Poems
Who says my poems are poems?
They aren’t poems at all.
Only when you understand my poems aren’t poems
can we talk poetry.
-Ryokan
17
By Bob Dylan
after crashin the sportscar
into the chandelier
i ran out t the phone booth
made a call t my wife. she wasnt home.
i panicked. i called up my best friend
but the line was busy
then i went t a party but couldnt find a chair
somebody wiped their feet on me
so i decided t leave
i felt awful. my mouth was puckered.
arms were stickin thru my neck
my stomach was stuffed an bloated
dogs licked my face
people stared at me an said
“what’s wrong with you?”
passin two successful friends of mine
i stopped t talk.
they knew i was feelin bad
an gave me some pills
i went home an began writin
a suicide note
it was then that i saw
that crowd comin down
the street
i really have nothing
against
marlon brando
* * *
ALLEGORY
By Gregory Pardilo
Professional wrestler Owen Hart embodied his own
omen when he battled gravity from rafters to canvas
in a Kansas City stadium. Like a great tent collapsing,
he fell without warning, no hoverboard, no humming-
bird’s finesse for the illusion of flight, no suspension
of disbelief to hammock his burden—the birth of virtue—
in its virtual reality. His angelic entrance eclipsed
when his safety harness failed. He fell out of the ersatz
like a waxwing duped by infinities conjured in a squeegee’s
mirage. Spectators wilted as the creature of grief emerged
to graze on their sapling gasps and shrieks. I’d like to think
that, freed of self-hype, he realized his mask was not a shield,
and that he didn’t spend his last attempting to method
Zeno’s proofs. E.M.T.s like evangelicals huddled to jolt
the hub of Hart’s radiating soul as fans prayed the stunt
might yet parade the emperor’s threads wrestlers call kayfabe.
Kayfabe, a dialect of pig Latin, lingo for the promise to drop
at the laying on of hands. To take myth as history. Semblance
as creed. A grift so convincing one might easily believe
it could work without someone else pulling the strings.
* * *
AFTER BEING ASKED IF I WRITE THE “OCCASIONAL POEM”
By Kimio Hahn
After leaving Raxruhá, after
crossing Mexico with a coyote,
after reaching at midnight
that barren New Mexico border,
a man and his daughter
looked to Antelope Wells
for asylum and were arrested. After
forms read in Spanish
to the Mayan-speaking father,
after a cookie but no water, after
the wait for the lone bus
to return for their turn, after boarding,
after the little girl’s temperature spiked,
she suffered two heart attacks,
vomited, and stopped breathing. After
medics revived the seven-year-old
at Lordsburg station, after she was flown
to El Paso, where she died,
the coroner examined
the failed liver and swollen brain. Then
Jakelin’s chest and head were stitched up
and she returned to Guatemala
in a short white coffin
to her mother, grandparents,
and dozens of women preparing
tamales and beans to feed the grieving.
In Q’eqchi’, w-e means mouth.
* * *
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
By Terrance Hayes
The only single women widows now or brides
Half married to the breeze. We lie to stay together.
We lie to make do. We lie to break the truth
Apart. We lie to shake fruit from the trees.
My mother favored the worker bee, her love buzzed
With stickiness & sting. I’m here about the widow
Afraid of butterflies. A widow knows ruin may be
As comprehensive as “rain,” a kind of cover
For the dirt about the dead. Nature does not destroy
Only change. Get down on your knees & pray
And get up quickly & live to celebrate that.
Falling is the first & most important skill in many things.
How to fall without breaking as well as how to break.
Tell me what you pray when you are broken or break.
* * *
ANOTHER LETHAL PARTY FAVOR
By Dean Young
I was being ushered somewhere to be beaten
when I ran into my old friend Harry.
He looked slicked down like he’d had help
licking his wounds and when I told him where
I was going he said, Ha, they don’t even know
how to beat a fly there. That’s Harry for you.
Don’t let him see you dragging your trash
to the curb because he’ll have to produce
a bigger heap, carry it on his back even if
his chin almost scrapes the ground like
a dung beetle. Tell him about your heart
transplant and he’ll say, Didn’t know
you had a heart. Lately he’s been concentrating
on contemporary poetry of all things,
kinda a relief like if Hitler had stayed
interested in painting more than politics.
Besides, it was a beautiful day to be beaten,
one of those spry spring afternoons you feel
you could talk to a daffodil and the daffodil,
full of its own problems, would nonetheless
accompany you into the dark cave of your own
skull like a torch held by a villager
intent upon burning down the castle.
* * *
ASK ME
By William Stafford
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
* * *
BECAUSE SHE WOULD ASK ME WHY I LOVED HER
By Christopher Brennan
If questioning would make us wise
No eyes would ever gaze in eyes;
If all our tale were told in speech
No mouths would wander each to each.
Were spirits free from mortal mesh
And love not bound in hearts of flesh
No aching breasts would yearn to meet
And find their ecstasy complete.
For who is there that lives and knows
The secret powers by which he grows?
Were knowledge all, what were our need
To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?.
Then seek not, sweet, the "If" and "Why"
I love you now until I die.
For I must love because I live
And life in me is what you give.
* * *
BLACK SEA
By Mark Strand
One clear night while the others slept, I climbed
the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky
strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it,
the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming
like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long
whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach
of a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer,
the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea,
and the dark become desire, and desire the arriving light.
The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stood
on that lonely height watching the slow swells of the sea
break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear ...
Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with all
that the world offers would you come only because I was here?
* * *
BLUETS
By Maggie Nelson
8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don't want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any “blueness.” Above all, I want to stop missing you.
54. Long before either wave or particle, some (Pythagoras, Euclied, Hipparchus) thought that our eyes emitted some kind of substance that illuminated, or “felt,” what we saw. (Aristotle pointed out that this hypothesis runs into trouble at night, as objects become invisible despite the eyes’ purported power.) Others, like Epicurous, proposed the inverse—that objects themselves project a kind of ray that reaches out toward the eye as if they were looking at us (and surely some of them are). Plato split the difference, and postulated that a “visual “fire burns between our eyes and that which they behold. This still seems fair enough.
156. “Why is the sky blue?”—A fair enough question. and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.
* * *
A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE
By Jack Gilbert
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
* * *
BROWNACRE
By Monica Youn
We were sitting, leaning back against the house,
on the stone patio, or terrace, looking out over a steep drop
at the mountains arrayed in a semicircle around us,
all expectant angles, like the music stands
of an absent orchestra—summer colors, orangey golds
and dim blues and there must have been greens as well—
I wasn’t paying attention: I was watching the thing
you had just said to me still hanging in the air between us,
its surfaces beading up with a shiny liquid like contempt
that might have been seeping from the words themselves
or else condensing from the air, its inscrutable humidity—
the droplets rounding themselves in their fall,
etching a darker patch on the patio tiles, a deepening
concavity, and, above it, a roughness in the air,
the molecules of concrete coalescing grain by grain
into a corrugated pillar topped by a cloud—a tree form:
not a sapling or a mountain tree, but a tree
that would look at home in a farmyard or meadow,
sheltered from winds, branches stretching out,
with all confidence, toward the horizon—
a shape that should have been an emblem
of sufficiency, of calm, but whose surfaces
were teeming with a turbulent rush of particles
like the inner workings of a throat exposed, and
whose dimensions were expanding with shocking speed,
accumulating mass, accumulating coherence
and righteousness, pulling more and more
of the disintegrating terrace into its form, taller than us,
then shadowing us, and doubtlessly, underground,
a root system of corresponding complexity and spread
was funnelling down displaced nothingness
from a hole in the upper air, and then it was time,
and I stood up and went inside and shut the door,
unsure what still anchored us to the mountainside.
* * *
CANDLES
By C.P. Cavafy
The days of our future stand in front of us
like a row of little lit candles --
golden, warm, and lively little candles.
The days past remain behind us,
a mournful line of extinguished candles;
the ones nearest are still smoking,
cold candles, melted, and bent.
I do not want to look at them; their form saddens me,
and it saddens me to recall their first light.
I look ahead at my lit candles.
I do not want to turn back, lest I see and shudder
at how fast the dark line lengthens,
at how fast the extinguished candles multiply.
(Translated, from the Greek, by Edmund Kelly.)
* * *
CAUGHT
By Kay Ryan
If something
gets caught
like a bone
in the throat
it isn't right.
We know this
with fish:
it isn't impolite to cough.
Our life
is at risk.
But there are
so many wrong thoughts
we refuse to release
massaging
our throats
like pate geese.
* * *
THE COUPLE IN THE PARK
By Louise Glück
A man walks alone in the park and beside him a woman walks, also alone. How does one know? It is as though a line exists between them, like a line on a playing field. And yet, in a photograph they might appear a married couple, weary of each other and of the many winters they have endured together. At another time, they might be strangers about to meet by accident. She drops her book; stooping to pick it up, she touches, by accident, his hand and her heart springs open like a child’s music box. And out of the box comes a little ballerina made of wood. I have created this, the man thinks; though she can only whirl in place, still she is a dancer of some kind, not simply a block of wood. This must explain the puzzling music coming from the trees.
* * *
CORNWALL
By Louise Glück
A word drops into the mist
like a child's ball into high grass
where it remains intermittently visible,
seductively flashing and glinting
until the gold bursts are revealed to be
simply field buttercups.
Word/mist, word/mist—thus it was with me.
