next door to your Brendon Gallacher.
Didn't you say his address was 24 Novar?
She says there are no Gallachers at 24 Novar.

There never have been any Gallachers next door.'
And he died then, my Brendon Gallacher,
flat out on my bedroom floor, his spiky hair,
his impish grin, his funny, flapping ear.
Oh Brendon. Oh my Brendon Gallacher.

Dover Beach

2006-05-27T21:12:00.000-07:00

Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night,
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-blanch'd 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 furl'd.
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.

A Quick One Before I Go

2006-05-26T21:11:00.000-07:00

David Lehman

There comes a time in every man's life
when he thinks: I have never had a single
original thought in my life
including this one & therefore I shall
eliminate all ideas from my poems
which shall consist of cats, rice, rain
baseball cards, fire escapes, hanging plants
red brick houses where I shall give up booze
and organized religion even if it means
despair is a logical possibility that can't
be disproved I shall concentrate on the five
senses and what they half perceive and half
create, the green street signs with white
letters on them the body next to mine
asleep while I think these thoughts
that I want to eliminate like nostalgia
0 was there ever a man who felt as I do
like a pronoun out of step with all the other
floating signifiers no things but in words
an orange T-shirt a lime green awning

The Ineffable

2006-05-25T21:11:00.000-07:00

Thom Ward

Of course it’s the moment
all lovers hope to reach
between cigarettes and the work
of each other’s buttons.

In nursery school
you hung out with its pals
enchantment and wonder,
stacked blocks, spread paint.

After the explosion, the sweep
of bullets through the market,
it takes up shop in your throat.
Looks like you were lucky

enough to survive the errant
missile. Grab a chair, my friend,
the one covered with dust,
and it will buy you a drink.

Oh, yes, did I mention? —
the hole in the rope
from which the body dangles,
the gaze of an ape.

Madness in the Form of Birds

2006-05-24T21:10:00.000-07:00

George Looney

Folks say mynahs mimic human speech.
Flocks of them settle on
the parapets of the local monastery
and speak to monks. These men,
who haven't heard human language
for years, sit, backs against bricks,
and cry. The mynahs come to them
as madness in the form of birds,
memories of the women they touch
asleep. The mynahs, they think
but never say, are demons. Like most
demons, they are irresistible.
The monks leave bread out for the mynahs
and dream of speaking the word love
to the birds, who don't know
their effect on the silent men. They come for
bread and the warmth of the sun
on the bricks of the parapets
and speak, out of kindness, nonsense
they've heard others like the monks
speak. They think the tears
are gratitude. The mynahs are wise birds.
Any monk would tell you that.
If he could. If he weren't a man
who needs a bird to speak for him.

A Poem Is Not a Prayer

2006-05-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

Christian Wiman

When the evening enters water,
the clear interior stained
and all in fire its minor sky;

when the sun like melted solder
burns into the green,
delineates the bones of each leaf;

the tree feels nothing,
the lake is not in pain,
this strange light is not a cry.

Nor does darkness bring relief.

Sylvia

2006-05-22T21:03:00.000-07:00

Gerald Stern

Across a space peopled with stars I am
laughing while my sides ache for existence
it turns out is profound though the profound
because of time it turns out is an illusion
and all of this is infinitely improbable
given the space, for which I gratefully lie
in three feet of snow making a shallow grave
I would have called an angel otherwise and
think of my own rapturous escape from
living only as dust and dirt, little sister.

She was a Dove

2006-05-22T06:56:00.000-07:00

Gerald Stern

for Anne Marie

Red are her eyes, for she was a dove once,
and green was her neck and blue and gray her throat,
croon was her cry and noisy flutter her wing once
going for water, or reaching up for another note.

And yellow her bill, though white some, and red her feet
though not to match her eyes for they were more suave,
those feet, and he who bore down above her
his feathers dropped around her like chaff from wheat.

And black was her mood, consider a dove that black,
as if some avian fury had overcome her
and overtaken my own oh lackadaisical state
for she was the one I loved and I abused her.

Blue we lived in, blue was our country seat,
and wrote our letters out on battered plates
and fought injustice and once or twice French-kissed there
and took each other out on desperate dates.

And it was a question always should we soar --
like eagles you know -- or should we land and stay,
athe battle I fought for sixty years or more
and still go over every day.

And there was a spot of orange above the bone
that bore a wing, though I could never explain
how that was what I lived and died for
or that it blossomed in the brain.

Adam's Complaint

2006-05-21T01:10:00.000-07:00

Denise Levertov

Some people,
no matter what you give them,
still want the moon.

The bread,
the salt,
white meat and dark,
still hungry.

The marriage bed
and the cradle,
still empty arms.

You give them land,
their own earth under their feet,
still they take to the roads.

And water: dig them the deepest well,
still it's not deep enough
to drink the moon from.

Losing Track

2006-05-21T01:02:00.000-07:00

Denise Levertov

Long after you have swung back
away from me
I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore
on the tide
and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges a pier:
am I a pier
half-in half-out of the water?

And in the pleasure of that communion
I lose track,
the moon I watch goes down, the

tide swings you away before
I know I'm
alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black
timbers of me,
a light growth of green dreams drying.