And yet, my silence was never total—
Like a curtain rising on a vista,
sometimes the mist cleared: alas, the game was over.
The game was over and the word had been
somewhat flattened by the elements
so it was now both recovered and useless.
I was renting, at the time, a house in the country.
Fields and mountains had replaced tall buildings.
Fields, cows, sunsets over the damp meadow.
Night and day distinguished by rotating bird calls,
the busy murmurs and rustlings merging into
something akin to silence.
How hopeful I was!
I had brought my paints with me,
packing them as one might pack
an umbrella for a trip to the desert.
I sat, I walked about. When night came,
I went indoors. I cooked modest dinners for myself
by the light of candles.
Evenings, when I could, I wrote in my journal.
Far, far away I heard cowbells
crossing the meadow.
The night grew quiet in its way.
I sensed the vanished words
lying with their companions,
like fragments of an unclaimed biography.
It was all, of course, a great mistake.
Even the sketchbooks remained blank,
the innocent paper that asked for nothing,
for drafts, merely.
I was, I believed, facing the end.
Like a fissure in a dirt road,
the end appeared before me—
as though the tree that confronted my parents
had become an abyss shaped like a tree, a black hole
expanding in the dirt, where by day
a simple shadow would have done.
It was, finally, a relief to go home.
I packed my paints again, I packed
my sketchbooks. Frankly,
I could have buried them.
At home, the studio was filled with boxes.
Cartons of tubes, boxes of the various
objects that were my still lives,
the vases and mirrors, the blue bowl
I filled with wooden eggs.
As to the journal:
I tried, I persisted.
I moved my chair onto the balcony—
The streetlights were coming on,
lining the side of the river.
The offices were going dark.
At the river's edge,
fog encircled the streetlights.
One could not, after awhile, see the lights
but a strange radiance suffused the fog,
its source a mystery.
The night progressed. Fog
swirled over the lit bulbs.
I suppose this is where it was visible;
elsewhere, it was simply the way things were,
blurred where they had been sharp.
I shut my book.
It was all behind me, all in the past.
Ahead, as I have said, was silence.
I spoke to no one.
Sometimes the phone rang.
Day alternated with night,
the earth and sky taking turns being illuminated.
* * *
CRUSH
By Ada Limon
Maybe my limbs are made
Mostly for decoration,
Like the way I feel about
persimmons. You can’t
Really eat them. Or you
wouldn’t want to. If you grab
The soft skin with your fist
It somehow feels funny,
Like you’ve been here
Before and uncomfortable,
Too, like you’d rather
Squish it between your teeth
Impatiently, before spitting
The soft parts back up
To linger on the tongue like
burnt sugar or guilt.
For starters, it was all
An accident, you cut
The right branch
And a sort of light
Woke up underneath,
And the inedible fruit
grew dark and needy.
Think crucial hanging.
Think crayon orange.
There is one low, learning
heart-shaped globe left
And dearest, can you
Tell, I am trying
to love you less.
* * *
“D"
By Charles Bukowski
the doctor is into collecting art
and the magazines in his waiting room
are Artsy
have thick covers, glistening pages,
and large color
photos.
the receptionist calls my name and
I’m led into a waiting room with
walls adorned with paintings
and a chart of the human
body.
the doctor enters: “how are you
doing?”
not well, I think, or I wouldn’t
be here.
“now,” he goes on, “I am surprised
by the biopsy, I didn’t expect
this…”
the doctor is a bald, well-scrubbed
pink fellow.
“I can almost always tell just by
looking; this time, I
missed…”
he paused.
“go on,” I say.
“all right, let’s say there are
4 types of cancer—A, B, C, D.
well, you’ve got
D.
and if I had cancer I’d rather
have your kind:
D.”
the doctor is in a tough business
but the pay is
good.
“well,” he says, “we’ll just burn it off,
o.k.?”
I stretch out on the table and he has an
instrument, I can feel the heat of it
searing through the air
but also
I hear a whirring sound
like a drill.
“it’ll be over in a
blink…”
the small growth is just inside of
the right nostril.
the instrument touches it
and
the room is filled with the smell
of burning flesh.
then he stops.
then he starts
again.
there is pain but it’s sharp and
centered.
he stops
again.
“now we are going to do it
once more to
clean it
up.”
he applies the instrument
again.
this time I feel the most
pain.
“there now…”
it’s finished, no bandage needed,
it’s
cauterized.
then I’m at the receptionist’s
desk, she makes out a bill, I
pay with my
Mastercard, am out the door,
down the stairway and there
in the parking lot
awaits
my faithful automobile.
It’s a day with a great deal of
afternoon left
I light a cigarette, start the
car and
get the hell
out of there
moving toward something
else.
* * *
DATE NIGHT
By John Kenney
Who are you . . .
What?
. . . texting. I was just wondering . . .
Sorry. What?
You’re texting and I just . . .
Client. Wait. They’re changing a . . .
What?
Meeting. Tomorrow now.
Oh, O.K. Well, I guess I’ll check . . .
Done. So, who are you . . .
One second. Sorry. Fuck.
Work?
What?
Is it work?
Wait. I told them where the file was.
Who?
What?
Nothing.
Damn it. It’s on the thumb drive. They know that . . .
What is?
What?
Nothing.
This restaurant is nice.
What?
* * *
DON’T DO THAT
By Stephen Dunn
It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything
Hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red
Along with some resentment I’d held in
For a few weeks, which was not helped
By the sight of little nameless things
Pierced with toothpicks on the tables,
Or by talk that promised to be nothing
If not small. But I’d consented to come,
And I knew what part of the house
Their animals would be sequestered,
Whose company I loved. What else can I say,
Except that old retainer of slights and wrongs,
That bad boy I hadn’t quite outgrown—
I’d brought him along, too. I was out
To cultivate a mood. My hosts greeted me,
But did not ask about my soul, which was when
I was invited by Johnnie Walker Red
To find the right kind of glass, and pour.
I toasted the air. I said hello to the wall,
Then walked past a group of women
Dressed to be seen, undress them
One by one, and went upstairs to where
The Rottweilers were, Rosie and Tom,
And got down with them on all fours.
They licked the face I offered them,
And I proceeded to slick back my hair
With their saliva, and before long
I felt like a wild thing, ready to mess up
The party, scarf and the hors d’ceuvres.
But the dogs said, No, don’t do that,
Calm down, after a while they open the door
And let you out, they pet your head, and everything
You might have held against them is gone,
And you’re good friends again. Stay, they said.
* * *
THE END AND THE BEGINNING
By Wislawa Szymborska
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
We'll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
* * *
ENTRANCE
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go. . .
EPIC OF GILGAMESH (Fragment)
Compiled by Sin-lēqi-unninni
No one at all sees Death,
no one at all sees the face [of Death,]
no one at all [hears] the voice of Death,
Death so savage, who hacks men down. . . .
Ever the river has risen and brought us the flood,
the mayfly floating on the water.
On the face of the sun its countenance gazes,
then all of a sudden nothing is there!”
(Translated, from the Akkadian, by Michael Schmidt.)
* * *
EPITHALAMIUM
By Sarah Holland-Batt
Any wonder he tossed back Sazeracs & sidecars,
the one who always woke sullen
as the long blue light between buildings,
who slept with his back curled
like an accusation, who rocked
his weight onto his heels like an amateur
actor overdoing Stanley in “Streetcar”
when he hailed his cab in the morning.
Any wonder there were apologies
& bodega flowers wreathed with baby’s breath,
any wonder there was another woman
I never met & then the wedding invitation,
no warning. He knew he was handsome—
his worst gift. In restaurants he ordered
without asking—steak tartare, dollop of yolk
glistening in raw meat. To love a narcissist
you have to believe, & reader, I did—
for a time, I loved him, I believed
in his cruelty & beauty—buds in silver
birch, sparrows scuffling
in the gravel by the basketball court
where I watched him play Sunday pickup—
his brute musculature twisting
beneath his T-shirt, the springtime
itch of him—O, I believed as he shoved
& dodged his way up to dunk, I believed
as he spun that pebbled orange leather
in his fingertips like a cartographer
turning the first terrestrial globe,
its oceans gathered at the poles
like the curtains of a diorama,
its continents warped & stretched—
I believed the swish I heard
was the susurrus of reeds
on the bank of a blessed body of water,
I believed in his first principles & precepts—
& what I remember best
is how the ball slipped over the lip
then hung there a second—
a midair moon in the shredded net.
* * *
ESSAY ON CLOUDS
By: James Richardson
Maybe a whale,
as Hamlet mused, or a camel or weasel,
more likely a hill,
or many hills (with clouds,
as with us, true singletons are rare).
Mostly we compare them
to silent things, sensing
that thunder is something else
that gets into them—a stone, a god—
and, as for what they want to say,
aeromancy, which presumed to interpret,
never caught on. After all,
clouds weren’t reliable predictors
even of rain, and if they had a message
for us, we guessed,
it would hardly be practical:
clouds are not about
about, showing instead
boundless detail without specificity.