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

2006-05-20T01:08:00.000-07:00

Amiri Baraka

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands

Until Words Turn To Moss

2006-05-20T01:02:00.000-07:00

C.D. Wright

This was all roses, here, where an overblown house crowns
the hill, the whole field, roses, all the way to the end;
when the rosarian died, the partition of roses
began. We’ve come out of nowhere, literally,
nowhere, autumnal towns marked for destruction
by a phantom hand; houses held underwater, every bed
a sunken tub, tools drowned between rows, every keyhole
caulked; clouds hallucinating girls asleep on a wedge
of wedding cake; the white rose, among the greatest of liars
beginning to show the debilitating effects of fame,
the ever-popular blaze placates a vase; the bad sons
of thunder beating back a strand of light; someone
who knows nothing apart from the rain
standing on a chair in muddy legs; the roses
blown into their cumulonimbuses,
and someone whose glove is recovered, a face
that doesn’t come clear, a face drawn under an umbrella,
beautiful, charcoal, beautiful, like words
that never get old, the sons of thunder beating

Bonsai

2006-05-18T00:58:00.000-07:00

Edith L. Tiempo

All that I love
I fold over once
And once again
And keep in a box
Or in a slit in a hollow post
Or in my shoe.

All that I love?

Why, yes, but for the moment--
And for all time, both.
Something that folds and keeps easy,
Son's note, or Dad's one gaudy tie,
A roto picture of a young queen,
A blue indian shawl, even
A money bill.

It's utter sublimation,
A feat, this heart's control
Moment to moment
To scale all love down
To a cupped hand's size,

Till seashells are broken pieces
From God's own bright teeth,
And life and love are real
Things you can run and
Breathless hand over
To the merest child.

Oranges

2006-05-17T16:00:00.000-07:00

Gary Soto

The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone,
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling
At her gloves, face bright
With rouge. I smiled,
Touched her shoulder, and led
Her down the street, across
A used car lot and a line
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore. We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted -
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth. I fingered
A nickle in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn’t say anything.
I took the nickle from
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quietly on
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady’s eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing
Very well what it was all
About.

Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl’s hand
In mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

A Night Without Stars

2006-05-16T15:41:00.000-07:00

Nancy Eimers

And the lake was a dark spot
on a lung
Some part of its peace was dead; the rest was temporary.
Sleeping ducks and geese,
goose shit underfoot
and wet gray blades of grass.
The fingerlings like sleeping bullets
hung deep in the troughs of the hatchery
and cold traveled each one end to end
such cold
such distances.

We lay down in the grass on our backs--
beyond the hatchery the streetlights were mired in fog and so
there were no stars
or stars would say there was no earth

Just a single homesick firefly lit on a grass blade
Just our fingers
curled and clutching grass
this dark our outmost hide, and under it
true skin.

Gift

2006-05-15T15:21:00.000-07:00

Leonard Cohen

You tell me that silence
is nearer to peace than poems
but if for my gift
I brought you silence
(for I know silence)
you would say
This is not silence
this is another poem
and you would hand it back to me.

Hamlet As Told On The Street

2006-05-14T15:43:00.000-07:00

Shel Silverstein

Now Francisco and Bernardo, they was guardin’ the castle,
Leanin’ on their spears, not lookin’ for no hassle,
Havin’ themselves a brew or two,
When out in the night they hear woo-wooo-wooo.
And here comes this ghost, lookin’ ragged and rank,
In a rusty suit of armor, goin’ clank, clank, clank.
They say, "Hey, Mr. Ghost, are you our dear departed king?"
But the ghost don’t say one motherfuckin’ thing.
He goes, "Wooo-wooo-wooo." They say, "Hey, we better split,
And go tell Hamlet about this shit."

So they run find Hamlet, they say, "Hey, sweet Prince,
Your daddy’s ghost been seen runnin’ hither and hince.
He’s all full of maggots and he’s grizzly and grim,
Somethin’s rotten in Denmark and -- whew -- we think it’s him."
Hamlet say, "Oh, are you sure it’s my pop?
Did he have matty gray hair with a bald spot on top?
Did he have bright blue eyes that never know fear
And a tattoo says GERTRUDE FOREVER right here?"

They say, "Hey, the thing just flittered by our station,
We didn’t give him no physical examination.
And we don’t know for sure if your daddy was the one,
But we do know a motherfuckin’ ghost when we see one."
Hamlet say, "Show me where you spied this spectral klunk
So I see if it’s my pop, or if you was both drunk."
So they bring ol’ Hamlet to the spot, and then
They wait five minutes and wooooo ---
Here he comes again.
He got gray skin, black teeth and hollow eyes,
Beckonin’ like this -- young Hamlet cries,
"Hold, spirit of darness, are you a ghostly apparition?"
"No," says the ghost, "I look like this from malnutrition.
Of course I’m a ghost, but sone, don’t be scared,
And I’ll tell you some shit that’ll fry your hair."

He says, "You got two relatives, I won’t say which,
But one’s a bloody murderer and one’s a faithless bitch.
Why, I was takin’ a nap in the garden right here,
When my ambitious brother pours some poison in my ear.
And before my body’s even cold he’s wearin’ my pajamas,
Layin’ up in my bed with my crown on his head,
Doin’ somethin’ sinful to your momma.
And the terrible thoughts of what they’re doin’ up there
Is more than a poor old ghost can bear.
So you gotta revenge me on this harlot and this knave
Or else I’ll never rest in my motherfuckin’ grave."