Whales, sure (which might in turn be
blue clouds), but we don’t say
How very like a screwdriver,
or my house, or my uncle, or certainly
how unlike my uncle. For though a blend
of winds we don’t at our level
necessarily feel lends them
amazing motion, that’s not the same as
intention, so failure
is not in question. We wouldn’t say
That cloud is derivative, jejune,
disproportionate, strained, in the wrong place,
or (since they affirm nothing)
That cloud is wrong,
though truly they often bear down
on exactly the wrong moment—that overcast,
is it one cloud or ten thousand
that makes everything feel so gray
forever? From inside, of course—think
of flying through one—
a cloud has no shape. As with us: only
when someone looks hard, or we catch
our reflections, do we solidify as
whale
weasel
fool
and plummet. Large clouds can weigh
more than a 747, yet not one
has ever crashed, so admirably
do they spread their weight, a gift
it is not too much to hope
we could possess, since according to Porchia
we are clouds: If I were stone
and not cloud, my thoughts,
which are wind, would abandon me. O
miracle not miraculous! Everything
we know well
lightens and escapes us, and isn’t that
when we escape? So, just as
Old and Middle English clūd
meant rock or hill, but now
means cloud, really I mean
in exactly the same way that stone
got over being stone
and rose, we rise.
* * *
[EVEN IN KYOTO]
By Kobayashi Issa
Even in Kyoto,
Hearing the cuckoo’s cry,
I long for Kyoto
* * *
THE FACES AT BRAGA
By David Whyte
In monastery darkness
by the light of one flashlight
the old shrine room waits in silence
While above the door
we see the terrible figure,
fierce eyes demanding, "Will you step through?"
And the old monk leads us,
bent back nudging blackness
prayer beads in the hand that beckons.
We light the butter lamps
and bow, eyes blinking in the
pungent smoke, look up without a word,
see faces in meditation,
a hundred faces carved above,
eye lines wrinkled in the hand held light.
Such love in solid wood!
Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence
they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them.
Engulfed by the past
they have been neglected, but through
smoke and darkness they are like the flowers
we have seen growing
through the dust of eroded slopes,
then slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain.
Carved in devotion
their eyes have softened through age
and their mouths curve through delight of the carver's hand.
If only our own faces
would allow the invisible carver's hand
to bring the deep grain of love to the surface.
If only we knew
as the carver knew, how the flaws
in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,
we would smile, too
and not need faces immobilized
by fear and the weight of things undone.
When we fight with our failing
we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself
and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good.
And as we fight
our eyes are hooded with grief
and our mouths are dry with pain.
If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carver's hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers
feeding the sea
where voices meet, praising the features
of the mountain and the cloud and the sky.
Our faces would fall away
until we, growing younger toward death
every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration
to merge with them perfectly,
impossibly, wedded to our essence,
full of silence from the carver's hands.
* * *
FICTION
By Mark Strand
I think of the innocent lives
Of people in novels who know they'll die
But not that the novel will end. How different they are
From us. Here, the moon stares dumbly down,
Through scattered clouds, onto the sleeping town,
And the wind rounds up the fallen leaves,
And somebody—namely me—deep in his chair,
Riffles the pages left, knowing there's not
Much time for the man and woman in the rented room,
For the red light over the door, for the iris
Tossing its shadow against the wall; not much time
For the soldiers under the trees that line
The river, for the wounded being hauled away
To the cities of the interior where they will stay;
The war that raged for years will come to a close,
And so will everything else, except for a presence
Hard to define, a trace, like the scent of grass
After a night of rain or the remains of a voice
That lets us know without spelling it out
Not to despair; if the end is come, it too will pass.
* * *
FIREFLIES
By Linda Pastan
here come
the fireflies
with their staccato
lights
their tiny headlamps
blinking
in silence
through the tall grass
like constellations
cut loose
from the night
sky
(see how desire
transforms
the plainest
of us)
or flashes of insight
that flare
for a moment
then flicker out
* * *
FLAMIN’ HOT CHEETOS
By Tim Donnelly
When I sensed I might
belong, I drew
the cotton duck drape
that hung before
the patio door
to the residency’s
clean white space
to seal me in, to seal
me in,
but my hand had been
where it had been,
and the stain it made
is blazon of my house.
* * *
FRAGMENT 31
By Sappho
He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing – oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
And cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead – or almost
I seem to me.
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty
(Translated, from the Greek, by Ann Carson.)
* * *
GETTING IT RIGHT
By Matthew Dickman
Your ankles make me want to party,
want to sit and beg and roll over
under a pair of riding boots with your ankles
hidden inside, sweating beneath the black tooled leather;
they make me wish it was my birthday
so I could blow out their candles, have them hung
over my shoulders like two bags
full of money. Your ankles are two monster-truck engines
but smaller and lighter and sexier
than a saucer with warm milk licking the outside edge;
they make me want to sing, make me
want to take them home and feed them pasta,
I want to punish them for being bad
and then hold them all night long and say I’m sorry, sugar, darling,
it will never happen again, not
in a million years. Your thighs make me quiet. Make me want to be
hurled into the air like a cannonball
and pulled down again like someone being pulled into a van.
Your thighs are two boats burned out
of redwood trees. I want to go sailing. Your thighs, the long breath of them
under the blue denim of your high-end jeans,
could starve me to death, could make me cry and cry.
Your ass is a shopping mall at Christmas,
a holy place, a hill I fell in love with once
when I was falling in love with hills.
Your ass is a string quartet,
the northern lights tucked tightly into bed
between a high-count-of-cotton sheets.
Your back is the back of a river full of fish;
I have my tackle and tackle box. You only have to say the word.
Your back, a letter I have been writing for fifteen years, a smooth stone,
a moan someone makes when his hair is pulled, your back
like a warm tongue at rest, a tongue with a tab of acid on top; your spine
is an alphabet, a ladder of celestial proportions.
When I place my fingers along it there isn’t an instrument in the world
I’d rather be playing. It’s a map of the world, a time line,
I am navigating the North and South of it.
Your armpits are beehives, they make me want
to spin wool, want to pour a glass of whiskey, your armpits dripping their honey,
their heat, their inexhaustible love-making dark.
Your arms are the arms of nations, they hail me like a cab.
I am bright yellow for them.
I am always thinking about them,
resting at your side or high in the air when I’m pulling off your shirt. Your arms
of blue and ice with the blood running
through them. Close enough to your shoulders
to make them believe in God. Your shoulders
make me want to raise an arm and burn down the Capitol. They sing
to each other underneath your turquoise slope-neck blouse.
Each is a separate bowl of rice
steaming and covered in soy sauce. Your neck
is a skyscraper of erotic adult videos, a swan and a ballet
and a throaty elevator
made of light. Your neck
is a scrim of wet silk that guides the dead into the hours of Heaven.
It makes me want to die, your mouth, which is the mouth of everything
worth saying. It’s abalone and coral reef. Your mouth,
which opens like the legs of astronauts
who disconnect their safety lines and ride their stars into the billion and one
voting districts of the Milky Way.
Darling, you’re my President; I want to get this right!
* * *
GOAT
By John Kinsella
Goat gone feral comes in where the fence is open
comes in and makes hay and nips the tree seedlings
and climbs the granite and bleats, through its line-
through-the-bubble-of-a-spirit-level eyes it tracks
our progress and bleats again. Its Boer heritage
is scripted in its brown head, floppy basset-hound ears,
and wind-tunnelled horns, curved back for swiftness.
Boer goats merged prosaically into the feral population
to increase carcass quality. To make wild meat. Purity
cult of culling made vastly more profitable. It’s a narrative.
Goat has one hoof missing—just a stump where it kicks
and scratches its chin, back left leg hobbling, counter-
balanced on rocks. Clots of hair hang like extra legs
off its flanks. It is beast to those who’d make devil
out of it, conjure it as Pan in the frolicking growth
of the rural, an easer of their psyches when drink
and blood flow in their mouths. To us, it is Goat
who deserves to live and its “wanton destruction”
the ranger cites as reason for shooting on sight
looks laughable as new houses go up, as dozers
push through the bush, as goats in their pens
bred for fibre and milk and meat nibble forage
down to the roots. Goat can live and we don’t know
its whereabouts. It can live outside nationalist tropes.
Its hobble is powerful as it mounts the outcrop
and peers down the hill. Pathetic not to know
that it thinks as hard as we do, that it can loathe
and empathize. Goat tells me so. I am being literal.
It speaks to me and I am learning to hear it speak.
It knows where to find water when there’s no water
to be found—it has learned to read the land
in its own lifetime and will breed and pass its learning
on and on if it can. Goat comes down and watches
us over its shoulder, shits on the wall of the rainwater
tank—our lifeline—and hobbles off
to where it prays, where it makes art.
* * *
HAPPINESS
By Tim Donnelly
Even if it could be felt
all at once, instead of
in installments, instead of
this staggering
out over a lifetime
of feeling it without
warning, or even
without wanting it, seize
before sliding back
into its opposite, seismic
event, so that
by analogy, being itself
grows corrugates,
as sand does recalling
the motion of water,
or like ridges on the roof
of a good dog’s mouth
science says serve
to stop the water from
escaping when lapping it
up—then again
by analogy, the feeling
of how it would feel
likewise would escape me.
* * *
THE GOD OF LONELINESS
By Philip Schultz
It’s a cold Sunday February morning
and I’m one of eight men waiting
for the doors of Toys R Us to open
in a mall on the eastern tip of Long Island.
We’ve come for the Japanese electronic game
that’s so hard to find. Last week, I waited
three hours for a store in Manhattan
to disappoint me. The first today, bundled
in six layers, I stood shivering in the dawn light
reading the new Aeneid translation, which I hid
when the others came, stamping boots
and rubbing gloveless hands, joking about
sacrificing sleep for ungrateful sons. “My boy broke
two front teeth playing hockey,” a man wearing
shorts laughs. “This is his reward.” My sons
will leap into my arms, remember this morning
all their lives. “The game is for my oldest boy,
just back from Iraq,” a man in overalls says
from the back of the line. “He plays these games
in his room all day. I’m not worried, he’ll snap out of it,
he’s earned his rest.” These men fix leaks, lay
foundations for other men’s dreams without complaint.
They’ve been waiting in the cold since Aeneas
founded Rome on rivers of blood. Virgil understood that
death begins and never ends, that it’s the god of loneliness.
Through the window, a clerk shouts, “We’ve only five.”
The others seem not to know what to do with their hands,
tuck them under their arms, or let them hang,
naked and useless. Is it because our hands remember
what they held, the promises they made? I know
exactly when my boys will be old enough for war.
Soon three of us will wait across the street at Target,
because it’s what men do for their sons.
* * *
HEAD, HEART
By Lydia Davis
Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go.
But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.
* * *
[HERE IN A THATCHED HUT]
By Kōhō Kennichi
Here in a thatched hut
hidden among mountain peaks,
with barely room for one,
I’m suddenly invaded
by wandering white clouds.
* * *
HOPE
By Kay Ryan
What’s the use
of something
as unstable
and diffuse as hope--
the almost-twin
of making do
the isotope
of going on:
what isn’t in
the envelope
just before
it isn’t
the always tabled
right of the present.
* * *
I HAVE A TIME MACHINE
By: Brenda Shaughnessy
But unfortunately it can only travel into the future
at a rate of one second per second,
which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant
committees and even to me.
But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next
moment and to the next.
Thing is, I can’t turn it off. I keep zipping ahead—
well, not zipping—And if I try
to get out of this time machine, open the latch,
I’ll fall into space, unconscious,
then desiccated! And I’m pretty sure I’m afraid of that.
So I stay inside.
There’s a window, though. It shows the past.
It’s like a television or fish tank
but it’s never live, it’s always over. The fish swim
in backward circles.
Sometimes it’s like a rearview mirror, another chance
to see what I’m leaving behind,
and sometimes like blackout, all that time
wasted sleeping.
Myself age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment
at having lost a library book.
Myself lurking in a candled corner expecting
to be found charming.
Me holding a rose though I want to put it down
so I can smoke.
Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me
because the explosion
of some dark star all the way back struck hard
at mother’s mother’s mother.
I turn away from the window, anticipating a blow.
I thought I’d find myself
an old woman by now, travelling so light in time.
But I haven’t gotten far at all.
Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as I’d like;
the past is so horribly fast.
* * *
HSIN-HSIN MING [excerpts]
By Seng T’san
The Great Way is not difficult
for those not attached to preferences.
When neither love nor hate arises,
all is clear and undisguised.
Separate by the smallest amount, however,
and you are as far from it as heaven is from earth.
If you wish to know the truth,
then hold to no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind.
When the fundamental nature of things is not recognized
the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.
The Way is perfect as vast space is perfect,
where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.
Indeed, it is due to our grasping and rejecting
that we do not know the true nature of things.
Live neither in the entanglements of outer things,
nor in ideas or feelings of emptiness.
Be serene and at one with things
and erroneous views will disappear by themselves.
When you try to stop activity to achieve quietude,
your very effort fills you with activity.
As long as you remain attached to one extreme or another
you will never know Oneness.
Those who do not live in the Single Way
cannot be free in either activity or quietude, in assertion or denial. . .
When in harmony with the nature of things, your own fundamental nature,
and you will walk freely and undisturbed.
However, when mind is in bondage, the truth is hidden,
and everything is murky and unclear,
and the burdensome practice of judging
brings annoyance and weariness.
What benefit can be derived
from attachment to distinctions and separations?. . .
To know this Reality directly
is possible only through practicing non-duality.
When you live this non-separation,
all things manifest the One, and nothing is excluded.
Whoever comes to enlightenment, no matter when or where,
Realizes personally this fundamental Source.
This Dharma-truth has nothing to do with big or small, with time and space.
Here a single thought is as ten thousand years.
Not here, not there—
but everywhere always right before your eyes.
Infinitely large and infinitely small: no difference,
for definitions are irrelevant
and no boundaries can be discerned.
So likewise with “existence” and “non-existence.”
Don’t waste your time in arguments and discussion
attempting to grasp the ungraspable.
Each thing reveals the One,
the One manifests as all things.
To live in this Realization
is not to worry about perfection or non-perfection.
To put your trust in the Heart-Mind is to live without separation,
and in this non-duality you are one with your Life-Source.
Words! Words!
The Way is beyond language,
for in it there is no yesterday,
no tomorrow
no today.
(Translated, from the Chinese, by Richard Clark.)
* * *
I SAT IN THE SUN
By Jane Hirshfield
I moved my chair into sun
I sat in the sun
the way hunger is moved when called fasting.
* * *
THE IMMORTALS
By Hermann Hesse
(1929 translation)
Ever reeking from the vales of earth
Ascends to us life’s fevered surge,
Wealth’s excess, the rage of dearth,
Smoke of death-meals on the gallow’s verge;
Greed without end, spasmodic lust;
Murderers’ hands, usurers’ hands, hands of prayer;
Exhales in fœtid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war and lovely art,
Decking out with idiot craze
Bawdy houses while they blaze,
Through the childish fair-time mart
Weltering to its own decay
In the glare of pleasure’s way,
Rising for each newborn and then
Sinking for each to dust again.
But we above you evermore residing
In the ether’s star-translumined ice
Know not day nor night nor time’s dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
Your murders and lascivious delighting
Are to us but as a show
Like the suns that circling go,
Changing not our day for night;
On your frenzied life we spy,
And refresh ourselves thereafter
With the stars in order fleeing;
Our breath is winter; in our sight
Fawns the dragon of the sky;
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star-bright is our eternal laughter.
* * *
IN STRANGE CITIES
By Adam Zagajewski
In strange cities, there's an unexpected joy,
The cool pleasure of a new regard.
The yellowing facades of tenements
The sun scales like an agile spider
Aren't mine. The town hall,
Harbor, jail and courthouse
Weren't built for me either.
The sea runs through the city, its salty tide
Submerging porches and basements.
In the market, pyramids of apples
Rise for the eternity of one afternoon.
Even the suffering's not really mine:
The local madman mutters
In an alien language, the misery
Of a lonely girl in a cafe
Is like a piece of canvas in a dingy museum.
The huge flags of the trees, though,
Flutter as in the places we know,
And the same lead is sown into the hems
Of sheets, dreams, and the imagination,
Homeless, and mad.
INSOMNIA
By Tim Donnelly
As darkness dissolves
the forms of things
they appear to merge
into the one
unbroken substance
they have been
all along, no single
component of which
can be said to exist
by necessity, but with
such continuous
relation to all other
components, it’s as if
nothing can be
lost without change
to everything, nothing
can be lost without
losing everything.
* * *
THE INVITATION
By Oriah Mountain Dreamer
It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, 'Yes.'
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
* * *
IT WAS LIKE THIS: YOU WERE HAPPY
By Jane Hirshfield
It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.
It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.
At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?
Now it is almost over.
Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.
It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.
Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.
It doesn't matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.
Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.
* * *
JUVENILES
By Nicky Beer
At dawn, the birds storm
the back yard like a country
they are astonished to have
won without a single shot
fired. There is no end
to its richness, every seed
tasting like a year.
They have no superstitions.
They celebrate in
monosyllables.
They cannot feel the god
who lives in the wires
strung over our houses
no matter how tightly
they grasp him with their feet.
The sky is one long drink.
They will never know the quiet
hands with which we hold them
when we find them
under the hedge at dusk.
* * *
JONAH
By Tim Donnelly
If I don’t speak to
the darkness it
swallows me.
* * *
LOVE AFTER LOVE
By Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
* * *
LOW
By Arda Collins
It’s not happiness, but something else; waiting
for the light to change; a bakery.
It’s a lake. It emerges from darkness into the next day surrounded by
pines.
There’s a couple.
It’s a living room. The upholstery is yellow and the furniture is
walnut.
They used to lie down on the carpet
between the sofa and the coffee table, after the guests had left.
The cups and saucers were still.
Their memories of everything that occurred took place
with the other’s face as a backdrop and sometimes
the air was grainy like a movie about evening, and sometimes there
was an ending
in the air that looked like a scene from a different beginning,
in which they are walking.
It took place alongside a scene in which one of them looks up at a
brown rooftop
early in March. The ground hadn’t softened.
One walked in front of the other breathing.
The other saw a small house as they passed and breathed. The
reflections in the windows
made them hear the sounds on the hill: a crow, a dog, and
branches—
and they bent into the hour that started just then, like bending to
walk under branches.
* * *
LE DERNIER POÉME (The Last Poem)
By Robert Besnos
I have dreamed of you so much,
Walked so much, talked so much,
Loved so much your shadow,
That there is nothing left for me of you.
I am left to be no more
than a shadow among shadows,
One hundred times
more shadow than shadow,
The shadow that will come again and again
to your sundrenched life.
* * *
THE MAN WITH MANY PENS
By Jonathan Wells
With one he wrote a number so beautiful
it lasted forever in the legends of numbers. With another
he described the martyrs’ feet as they marched
past the weeping stones and cypresses, watched
by their fathers. He used one as a silver wand to lift
a trout from its spawning bed to more fruitful waters
and set it back down, its mouth facing upstream.