Well, this information just flips Hamlet out.
He starts walkin’ like this, with spit hangin’ out his mouth.
His eyes are all bleary and his tongue looks worse,
And he’s talkin’ in couplets and blank fuckin’ verse.
I mean the dude is indecisive,
He don’t know how he’d like his eggs,
And he’s got no opinion on tits, ass or legs.
He can’t decide which horse to play at the track,
And when they ask him what suit you wanna wear today?
He say, "Ah…um…gimme the black."
He calls his uncle a murderer,
Calls his momma a whore,
And he can’t get it up for Ophelia no more.
Oh, and Ophelia? She’s tryin’ her best
To make him feel better,
Wants to polish his crown jewels,
But he won’t let her.
"Stead of sayin’ yea, the fool says nay,
And the whole court’s figurin’ he must be gay.

Well, then in come Hamlet’s oldest friends,
Rosenstern and Guildencrantz,
They say, "Hey there, Ham, you gloomy Gus,
Get up – get down – and party with us.
We brought you some actors,
Some tunes and some lyrics
To put on a play to boost up your spirits."
Hamlet says, "Hey – songs and skits,
That gives me an idea that could stir up some shit.
We’ll put on a play –
"N" that could be just the thing
To catch the conscience of the king,
If there is a conscience in the motherfuckin’ king."

So Hamlet calls all the actors, he say, "’Fore this drama starts,
I’m gonna tell you suckers how to play your parts.
You gotta speak the speech like I pronounced it –
Don’t rush it, don’t milk it, don’t drag it, don’t bounce it.
I mean, do it trippingly on the tongue,
Or else I’ll see your thespian asses strung up and hung.
And don’t saw the air with your hands flappin’ wild,
"N’ don’t go mouthin’ my words in some method style."

Then the lead actor says, "Hey – are we alive?
Or just some talking meat that’s gotta listen to this jive?
I have read this thing you call a script
And it ain’t too bad, it’s got a few little dips.
But with some new dialogue and a few minor edits –
Hey, do you mind sharing writer credits?
But this part about the king? -- poisoning his brother?
I play this wile the real king’s watchin’? Sittin’ with your mother?
You must be out of your cotton-pickin’ mind.
He’ll cut out my tongue, he’ll gouge out my eyes,
He’ll boil me in oil and send me to hell."
Hamlet says, "How about double scale?" – The actor says, "Well…

"I want my name above the title, three percent of the gross,
I want that tall brunette as my dialogue coach.
I want approval of director and a juicy per diem,
And if there’s changes in the script, I got to see ‘em.
I want a dresser, and undresser and a hairdresser, too,
And I gotta-gotta-gotta have the biggest dressing room.
I want an escape clause that lets me out in a month,
And the first thing I insist is that you fire that cunt.
I want transportation to and from every show,
I want complimentary tickets for everybody I know.
I want my brother and my cousin hired to play in the band,
And don’t go tryin’ to sneak in any extra matinees.
And next time you wanna speak to me,
Check with the director first.
Now will you please go away and let us rehearse?"
So Hamlet slinks off, lookin’ for a backer,
Mutterin’ how he’ll never ever talk to another fuckin’ actor.
And him and Horatio, they walk down a ways,
Till they see some clown diggin’ a mouldy grave.
Hamlet picks up a skull, he says, "Who was this sucker?"
They say, "Yorick." He says, "Yorick? I knew the motherfucker.
He used to be court jester. Hey, Yorick, show us how
You used to make them funny faces – Why ain’t you laughin’ now?
I’ve kissed these lips, I know not how oft." And Horatio quips,
"Hey, let’s not announce how oft you kissed them lips.
I mean people already talkin’ ‘bout the way you walk,
And the fact that you ain’t givin’ Ophelia no nook."

Oh, and speakin’ of Ophelia – Polonius, her daddy,
Says, "Hey, that prince is drivin’ my little girl batty.
Got her runnin’ all night and sleepin’ till noon,
God knows what else he got her doin’.
But he’s our royal prince, lord of earth, sky and water,
But he’s also a horny little pimply-faced shithead
Trying to hump my daughter."
So Polonius calls Ophelia and says, "Listen, darlin’ daughter,
I hope you and Ham ain’t doin’ things you shouldn’t oughter,
‘Cause you let ‘em touch an ankle and they wanna grab a knee,
And they never buy nothin’ that you let ‘em have for free."

Ophelia says, "Hey, Pop, I know the score,
You think I wanna wind up another palace whore?
I got the dud sendin’ me letters and babblin’ ‘bout the moon,
I really do think his bells are out of tune."
"Well, don’t you go dingin’ his bells," says Polonius,
"’Cause if he throws you in the grass,
I’ll get your big brother Laertes to kick his royal ass."