He wrote Time has no other river but this one in us,
no other use but this turn in us from mountain lakes
of late desires to confusions passed through
with every gate open. Let’s not say he didn’t take us
with him in the long current of his letters, his calligraphy
and craft, moving from port to port, his hand stopping
near his heart, the hand that smudged and graced the page,
asking, asking, his fingers a beggar’s lucent black,
for the word that gave each of us away.
* * *
A MARRIAGE
By Julie Bruck
His paintings were small, suggestions
of houses, pinpricks of green for trees.
She’d set her glass down, say, Paint
like you’re blind, from memory and passion—
two words he especially didn’t care for.
She’d say, Paint like you’re on fire.
But their house was already burning,
and he was going blind and deaf.
So he’d carry the painting back down
to the basement, resume with
his thinnest sable brush. He would
never touch her the way she wanted,
though she kept asking him to,
like this, in front of everybody.
* * *
MIRROR
By Mark Strand
A white room and a party going on
and I was standing with some friends
under a large gilt-framed mirror
that tilted slightly forward
over the fireplace.
We were drinking whiskey
and some of us, feeling no pain,
were trying to decide
what precise shade of yellow
the setting sun turned our drinks.
I closed my eyes briefly,
then looked up into the mirror:
a woman in a green dress leaned
against the far wall.
She seemed distracted,
the fingers of one hand
fidgeted with her necklace,
and she was staring into the mirror,
not at me, but past me, into a space
that might be filled by someone
yet to arrive, who at that moment
could be starting the journey
which would lead eventually to her.
Then, suddenly, my friends
said it was time to move on.
This was years ago,
and though I have forgotten
where we went and who we all were,
I still recall that moment of looking up
and seeing the woman stare past me
into a place I could only imagine,
and each time it is with a pang,
as if just then I were stepping
from the depths of the mirror
into that white room, breathless and eager,
only to discover too late
that she is not there.
MONEY TIME
By Craig Morgan Teicher
Supposedly, time is money:
money will buy you time
assuming you have money
to spend, as well as time
to wait while your money
grows. However, time
spent waiting can be like money
misspent—it’s often time
wasted, even if money
is made, a kind of time
not worth spending, so money
isn’t necessarily time.
Maybe time is money
if you make with your time
something else that makes money,
though most of the time
it’s not your money
you’ve made with your time.
And money isn’t even money,
necessarily, in a time
like this, when money
loses value and time
is misspent losing money.
And time isn’t even time,
necessarily, if it’s lost money
on which you’re wasting time,
nor is money really money
if it’s wasted on wasted time.
Still, sometimes, time is money,
but only if you have money and time.
NEITHER HERE NOR THERE
By W.S. Merwin
An airport is nowhere
which is not something
generally noticed
yet some unnamed person in the past
deliberately planned it
to be there
and you have spent time there
again
and are spending time there again
for something you have done
which you do not entirely remember
like the souls of Purgatory
you sit there in the smell
of what passes for food
breathing what is called air
while the timepieces measure
their agreement
you believe in it
while you are there
because you are there
and sometimes you may even feel happy
to be that far on your way
to somewhere
NIETZSCHE
By Gerald Stern
You can say what you want but I love Nietzsche most
when he stood between the terrified horse and the coachman
and intervened though I have pity for his sudden
madness even if he hated pity for he was
human then nor could one word matter anyhow,
and when he went insane, as I understand it,
he suffered from shame and sadness in different cities
for which we have the very late letters his vicious
sister never burned, and though I know
it wasn’t Heine or Émile Zola I thought
it had to be either Gogol or Dostoyevsky
who threw his arms around the bleeding horse;
and there is so much to say about him I want to
live again so I have time to study him,
for intervening is the only mercy left now,
as Grace walked on the White House lawn, as Daniel
broke the nose cones and burned the draft cards as if
those were the poems, not making up tunes to go
with a noisy furnace—it was for Nietzsche. Before
anyone was born I walked through the Armstrong tunnel
connecting one language to another, holding
a book in front of me, and crowded the wall,
especially when I came to the curve so I could
live the first time, more or less, which when I
think of the working horse it was the bag
of oats, the blinders, the snorting, and the complex of
leather straps, but what wouldn’t I give today,
June 11th, 2009, to talk to
Stanley or, for that matter, Paul Goodman
or those who came before—could I be the one
who carries the smell of dead birds in his blood, and horses?
NO WARNING NO REASON
By Michael Ryan
Because he left her she must make him
someone she doesn't love, rescripting as
deception their hand-clasped walks at dusk
when she felt his was the hand of God
linking her to him because she was
so blessed to be given this love
this late in life. It must have been lies:
each touching word, all thoughtfulness,
his shows of pleasure putting her first,
his endearing sex talk that first
amused her then go to her
(his hot moist breath the poison in her ear)
as he learned with seemingly selfless patience
how to move inside her as no one ever had before.
How can she change memories like these?
He must have been lying
because the man who did these things
could not leave her with no warning or reason.
But she knows he wasn't,
she is stuck. No one can help her.
No one can enter the sacred circle they made together
she now wears as a necklace of fire.
How can she obliterate the person he is?
What is she to do? She has to live.
THE ODYSSEY
By Homer (Book 1, Lines 1-13)
SPEAK, MEMORY—
Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again
After he plundered Troy's sacred heights.
Speak
Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,
The suffering deep in his heart at sea
As he struggled to survive and bring his men home
But could not save them, hard as he tried—
The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness
When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun,
And that god snuffed out their day of return.
Of these things,
Speak, Immortal One,
And tell the tale once more in our time. . .
THE OLD POET, DYING
By August Kleinzahler
He looks eerily young,
what's left of him,
purged, somehow, back into boyhood.
It is difficult not to watch
the movie on TV at the foot of his bed,
40" color screen,
a jailhouse dolly psychodrama:
truncheons and dirty shower scenes.
I recognize one of the actresses,
now a famous lesbian,
clearly an early B-movie role.
The black nurse says "Oh dear"
during the beatings.
- TV in this town is crap , he says.
His voice is very faint.
He leans toward me,
sliding further and further,
until the nurse has to straighten him out,
scolding him gently.
He reaches out for my hand.
The sudden intimacy rattles me.
He is telling a story.
Two, actually,
and at some point they blend together.
There are rivers and trains,
Oxford and a town near Hamburg.
Also, the night train to Milan
and a lovely Italian breakfast.
The river in Oxford-
he can't remember the name;
but the birds and fritillaria in bloom ...
He remembers the purple flowers
and a plate of gingerbread cookies
set out at one of the colleges.
He gasps to remember those cookies.
How surprised he must have been
by the largesse,
and hungry, too.
- He's drifting in and out:
I can hear the nurse
on the phone from the other room.
He has been remembering Europe for me.
Exhausted, he lies quiet for a time.
- There's nothing better than a good pee ,
he says and begins to fade.
He seems very close to death.
Perhaps in a moment, perhaps a week.
Then awakes.
Every patch of story, no matter how fuddled,
resolves into a drollery.
He will perish, I imagine,
en route to a drollery.
Although his poems,
little kinetic snapshots of trees and light,
so denuded of personality
and delicately made
that irony of any sort
would stand out
like a pile of steaming cow flop
on a parquet floor.
We are in a great metropolis
that rises heroically from the American prairie:
a baronial home,
the finest of neighborhoods,
its broad streets nearly empty
on a Saturday afternoon,
here and there a redbud in bloom.
Even in health,
a man so modest and soft-spoken
as to be invisible
among others, in a room of almost any size.
It was, I think, a kind of hardship.
- Have you met what's-his-name yet?
he asks.
You know who I mean,
the big shot.
-Yes , I tell him, I have.
-You know that poem of his?
Everyone knows that poem
where he's sitting indoors by the fire
and it's snowing outside
and he suddenly feels a snowflake
on his wrist?
He pauses and begins to nod off.
I remember now the name of the river
he was after, the Cherwell,
with its naked dons, The Parson's Pleasure.
There's a fiercesome catfight
on the TV, with blondie catching hell
from the chicana.
He comes round again and turns to me,
leaning close,
- Well, of course , he says,
taking my hand,
his eyes narrowing with malice and delight:
- That's not going to be just any old snowflake,
now, is it?
ONE FLEW OVER THE MACHINE SHOP
By Fred Voss
Every so often a machinist
doesn’t come to work Monday morning
Tuesday morning
Wednesday morning
has Ignacio finally hit that big roulette jackpot in Vegas
and given up his day job
to walk the neon streets in a $2,000 suit with big diamond rings on his pinkies
and beautiful babes
hanging on his arms?
did Carl
finally get discovered telling jokes down at that comedy club Saturday night
and sign his big dream tv contract
is he leaning over the railing of some cruise ship sailing to Guadalajara
laughing at us?
did Bobby have another flashback
and has he been having a free 3-day acid trip
listening to his Doors and Jefferson Airplane records
pretending to be at a rock festival again?
did Dimitri
finally say, “Fuck it all!” and ride off
in his black tasseled leather jacket on his new Gold Wing motorcycle and begin his
month-long trip around the highways of the U.S.A.
not caring whether or not his job was there
when he got back?
did Roger
finally get arrested trying to direct traffic at some 3 am intersection
in his pajamas
and committed to Norwalk State Mental Hospital so he can get the therapy
we’ve always said he needed?
then Thursday
morning Ignacio or Carl or Bobby or Dimitri or Roger
come shuffling back in to work
and we find out he was merely sick
as he picks up a wrench and looks around sheepishly
he’s just like the rest of us
and all our excitement is over
no jackpot or dream or motorcycle trip or flashback or breakdown
has saved him
from merely being a cog
in the wheel that keeps the world
going.
OPEN GESTURE OF AN I
By D. A. Powell
I want to give more of my time
to others the less I have of it,
give it away in a will and testament,
give it to the girls’ club, give it
to the friends of the urban trees.
Your life is not your own and
never was. It came to you in a box
marked fragile. It came from the
complaint department like amends
on an order you did not place with
them. Who gave me this chill life.
It came with no card. It came
without instruction. It said this
end up though I do not trust those
markings. I have worn it upside
downs. I have washed it without
separating and it did not shrink.
Take from it what you will. I will
ORACULAR
By Charlotte Boulay
The road is too hot to move. I’m stuck in the median,
I slept too fast & then too slow.
Sufi says, I’m not only bones & bones—
who loves the saints in the streets? We don’t need
your love, only your briefest notice sustains us.
Dogs crouch in the ancient of their shade,
tooth-brushers spit into their crevices, piss in the gutters
they create.
Bedtime—stars like mustard seeds pop
through the smog. There’s a wail & an anguish of horns;
everlastingness reaches up & turns out the light—
ORGY
By John Kenney
Autumn.
Overcast and cool.
Woodsmoke-scented air.
Leaves in the yard.
We decided to go out back
among the tall hedgerows to rake and bag the leaves.
You said, in a very sexy voice,
“We’re out of garbage bags.”
And in your shrugging I might have seen
your breasts move,
Had they not been covered by
your fleece sweatshirt,
your work shirt,
and your T-shirt.
“Well, I’m going in,” you said.
Later, we heated up Dinty Moore beef stew
and then you went to bed.
I watched half a Jason Bourne movie.
Did I say orgy?
Sorry, my mind wandered.
I meant yard work.
PERFECTION, PERFECTION
By Kilian McDonnell
("I will walk the way of perfection." Psalm 101:2)
I have had it with perfection.
I have packed my bags,
I am out of here.
Gone.
As certain as rain
will make you wet,
perfection will do you
in.
It droppeth not as dew
upon the summer grass
to give liberty and green
joy.
Perfection straineth out
the quality of mercy,
withers rapture at its
birth.
Before the battle is half begun,
cold probity thinks
it can't be won, concedes the
war.
I've handed in my notice,
given back my keys,
signed my severance check, I
quit.
Hints I could have taken:
Even the perfect chiseled form of
Michelangelo's radiant David
squints,
the Venus de Milo
has no arms,
the Liberty Bell is
cracked.
PERSONAL POEM
By Frank O'Hara
Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion
but now I'm happy for a time and interested
I walk through the luminous humidity
passing the House of Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and the construction to
the left that closed the sidewalk if
I ever get to be a construction worker
I'd like to have a silver hat please
and get to Moriarty's where I wait for
LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and
shaker the last five years my batting average
is .016 that's that, and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don't give her one we
don't like terrible diseases, then
we go eat some fish and some ale it's
cool but crowded we don't like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don't like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don't want to be in the poets' walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich
and walk on girders in our silver hats
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so.
THE PIANO PLAYER EXPLAINS HIMSELF
By Allen Grossman
When the corpse revived at the funeral,
The outraged mourners killed it; and the soul
Of the revenant passed into the body
Of the poet because it had more to say.
He sat down at the piano no one could play
Called Messiah, or The Regulator of the World,
Which had stood for fifty years, to my knowledge,
Beneath a painting of a red-haired woman
In a loose gown with one bared breast, and played
A posthumous work of the composer S—
About the impotence of God (I believe)
Who has no power not to create everything.
It was the Autumn of the year and wet,
When the music started. The musician was
Skilful but the Messiah was out of tune
And bent the time and the tone. For a long hour
The poet played The Regulator of the World
As the spirit prompted, and entered upon
The pathways of His power – while the mourners
Stood with slow blood on their hands
Astonished by the weird processional
And the undertaker figured his bill.
– We have in mind an unplayed instrument
Which stands apart in a memorial air
Where the room darkens toward its inmost wall
And a lady hangs in her autumnal hair
At evening of the November rains; and winds
Sublime out of the North, and North by West,
Are sowing from the death-sack of the seed
The burden of her cloudy hip. Behold,
I send the demon I know to relieve your need,
An imperfect player at the perfect instrument
Who takes in hand The Regulator of the World
To keep the splendor from destroying us.
Lady! The last virtuoso of the composer S—
Darkens your parlor with the music of the Law.
When I was green and blossomed in the Spring
I was mute wood. Now I am dead I sing.
POEM FOR EVERYMAN
By John Woods
I will present you
parts of my self slowly
if you are patient and tender
I will open drawers that mostly stay closed
and bring out places and people and things sounds and smells,
loves and frustrations, hope and sadnesses,
bits and pieces of three decades of life
that have been grabbed off in chunks
and found lying in my hands that have eaten
their way into my memory,
carved their way into
my heart,
-- altogether you or I will never see them
they are me,
if you regard them lightly,
deny that they are important
or worse, judge them
I will quietly, slowly,
begin to wrap them up,
in small pieces of velvet, like worn silver and gold jewelry,
tuck them away
in a small wooden chest of drawers
and close.
PREFACE TO A TWENTY VOLUME SUICIDE NOTE
for Kellie Jones, born 16 May 1959
By 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.
PRIVATE EQUITY
By Sophie Cabot Black
To put one and one together making
Two and so on. A house appears, room
With a bed in it. To configure anyway,
Even without enough information.
We work into it, the chosen. To measure
Everything out until the one who takes over
Becomes taken. This as strategy, the art
Of how we build until management
In turn builds us, elegant the logic
Used. To draw out more than what is put in.
Everyone wants beyond; even with the one last page
As exit plan it is the return that is watched and how
We will be known. To end up where we start
Again, and to look as if we gained.
RAIN
By Don Paterson
I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;
one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame
to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,
and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,
so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,
I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:
forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters
and none of this, none of this matters.
THE PROMISE
By Jane Hirshfield
Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.
Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.
Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.
Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.
Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.
Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.
RAY
By Hayden Caruth
How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables
right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same
time, eating a piece of pie? - that's what I
wondered. A big piece of pie, because I'd just
finished reading Ray's last book. Not good pie,
not like my mother or my wife could've
made, but an ordinary pie I'd just bought, being
alone, at the Tops Market two hours ago. And how
many had water in their eyes? Because of Ray's
book and especially those last poems written
after he knew: the one about the doctor telling
him, the one where he and Tess go down to
Reno to get married before it happens and shoot
some craps on the dark baize tables, the one
called "After-Glow" about the little light in the
sky after the sun sets. I can just hear him,
if he were still here and this were somebody
else's book, saying, "Jesus," saying, "This
is the saddest son of a bitch of a book I've
read in a long time," saying, "A real long time."
And the thing is, he knew we'd be saying this
about his book, he could just hear us saying it,
and in some part of him he was glad! He
really was. What crazies we writers are
our heads full of language like buckets of minnows
standing in the moonlight on a dock. Ray
was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his
poems are good, most of them and they made me
cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down,
me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool
because all old men are fools, they have to be,
shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie
into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes
onto the pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles
shining in the light, brightening the colors, and I
ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me.
REALISM
By Beth Bachmann
God said, your name is mud
and the thing about mud is you
got to throw it down
repeatedly
to remove the air
and sometimes cut it
and rejoin it with another part.
If stars are made of dust,
it’s not the same stuff,
God said;
you can’t make a hut out of it,
only heaven,
and when I said dust to dust, that’s not what I meant.
RECIPROCITY
By Wislawa Szymborska
There are catalogues of catalogues.
There are poems about poems.
There are plays about actors played by actors.
Letters due to letters.
Words used to clarify words.
Brains occupied with studying brains.
There are griefs as infectious as laughter.
Papers emerging from waste papers.
Seen glances.
Conditions conditioned by the conditional.
Large rivers with major contributions from small ones.
Forests grown over and above by forests.
Machines designed to make machines.
Dreams that wake us suddenly from dreams.
Health needed for regaining health.
Stairs leading as much up as down.
Glasses for finding glasses.
Inspiration born of expiration.
And even if only from time to time
hatred of hatred.
All in all,
ignorance of ignorance
and hands employed to wash hands.
REMAINDER OF A LIFE
By Mahmoud Darwish
If I were told:
By evening you will die,
so what will you do until then?
I would look at my wristwatch,
I’d drink a glass of juice,
bite an apple,
contemplate at length an ant that has found its food,
then look at my wristwatch.
There’d be time left to shave my beard
and dive in a bath, obsess:
“There must be an adornment for writing,
so let it be a blue garment.”
I’d sit until noon alive at my desk
but wouldn’t see the trace of color in the words,
white, white, white . . .
I’d prepare my last lunch,
pour wine in two glasses: one for me
and one for the one who will come without appointment,
then I’d take a nap between two dreams.
But my snoring would wake me . . .
so I’d look at my wristwatch:
and there’d be time left for reading.
I’d read a chapter in Dante and half of a mu’allaqah
and see how my life goes from me
to the others, but I wouldn’t ask who
would fill what’s missing in it.
That’s it, then?