Now Laertes overhears his name bein’ bandied about,
He says, "Hey, Pop, you signin’ my ass up for somethin’
My head don’t know about?"
Plonius says, "Son, it’s Hamlet, that loony tune,
Been fed all his life with a silver spoon.
He’s in my face and on my neck,
I mean the dude ain’t playin’ with a full damn deck.
He’s bumblin’ around twirlin’ his crown,
And callin’ me a fishmonger all over town.
And he’s charmed your baby sister with his rhymes and his riddles.
Hey, you think she’s puttin’ on a little weight around the middle?"
Laertes says, "Hey, Pop, she ain’t no baby,
She got a set of jugs tha’d drive any prince crazy.
Now that’s just a natural fact and not lust or incest,
And if she shakes ‘em right, she could be a princess."
"That’s right," says Ophelia. "That’s my scheme,
And the way kings been dyin’ ‘round here, I could wind up queen."
"Enough," says Polonius. "That Pince has ruined my day.
Now we gotta see his fuckin’ play within a play.
Hell, the place’ll be drafty, the seats won’t be com’fa’ble,
I wouldn’t go at all but these tickets ain’t refundable.
Prob’ly full of symbolism, I won’t understand it,
Shit, I hope it rains and all the critics pan it."

So they go to the play and everybody’s there.
They got diamonds on their doublets,
They got ribbons in their hair.
Lords, ladies, dogs, babies, all in attendance,
The marquee says MURDER, DECEIT AND VENGEANCE.
ONE OF YEAR’S TEN BEST. DO NOT MISS IT.
So everybody figures it’s another piece of shit.
And they’re bitchin’ ‘bout their seats, buckin’ the line,
Scalpin’ tickets and sippin’ wine,
Rattlin’ their programs, twistin’ in their chairs,
Tryin’ to catch if any celebrities are there.
Then the play begins – and ooh, looky here –
It shows the king puttin’ poison in his brother’s ear.
And King Claudius is watchin’, and -- ooh -- is he pissed.
He says, "I know who’s responsible for this."
He calls, "Hey Gertie, come here, hon.
What the hell’s the matter with your jive-ass son?
I give the kid room, board ‘n’ remedial education,
And he calls me a murderer, and other wild accusations.
Hell, I’d sue him for libel for implyin’ that shit.
But the libel laws ain’t been invented yet.
Just ‘cause I’m bangin’ you, he’s givin’ me hell,
I think he wants to hump you his own damn self."

Queen Gertrude says, "I think he’s goin’ through
An Oedipal rejection, seein’ his uncle
Replace his father in his momma’s affection."
"Oedipal?" says the king. "The punk is givin’ me some shit.
I’ll send him where I sent his pop if he don’t quit.
So you tell him it’s better to leave some things unsaid,
Or he’ll be puttin’ on his crown without his motherfuckin’ head."
So the queen runs to Hamlet, she says, "Oh listen, son,
Y’better suck up to the king before some foul deed gets done.
It’s true he wears black socks and Hawaiian shirts,
But that ain’t no reason to treat him like dirt,
Because he is your uncle, and I do wear his ring,
And most of all, he is the motherfuckin’ king."
"Don’t say mother-fuckin’ king," says Hamlet. "Please,
Somehow that phrase makes my blood freeze.
My daddy was a handsome dude with dignity and class,
And this fat fool got hair on his back and boils on his ass.
Can anybody get you in their goddamn bed
Just ‘cause they got a crown on their goddamned head?"
His momma says, "Hey, before you go off the deep end,
There’s some things about women you gotta comprehend.

"Now milkmaids and queens, we all have filet mignon dreams,
But when the steak is gone, you will eat the beans.
And when you’re out of beans, you’ll chew the shoes off their feet,
But you eat.
Just picture me – a sweet young thing,
Then boom – my husband’s dead – and this sucker’s king.
So it’s ‘heat the meat and act real sweet’
Or wind up with my ass out in the goddamned street.
I got cellulite, I got varicose veins,
I got a hip gets stiff every time it rains.
And -- this -- is what nursing a baby can do,
"Course, honey, I’m not blamin’ you,
Though you were such a hungry child,
But life goes on and a queen must smile."

Then hark – just then Hamlet hears a sound
From behind the curtain – like a mouse skitt’rin’ ‘round.
But it’s really Ophelia’s daddy, spyin’ for the king,
Listenin’ and takin’ down everything.
Hamlet yells, "A rat!" and he stabs at the place,
And kerplunk, out falls Polonius on his eavedroppin’ face.
Hamlet sees it ain’t the king, he says, "Oh shit,
Y’finally do take action and this is what you get.
Now I killed my girlfriend’s poppa and I’m covered with his blood,
How do you explain this to someone you love?"

Then here comes Ophelia, callin’, "Daddy, Daddy dear,
Hamlet, is my daddy in here?"
Well…he is… and he ain’t – but someone should have told the cat
Y’don’t wanna get stabbed, don’t make noise like a rat.
She cries, "Oh, my daddy’s dead and I can see
You stuck it in him like you stuck it in me.
I can’t believe the shit you done to me.
You used to want all – now you want none of me.
Is this your perverted way of makin’ fun o’ me?"
Hamlet says, "Hey then, get thee someplace…
Maybe a … a nunnery."
"Get me to a nunnery?" Ophelia moans,
"Now that you ate the chicken, you wanna try and hide the bones?
With your poetry and promises you messed up my brain,
You are a dirty dog – and not a great Dane."
"Please," says Hamlet, "I’m in a crazed condition.
Can’t you see I’m torn by indecision?
To be or not to be? That’s the fuckin’ question
That’s givin’ me migraines and indigestion.
Should I take arms against a sea of trouble,
Or just walk around goin’ gubble-gubble-gubble?"

Ophelia says, "Hey, you don’t fool me a bit,
You’re fakin’ all this psycho shit,
‘Cause if you’re insane you don’t have to kill the king,
Or marry me or do any damn thing."
Ham says, "Hey, go bake a cake, or give your booty a shake,
Or take a jump in the motherfuckin’ lake –"
Well, that’s where he made another fatal mistake.
Y’see he didn’t really mean for the bitch to do it,
But she’s gone like a flash, and run, jump, splash,
She’s floatin’ and bloatin’ ‘fore anybody knew it.
"Oh, when it rains it pours," says Hamlet, "Ain’t no doubt,
Here’s another thing I gotta feel guilty about."

Well, they have Ophelia’s funeral and everybody’s there.
They got diamonds on their doublet, they got ribbons in their hair.
They’re rattlin’ their beads and twistin’ in their chairs,
Tryin’ to catch if any celebrities are there.
And it’s a pleasant event, until into her grave
Leaps her brother Laertes and he rants and raves.
He’s shakin’ his fist and pullin’ his hair,
Gettin’ his ass tangled up in his underwear,
Jumpin’ up and down in a frenzied fit,
Meanwhile stompin’ her body to shit.
He cries, "FEE-FO-FI, if I find the guy who caused her to die,
I’ll slice him like a pie. I’ll cut out his heart and send it to Peru,
‘N’ I’ll c.o.d. his balls off to Timbuktu,
Ship his dick to England in a registered letter,
And then let him try to get his shit back together."
Then the king pulls his coat, he says, "Harken to this,
Hamlet’s the dude who fucked up your sis.
And he also stabbed your daddy, too,
And all you do is boo-hoo-hoo? What kind of brother and son are you?
If it was my family I know what I’d do, I’d be on him like a damned tattoo.
Now… there is a sword with a poisoned tip.
It’ll send any sucker on a one-way trip,
‘Cause all it takes is one itty bitty scratch…
Hey, Hamlet, how about a little fencin’ match?"
Well, then the whole fuckin’ place caves in,
Hamlet stabs Laertes, and Laertes stabs him.
Then Hamlet turns around and stabs his uncle, too,
While the queen drinks some poison the king had brewed.
So she dies, he dies, Hamlet dies, Laertes dies
On top of where Ophelia lies,
Right next to where Polonius died.
And before you can wink, blink or turn your head,
Chop-stab-slice -- every motherfucker’s dead.

Then in walks this cat Fortinbras, he says, "What – is -- this?
I have never seen such a fuckin’ mess.
You got skulls and swords, you got guts and gore,
You got bodies piled up from ceiling to floor.
You got broken glass, y’got tangled hairs,
You got blood and wine runnin’ down the stairs.
You got dented armor and ripped up gowns,
You got bent-up crowns just rollin’ ‘round.
Y’got a punctured king, y’got a poisoned queen,
Y’got a sweet prince dyin’ on the mezzanine.
And behind that curtain there’s another dead duff,
And a body from the fishpond just floated up.
Y’got a stiff in the garden with some gunk in his ear,
And a tattoo says GERTRUDE FOREVER right here,
And two guards on the gate tower drunk on beer.
What the hell’s been goin’ on here?"

Well, that was the end of our sweet prince,
He died in confusion and nobody’s seen him since.
And the moral of the story is bells do get out of tune…
And you can find shit in a silver spoon…
And an old man’s revenge can be a young man’s ruin…
Oh – and never look too close… at what your mamma is doin’.

Beyond the Ash Rains

2006-05-13T14:36:00.000-07:00

Agha Shahid Ali

'What have you known of loss
That makes you different from other men?'
- Gilgamesh.

When the desert refused my history,
Refused to acknowledge that I had lived
there, with you, among a vanished tribe,

two, three thousand years ago, you parted
the dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,

and beckoned me to the northern canyons.
There, among the red rocks, you lived alone.
I had still not learned the style of nomads:

to walk between the rain drops to keep dry.
Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,

without irony. You showed me the relics
of our former life, proof that we'd at last
found each other, but in your arms I felt

singled out for loss. When you lit the fire
and poured the wine, "I am going," I murmured,
repeatedly, "going where no one has been
and no one will be... Will you come with me?"
You took my hand, and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerable
to our suddenly bare history in which I was,

but you said won't again be, singled
out for loss in your arms, won't ever again
be exiled, never again, from your arms.

A Broken Appointment

2006-05-12T14:40:00.000-07:00

Thomas Hardy

You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.

You love me not,
And love alone can lend you loyalty;
-I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love me not.

The All-Night Waitress

2006-05-11T14:53:00.000-07:00

Maura Stanton

To tell the truth, I really am
a balloon. I'm only rubber, shapeless,
smelly on the inside...
I'm growing almost invisible.
Even the truckers admire my fine
indistinctiveness, shoving their fat hands
through my heart as they cry,
"Hey, baby! You're really weird!"
Two things may happen: if the gas
explodes at the grill some night,
I'll burst through the greasy ceiling
into black, high air,
a white something children point at
from the bathroom window at 3 a.m.
Or I'll simply deflate.
Sweeping up, the day shift will find
a blob of white substance
under my uniform by the door.
"Look," they'll say, "what a strange
unnatural egg; who wants to touch it?"
Actually, I wonder how I'd
really like being locked into orbit
around the earth, watching
blue, shifting land forever--
Or how it would feel to disappear
unaccountable in the arms of some welder
who might burst into tears
& keep my rubbery guts inside his lunch box
to caress on breaks, to sing to...
Still it would mean escape
into a snail's consciousness, that muscular
foot which glides a steep shell
over a rocky landscape, recording passage
on a brain so small how could it hurt?