That’s it, that’s it.
Then what?
Then I’d comb my hair and throw away the poem . . .
this poem, in the trash,
and put on the latest fashion in Italian shirts,
parade myself in an entourage of Spanish violins,
and walk to the grave!
(Translated, from the Arabic, by Fady Joudah.)
RHODODENDRON
By Matthew Dickman
People pray to a vengeful
god because they seek revenge.
They chose a god who hates
what they hate
but also made the sea
and the sequoia.
I’m walking my infant
son through a stand of rhododendron
trees. It feels like we are walking
through a cloud of jellyfish
made of pink and purple paper
petals falling
to the ground.
These jellyfish are the fish of spring.
He is making sounds
like a mouse, small but all out
of his body. Inside,
his organs are so new
that they are both organs
and the beginning of organs.
When he cries for his mother
to nurse him
he sounds like a rooster.
He is not
just hungry
but hunger itself.
He is the thing
he cries for. Sunlight is turning
the rhododendrons
into balls of pink light if light
were liquid
and something else,
splashing,
that’s what the pink is doing,
splashing all over us,
lucky without god,
animals under the bright pink
idea of earth.
SEPARATION
By W. S. Merwin
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
SHOPPING FOR POMEGRANATES AT WAL-MART ON NEW YEAR’S DAY
By Campbell McGrath
Beneath a ten-foot-tall apparition of Frosty the Snowman
with his corncob pipe and jovial, over-eager, button-black eyes,
holding, in my palm, the leathery, wine-colored purse
of a pomegranate, I realize, yet again, that America is a country
about which I understand everything and nothing at all,
that this is life, this ungovernable air
in which the trees rearrange their branches, season after season,
never certain which configuration will bear the optimal yield
of sunlight and water, the enabling balm of nutrients,
that so, too, do Wal-Mart’s ferocious sales managers
relentlessly analyze their end-cap placement, product mix,
and shopper demographics, that this is the culture
in all its earnestness and absurdity, that it never rests,
that each day is an eternity and every night is New Year’s Eve,
a cavalcade of B-list has-beens entirely unknown to me,
needy comedians and country singers in handsome Stetsons,
sitcom stars of every social trope and ethnic denomination,
pugilists and oligarchs, femmes fatales and anointed virgins
throat-slit in offering to the cannibal throng of Times Square.
Who are these people? I grow old. I lie unsleeping
as confetti falls, ash-girdled, robed in sweat and melancholy,
click-shifting from QVC to reality TV, strings of commercials
for breath freshener, debt reconsolidation, a new car
lacking any whisper of style or grace, like a final fetid gasp
from the lips of a dying Henry Ford, potato-faced actors
impersonating real people with real opinions
offered forth with idiot grins in the yellow, herniated studio light,
actual human beings, actual souls bought too cheaply.
That it never ends, O Lord, that it never ends!
That it is relentless, remorseless, and it is on right now.
That one sees it and sees it but sometimes it sees you, too,
cowering in a corner, transfixed by the crawler for the storm alert,
home videos of faces left dazed by the twister, the car bomb,
the war always beginning or already begun, always
the special report, the inside scoop, the hidden camera
revealing the mechanical lives of the sad, inarticulate people
we have come to know as “celebrities.”
Who assigns such value, who chose these craven avatars
if not the miraculous hand of the marketplace,
whose torn cuticles and gaudily painted fingernails resemble nothing
so much as our own? Where does the oracle reveal our truths
more vividly than upon that pixillated spirit glass
unless it is here, in this tabernacle of homely merchandise,
a Copernican model of a money-driven universe
revolving around its golden omphalos, each of us summed
and subtotalled, integers in an equation of need and consumption,
desire and consummation, because Hollywood had it right all along,
the years are a montage of calendar pages and autumn leaves,
sheet music for a nostalgic symphony of which our lives comprise
but single trumpet blasts, single notes in the hullabaloo,
or even less—we are but motes of dust in that atmosphere
shaken by the vibrations of time’s imperious crescendo.
That it never ends, O Lord. That it goes on,
without pause or cessation, without pity or remorse.
That we have willed it into existence, dreamed it into being.
That it is our divine monster, our factotum, our scourge.
That I can imagine nothing more beautiful
than to propitiate such a god upon the seeds of my own heart.
SHORTCHANGED
By Fred Voss
People are told
all their lives what is good for them who to vote for
where to go and what to do as they march
to work and up and down the streets buying things and yet
Dostoevsky
in 4 great huge novels barely scratches the surface
of what it is to be a human being.
People are told what to think
and what it all means and what
to give their lives for by politicians
and bosses and bureaucrats and experts and
teachers and traffic signals and laws
and electric shocks and 30 days in County Jail and armies
that kill millions of people and yet
Shakespeare
barely shines a few rays of light
into the mystery of the human soul.
People use up their lives
thinking they are worth nothing as they follow other people's directions
while the genius of Tennessee Williams
in dozens of plays moves our understanding
of what is really inside us
one fraction of an inch forward.
SOLVITUR AMBULANDO
By Tim Donnelly
After the impossibility of the movement
of any object through time as raised in light
of the fact that, in time’s smallest unit,
no motion can take place (which is to say,
that any given object in it is at rest, or
if it isn’t, then the unit isn’t actually
the smallest, because it can still be divided
further, specifically: into a time when the object
was in one place, and then the time
just after, when it’s in another, and insofar as
any length of time is composed of a finite
number of such smallest units
during which, by definition, no motion
can take place, it follows that no motion
can take place in any aggregate of these
units either—which is to say, the flying arrow
is motionless, a paradox one might
be inclined to dismiss with other oddnesses
that don’t immediately fit our sense
of what is real, or what it profits us to take
seriously, especially in the face of what
we have to face), the need to commit to a new
kind of take on what it means to be
composed, and of how the properties
of the collective won’t by necessity reflect those
of its constituents, paradoxically
arose—the way no atom in my brain tonight
feels on its own capable of wanting to walk out into
the street to see the stars, but together,
they still want to, and it feels miraculous.
SOME SAY
By Maureen N. McLane
Some say a host
of horsemen, a horizon
of ships under sail
is most beautiful &
some say a mountain
embraced by the clouds &
some say the badass
booty-shakin’ shorties
in the club are most
beautiful and some say
the truth is most
beautiful dutifully singing
what beauty might
sound under stars
of a day. I say
what they say
is sometimes
what I say
Her legs long
and bare shining
on the bed the hair
the small tuft
the brown languor
of a long line
of sunlit skin I say
whatever you say
I’m saying is beautiful
& whither truth beauty
and whither whither
in the weather of an old day
suckerpunched by a spiral
of Arctic air blown
into vast florets of ice
binding the Great Lakes
into a single cracked sheet
the airplanes fly
unassuming over O they eat
and eat the steel mouths
and burn what the earth
spun eons to form
Some say calamity
and some catastrophe
is beautiful Some say
porn Some jolie laide
Some say beauty
is hanging there at a dank bar
with pretty and sublime
those sad bitches left behind
by the horsemen
SONG OF STARLIGHT
By Brian Andreas
(adapted)
Last night,
I walked in the cold
and there was no other sound
but the crunch of my boots on snow
and then,
almost too soft to hear,
there was the thin crystal song of starlight
and I stopped and listened
for a long time
and somewhere in there
the universe suddenly made sense,
but by the time I got home it didn’t any more
and still it made me smile
at how little that mattered
now that I’d heard
the starlight sing.
STOLEN, 1966
By Traci Brimhall
One candidate swears he’ll import artists from Paris
to paint every voter’s portrait, but the wiretap reveals
that, of the six masked balls and two bullfights he promised,
he only planned to pass out free twelve packs
of Guaraná Antarctica on Election Day. One candidate
skips town when someone catches him digging up a body
and reburying it beneath the courthouse. Another rumor
says he was caught tattooing women after curfew, inking
diabolical love letters onto their ankles. He was part of
a conspiracy of windmills, others claim. They say his chickens
accused him of unspeakable things. When you arrive to cast
your ballot, the soldiers at the polls hand you a picture
of the general leading the charge against the Bolivian Army
and a picture of the President’s house stormed by the Navy.
You vote for the general twice, go to the town square,
and dance with short men with long mustaches who bury
their bristled cheeks between your breasts and swear to help
you when the borders open if you’ll only let them sign
their names on your thighs. One plans your escape in a canoe
under a dead fisherman. One will pack you in a sack when
he ships his manioc. One promises to write you a poem
whose music will transport you over the Andes, even if
your body remains here. My bride, says the first. Beloved,
says the second. Muse, writes the third. Now choose.
THE SUNRISE RUBY
By Rumi
In the early morning hour,
just before dawn, lover and beloved awake
and take a drink of water.
She asks, Do you love me or yourself more?
Really, tell me the absolute truth.
He says, There is nothing left of me.
I am like a ruby held up to the sunrise.
Is it still a stone, or a world
made of redness? It has no resistance
to sunlight. The ruby and the sunrise are one.
Be courageous and discipline yourself.
Work. Keep digging your well.
Don't think about getting off from work.
Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that is a ring on the door.
Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who's there.
SUPPLY AND DEMAND
By Clarence Major
As a dishwasher
in a restaurant
I lasted only three hours.
It was a dubious role at best.
The dirty dishes kept coming
faster than I could produce clean ones.
But I could play the piano
for hours and hours,
snake across the floor
on my belly
all afternoon and into the night.