Miles Away

2006-05-11T14:49:00.000-07:00

Carol Ann Duffy

I want you and you are not here. I pause
in this garden, breathing the colour thought is
before language into still air. Even your name
is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again
and again, it will not stay with me. Tonight
I make you up, imagine you, your movements clearer
than the words I have you say you said before.

Wherever you are now, inside my head you fix me
with a look, standing here whilst cool late light
dissolves into the earth. I have got your mouth wrong,
but still it smiles. I hold you closer, miles away,
inventing love, until the calls of nightjars
interrupt and turn what was to come, was certain,
into memory. The stars are filming us for no one.

Lady Lazarus

2006-05-10T15:08:00.000-07:00

Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it----

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
0 my enemy.
Do I terrify?----

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart----
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash ---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Mad Girl's Love Song

2006-05-10T15:06:00.000-07:00

Sylvia Plath

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

Mirror

2006-05-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful--
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of her hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces darkness.
In me she drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

New York, New York

2006-05-09T15:20:00.000-07:00

David Berman

A second New York is being built
a little west of the old one.
Why another, no one asks,
just build it, and they do.

The city is still closed off
to all but the work crews
who claims it's a perfect mirror image.

Truthfully, each man works on the replica
of the apartment building he lives in,
adding new touches,
like cologne dispensers, rock gardens,
and doorknobs marked for the grand hotels.

Improvements here and there, done secretly
and off the books. None of the supervisors
notice or mind. Everyone's in a wonderful mood,
joking, taking walks through the still streets
that the single reporter allowed inside has described as

"unleaved with reminders of the old city's complicated past,
but giving off some blue perfume from the early years on earth."

The men grow to love the peaceful town.
It becomes more difficult to return home at night,

which sets the wives to worrying.
The yellow soups are cold, the sunsets quick.

The men take long breaks on the fire escapes,
waving across the quiet spaces to other workers
meditating on their perches.

Until one day...

The sky fills with charred clouds.
Toolbelts rattle in the rising wind.

Something is wrong.

A fireman stands in the avenue
pointing binoculars at a massive gray mark
moving towards us in the eastern sky.

Several voices, What, What is it?

Pigeons, he yells through the wind.

The Terms in Which I Think of Reality

2006-05-08T15:23:00.000-07:00

Allen Ginsberg

Reality is a question
of realizing how real
the world is already.

Time is Eternity,
ultimate and immovable;
everyone's an angel.

It's Heaven's mystery
of changing perfection :
absolute Eternity

changes! Cars are always
going down the street,
lamps go off and on.

It's a great flat plain;
we can see everything
on top of a table.

Clams open on the table,
lambs are eaten by worms
on the plain. The motion

of change is beautiful,
as well as form called
in and out of being.

Next : to distinguish process
in its particularity with
an eye to the initiation

of gratifying new changes
desired in the real world.
Here we're overwhelmed

with such unpleasant detail
we dream again of Heaven.
For the world is a mountain

of shit : if it's going to
be moved at all, it's got
to be taken by handfuls.

Man lives like the unhappy
whore on River Street who
in her Eternity gets only

a couple of bucks and a lot
of snide remarks in return
for seeking physical love

the best way she knows how,
never really heard of a glad
job or joyous marriage or

a difference in the heart :
or thinks it isn't for her,
which is her worst misery.

Serenade

2006-05-07T15:28:00.000-07:00

Terrance Hayes

I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket
of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice.
I want to learn to walk without blinking.
I want to learn the language of a Chilean poet.
I want to say God & fuck you & touch me
without blinking. I want to outlive the turtle
& the turtle's father, the stone. I want a mouth
full of permissions & a pink glistening bud.
If the wildflower & ant hill can return
after sleeping three seasons, I want to walk
out of this house wearing nothing but wind.
I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with you
weighing less than a chill. I want to fight off the bolts
of gray lighting the alcoves & winding paths
of your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgings
of snow. I want to fight off the wind.
I want to be the wind & I want to fight off the wind
with its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging
screen doors, its gilded boxes, & neatly folded pamphlets
of noise. I want to fight off the dull straight lines
of two by fours & endings, your disapprovals,
your doubts & regulations, your carbon copies.
If the locust can abandon its suit,
I want a brand new name. I want the pepper's fury
& the salt's tenderness. I want the eight-sided passion
of sugar, but not its need. I want the virtue
of the evening rain, but not its gossip.
I want the moon's intuition, but not its questions.
I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter
every room in a strange electrified city
& find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh
at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror,
but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch.
I do not want to be the yellow photograph
or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman,
I want to be pure flame and song. I want to be your breath.

The Wall

2006-05-06T15:31:00.000-07:00

Donald Justice

The wall surrounding them they never saw;
The angels, often. Angels were as common
As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw
In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
The second was the dream which woke the woman:
She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.
As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.
They had been warned of what was bound to happen;
They had been told of something called the world;
They had been told and told about the wall.
They saw it now; the gate was standing open.
As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

Aublade

2006-05-05T15:33:00.001-07:00

Nick Laird

Go Home. I haven't slept alone
in weeks and need to reach across
the sheets to find not warmth but loss.

The lack of which now sees me fat
and not content- by that I mean
I couldn't manage either tough or kind.

Not fit to speak to man or beast,
I would suffer you to see
the sight of me drawn inside-out,

which means the thing is being there.
Not here. If you knew enough you'd
know removed is how you're loved.

Get up. Take yourself into the night.
Walk streets that lie against and cross
themselved to pay for shade, then light.

A Language I Cannot Speak Without You

2006-05-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

Zen Oleary

There are earthquakes in me,
shivers of anticipation,
that disorient the day and
send me stumbling to
the edge of tomorrow.

I shout your name
across this abyss I cannot see
and listen for incoming echoes.

I wait for you like a seed
waits for rain or
a leaf thirsts for sunlight
or a bird lusts for grubs.

My eyes paint you in my mind,
your image strung on banners
streamed out of sky-writing planes,
whorled in rising thunder clouds.

I hear you in the graveled roars
of truck engines, the growls of lions,
the whispered buzz of bees.

I feel you in my blood, my breath
and the longing in my bones.

You have infiltrated and overtaken me
even in your absence till
you've turned me into a language
I cannot speak without you.

Number 8

2006-05-03T23:09:00.000-07:00

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant
a face as easily hurt
by laughter or light

'We think differently at night'
she told me once
lying back languidly

And she would quote Cocteau

'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
'whom I am constantly shocking'

Then she would smile and look away
light a cigarette for me
sigh and rise

and stretch
her sweet anatomy

let fall a stocking

On the Problem of Remembering Your Face

2006-05-02T23:23:00.000-07:00

Cilla McQueen

Old sailors with their
celestial navigation knew
the trick: not to look straight
at, but past, catching
your star deviously
(a delicate business, this,
like remembering a dream)
in the corner of the eye

Continually you elude me;
I'm having trouble with
this obliquity -
there is, for example, this
mouth above my forehead, this
shoulder beyond my cheekbone, a
familiar gesture of yours,
somewhere, only just
out of vision -

Each time, naively, I
forget about the old
sailors and look, directly, to
see you disintegrate in
mocking ripples, then
reassemble gradually your
familiar fragments as a hand, an
eyebrow, a bone beneath the skin
just beyond the corner of
my eye

It is the plight of
Orpheus, who in the
moment of turning sent
his beloved
exploding in splinters
outwards into darkness
- instantly to reassemble
into a perfect image of
herself, always
henceforth
(a dream of shadow
slipping through fingers)
just beyond his field of vision -

I could remember you, easily,
if you didn't fly
apart all the time,
like this.

Risk

2006-05-01T23:31:00.000-07:00

Anaïs Nin

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.

Design

2005-10-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

I pour a coating of salt on the table
and make a circle in it with my finger.
This is the cycle of life
I say to no one.
This is the wheel of fortune
the Arctic Circle.

This is the ring of Kerry
and the white rose of Tralee
I say to the ghosts of my family,
the dead fathers,
the aunt who drowned,
my unborn brothers and sisters,
my unborn children.
This is the sun with its glittering spokes
and the bitter moon.
This is the absolute circle of geometry
I say to the crack in the wall,
to the birds who cross the window.
This is the wheel I just invented
to roll through the rest of my life
I say
touching my finger to my tongue.

The Death of the Hat

2005-10-01T20:41:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

Once every man wore a hat.

In the ashen newsreels,
the avenues of cities
are broad rivers flowing with hats.

The ballparks swelled
with thousands of strawhats,
brims and bands,
rows of men smoking
and cheering in shirtsleeves.

Hats were the law.
They went without saying.
You noticed a man without a hat in a crowd.

You bought them from Adams or Dobbs
who branded your initials in gold
on the inside band.

Trolleys crisscrossed the city.
Steamships sailed in and out of the harbor.
Men with hats gathered on the docks.

There was a person to block your hat
and a hatcheck girl to mind it
while you had a drink
or ate a steak with peas and a baked potato.
In your office stood a hat rack.

The day war was declared
everyone in the street was wearing a hat.
And they were wearing hats
when a ship loaded with men sank in the icy sea.

My father wore one to work every day
and returned home
carrying the evening paper,
the winter chill radiating from his overcoat.

But today we go bareheaded
into the winter streets,
stand hatless on frozen platforms.

Today the mailboxes on the roadside
and the spruce trees behind the house
wear cold white hats of snow.

Mice scurry from the stone walls at night
in their thin fur hats
to eat the birdseed that has spilled.

And now my father, after a life of work,
wears a hat of earth,
and on top of that,
a lighter one of cloud and sky--a hat of wind.

I Ask You

2005-10-01T20:39:00.001-07:00

Billy Collins

What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside--
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

No, it's all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles--
each a different height--
are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt--
frog at the edge of a pond--
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House

2005-10-01T20:39:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,
and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.
When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton
while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

My Life

2005-10-01T20:38:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

Sometimes I see it as a straight line
drawn with a pencil and a ruler
transecting the circle of the world

or as a finger piercing
a smoke ring, casual, inquisitive,

but then the sun will come out
or the phone will ring
and I will cease to wonder

if it is one thing,
a large ball of air and memory,
or many things,
a string of small farming towns,
a dark road winding through them.

Let us say it is a field
I have been hoeing every day,
hoeing and singing,
then going to sleep in one of its furrows,

or now that it is more than half over,
a partially open door,
rain dripping from the eaves.

Like yours, it could be anything, a nest with one egg,
a hallway that leads to a thousand rooms--
whatever happens to float into view
when I close my eyes
or look out a window
for more than a few minutes,
so that some days I think
it must be everything and nothing at once.

But this morning, sitting up in bed,
wearing my black sweater and my glasses,
the curtains drawn and the windows up,

I am a lake, my poem is an empty boat,
and my life is the breeze that blows
through the whole scene

stirring everything it touches--
the surface of the water, the limp sail,
even the heavy, leafy trees along the shore.

Duck/Rabbit

2005-10-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

The lamb may lie down with the lion,
But they will never be as close as this pair
Who share the very lines
Of their existence, whose overlapping is their raison d'etre
How strange and symbiotic the binds
That make one disappear
Whenever the other is spied.
Throw the duck a stare,
And the rabbit hops down his hole.
Give the rabbit the eye,
And the duck waddles off the folio.
Say, these could be our mascots, you and I--
I could look at you forever.
And never see the two of us together.

Madmen

2005-10-01T20:35:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with breadknives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

Actually, they are the real artists,
you said, spinning the ice in your glass.
The screwdriver is their brush.
The real vandals are the restorers,
you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,
the ones in the white doctor's smocks
who close the wound in the landscape,
and thus ruin the true art of the mad.

I watched my poem fly down to the front
of the bar and hover there
until the next customer walked in--
then I watched it fly out the open door into the night
and sail away, I could only imagine,
over the dark tenements of the city.

All I had wished to say
was that art was also short,
as a razor can teach with a slash or two,
that it only seems long compared to life,
but that night, I drove home alone
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart
except the faint hope that I might
catch a glimpse of the thing
in the fan of my headlights,
maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,
poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,
staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.

Shoveling Snow With Buddha

2005-10-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.

Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.

Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.

After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?

Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck.
and our boots stand dripping by the door.

Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.

Flames

2005-10-01T20:05:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.

His ranger's hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.

His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher's mitts,
crackle into the distance.

He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.

He is going to show them
how a professional does it.

By A Swimming Pool Outside Syracusa

2005-10-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

All afternoon I have been struggling
to communicate in Italian
with Roberto and Giuseppe, who have begun
to resemble the two male characters
in my Italian for Beginners,
the ones who are always shopping
or inquiring about the times of trains,
and now I can hardly speak or write English.

I have made important pronouncements
in this remote limestone valley
with its trickle of a river,
stating that it seems hotter
today even than it was yesterday
and that swimming is very good for you,
very beneficial, you might say.
I also posed burning questions
about the hours of the archaeological museum
and the location of the local necropolis.

But now I am alone in the evening light
which has softened the white cliffs,
and I have had a little gin in a glass with ice
which has softened my mood or—
how would you say in English—
has allowed my thoughts to traverse my brain
with greater gentleness, shall we say,

or, to put it less literally,
this drink has extended permission
to my mind to feel—what's the word?—
a friendship with the vast sky
which is very—give me a minute—very blue
but with much great paleness
at this special time of day, or as we say in America, now.

The Only Day In Existence

2005-10-01T19:59:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

The early sun is so pale and shadowy,
I could be looking up at a ghost
in the shape of a window,
a tall, rectangular spirit
looking down at me in bed,
about to demand that I avenge
the murder of my father.
But the morning light is only the first line
in the play of this day--
the only day in existence--
the opening chord of its long song,
or think of what is permeating
the thin bedroom curtains

as the beginning of a lecture
I will listen to until it is dark,
a curious student in a V-neck sweater,
angled into the wooden chair of his life,
ready with notebook and a chewed-up pencil,
quiet as a goldfish in winter,
serious as a compass at sea,
eager to absorb whatever lesson
this damp, overcast Tuesday
has to teach me,
here in the spacious classroom of the world
with its long walls of glass,
its heavy, low-hung ceiling.

The Art Of Drowning

2005-10-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

The Dead

2005-10-01T19:55:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

The dead are always looking down
on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes
or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the
glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly
through eternity

They watch the tops of our heads
moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or
on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a
warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at
them,

which makes them lift their oars
and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to
close our eyes.

Walking Across The Atlantic

2005-10-01T19:44:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach
before stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlantic
thinking about Spain,
checking for whales, waterspouts.
I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.
Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to imagine what
this must look like to the fish below,
the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.

Nostalgia

2005-10-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

The Best Cigarette

2005-10-01T19:34:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

Introduction to Poetry

2005-10-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles

2005-10-01T19:31:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins

It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

"Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon" is one of Sun Tung Po's.
"Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea"
is another one, or just
"On a Boat, Awake at Night."

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
"In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying
My Woman Is Cruel--Moved, I Wrote This Poem."

There is no iron turnstile to push against here
as with headings like "Vortex on a String,"
"The Horn of Neurosis," or whatever.
No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

Instead, "I Walk Out on a Summer Morning
to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall"
is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

And "Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors"
is a servant who shows me into the room
where a poet with a thin beard
is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine
whispering something about clouds and cold wind,
about sickness and the loss of friends.

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner,
cross my legs like his, and listen.