As Hercules
I lifted Antaeus from the earth,
robbing him of his strength.
Always happy,
I could walk around the block
on my hands.
In a fanciful costume,
I played the joker.
With a thirty-pound sack of rice
on my head, all day
I danced
on a stone balustrade
without falling off.
From sunup to sundown,
week after week,
I was a whole amusement park
unto myself.
I was on top of contingencies.
I defended victims of foolishness
and porous people.
I campaigned for weeks
against the greedy.
I deconstructed ancestral suffering.
I gave comfort to the feeble
and the needy.
I made marionettes dance for kids.
I played marbles with the best
and the worst.
But as a dishwasher
I lasted only three hours.
TABLE TALK
By Billy Collins
Not long after we had sat down to dinner
at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago
and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus,
one of us--a bearded man with a colorful tie--
asked if any one of us had ever considered
applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom of St. Sebastian.
The differences between these two figures
were much more striking than the differences
between the Cornish hen and the trout amandine
I was wavering between, so I looked up and closed my menu.
If, the man with the tie continued,
an object moving through space
will never reach its destination because it is always
limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half,
then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die
from the wounds inflicted by the arrows.
No, the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their endless approach.
St. Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack.
I think Ill have the trout, I told the waiter,
for it was now my turn to order,
but all through the elegant dinner
I kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing
the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian
a fleet of them perpetually halving the tiny distances
to his body, tied to a post with rope,
even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.
And I thought of the bullet never reaching
the wife of William Burroughs, an apple trembling on her head,
the tossed acid never getting to the face of that girl,
and the Oldsmobile never knocking my, dog into a ditch.
The theories of Zeno floated above the table
like thought balloons from the fifth century before Christ,
yet my fork continued to arrive at my mouth
delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish,
and after we all talked and ate and lifted our glasses,
we left the restaurant and said goodbye on the street
then walked our separate ways in the world where things do arrive,
where people get where they are going--
where the train pulls into the station in a cloud of vapor,
where geese land with a splash to the surface of the lake,
and the one you love crosses the room and arrives in your arms--
and, yes, where sharp arrows will pierce a torso,
splattering the groin and the bare feet of the saint,
that popular subject of European religious painting.
One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling with quills.
TAO TE CHING [excerpts]
By Lao Tzu
TAO defined is not the constant Tao.
No name names its eternal name.
The unnamable is the origin of heaven and earth;
named, it is the mother of the ten thousand things.
Emptied of desire, we see the mystery;
filled with desire, we see the manifestation of things.
Two names emerge from a single origin, a
nd both are called mysterious,
and the mystery itself is the gateway to perception...
BEAUTY and ugliness have one origin.
Name beauty, and ugliness is.
Recognizing virtue recognizes evil.
Is and is not produce one another.
The difficult is born in the easy,
long is defined by short,
the high by the low.
Instrument and voice achieve one harmony.
Before and after have places.
That is why the sage can act without effort
and teach without words,
nurture things without possessing them,
and accomplish things without expecting merit:
only one who makes no attempt to possess it
cannot lose it....
HEAVEN is eternal. The earth endures.
The reason for heaven’s eternity and earth’s endurance
is that they do not live for themselves only,
and therefore may live forever.
The sage steps back but remains in front,
the outsider always within.
Self is realized through selflessness.
TERRIBLE THINGS ARE HAPPENING . .
By Maureen N. McClane
Terrible things are happening in Russian
novels!
Just yesterday I heard in the café
of two peasants, long friends,
one in sudden possession of a
watch hanging from a gold chain
which so disturbed his
compadre he
stole upon the other unsuspecting, prayed
to god
and slit his throat, fleeing with
the watch— and that’s
not the worst of it!
Just yesterday my love and I
too had not exactly a
“fight”
but a “reckoning” perhaps, or no—a
“conversation” which opened the ocean
of grief
and now she is in another city
perhaps crying
and not because of Russian novels
THE STRAIGHTFORWARD MERMAID
By Matthea Harvey
The straightforward mermaid starts every sentence with “Look . . . ” This comes from being raised in a sea full of hooks. She wants to get points 1, 2, and 3 across, doesn’t want to disappear like a river into the ocean. When she’s feeling despairing, she goes to eddies at the mouth of the river and tries to comb the water apart with her fingers. The straightforward mermaid has already said to five sailors, “Look, I don’t think this is going to work,” before sinking like a sullen stone. She’s supposed to teach Rock Impersonation to the younger mermaids, but every beach field trip devolves into them trying to find shells to match their tail scales. They really love braiding. “Look,” says the straightforward mermaid. “Your high ponytails make you look like fountains, not rocks.” Sometimes she feels like a third gender—preferring primary colors to pastels, the radio to singing. At least she’s all mermaid: never gets tired of swimming, hates the thought of socks.
THE TWO YVONNES
By Jessica Greenbaum
For help he said I should read the new translation of a Gogol story called
“The Two Yvonnes,” but after I wrote down the title
of course I realized he meant “Ivans” which brought me to the two
Two Yvonnes, one male, one female, whatever her story might be,
now that both of her exist in ballpoint on a line of notebook paper.
And because, at my age, facts tend to switch out with mere notions
like star actors being swapped out for lesser-paid stand-ins
the same day I got the time wrong for a friend’s book party—
and what could be more spazzy than arriving early for a book party?
Not being an important actor I stayed on the scene and talked
to my friend’s husband: Paul, I said, I love your painting, “Ezekiel’s
Dream,” which I saw on that postcard you sent out—how big is it?
He air-sketched a rectangle, tall as an old school window,
and I said, Oh, I thought it was more wide than tall,
at least from the postcard. Oh no, he said, it’s more tall than wide. I
didn’t believe him but I wasn’t going to argue. How’s your painting going?
he kindly asked. I don’t paint, I said, barely wanting to admit it
since it’s so rare to be asked about work. You’re too modest!
he said. We had only met a few times so I explained, No, really, Paul,
I only write. Go on! he said, imitating me, I only write. Ha ha!
and this sort of exchange continued for some volleys, Paul’s guffaws
escalating with each of my more earnest denials. Karen, I said,
finding my friend who was needed across the room because some heavy
guests had started arriving, Paul is mistaking me for another friend of yours
and he thinks I’m a really good painter! This is Jess, Karen said
into Paul’s good ear, a thought that went directly to the voting booth
and pressed the lever. He nodded, remembering, and then Karen said to me,
Your hair! It’s so much darker! Darker? I asked . . . Hmmm, I stalled,
trying not to embarrass anyone. Yes! she said, happy to be her honest self,
much, much darker! You used to have much lighter hair! Who
was she, I wondered, this sandy-haired painter who doubled for me
in their imaginations—the second Yvonne in the new translation—
and who are you? You who I thought the star of my story?
TRUTH
By Maxine Kumine
Came varnished,
prepackaged, required
scissors to break the seal.
Worn raw from use, reuse
it put up splinters.
I sanded it, wiped it
clear with turpentine.
Liked the look of it
newborn. Thought about
polyurethane, two coats
at least—varnish is old hat.
Rethought the climate:
cutting, quick to punish.
Went out for more varnish.
UNLIMITED SOUP AND SALAD
By Timothy Donnelly
A little goes a long way when it comes to reality
and the question of whether we can know it directly
rather than just through the gauze of our experience
(not that it makes that much of a difference
when you’re right in the thick of it, as when performing
a bank heist, or competitive mummery among
family and friends, in which case your trust that
the world is as it appears is more or less inviolate
if unself-reflecting, the way a honeybee trusts nectar
inhabits the petunia, or that her venom sac or
gland or whatever it is will continue pumping its venom
long after the stinger anchors in the forearm
of the intruder—often merely an innocent passerby—
having ripped off the hindmost furze of her body
evisceratingly, which is to say, along with much of her
abdomen and digestive tract, plus whatever
else happens to come with, a kind of surrendering
as means of attack, which reads tragically wrong-
headed in retrospect, although it does lend a vividness
to the question of to whom the bee’s business
end belongs now—the one from whose person it
juts or her whose torn foreparts lie on the granite
pavement lifelessly from having implanted it there).
But when appetizers alone can fill you up, why bother
gambling on the main course, it will only distract
you from what you have come to rely on as fact
relies on its verifiability—in silence and so totally
you could almost weep for it, the way they do in Italy
at the end of an opera, an era, or even the idea of
anything familiar dying: a tradition; a truth; an olive
tree fallen to fungus whose narrow leaves made with
wind a conversation we had found to be rejuvenative
to listen to, whose fruit and oil expressed therefrom
we couldn’t get enough of, whose shade could reform,
and whose earliest ancestor Athena’s constant hand
did unveil in Attica as the greatest gift to humankind.
[UNTITLED]
By Daniel Ladinsk
Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth
“You owe me"
Look what happens with a love like that
It lights the whole sky
VARIATION ON THE WORD SLEEP
By Margaret Atwood
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
WATER
By Philip Larkin
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
THE WAY
By Albert Goldbarth
The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—and so the devastating rose
of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lamé
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lamé.” The way
our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk
to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.
WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT THIS PROBLEM
By Hafiz
There is a Beautiful Creature
Living in a hole you have dug.
So at night
I set fruit and grains
And little pots of wine and milk
Beside your soft earthen mounds,
And I often sing.
But still, my dear,
You do not come out.
I have fallen in love with Someone
Who hides inside you.
We should talk about this problem---
Otherwise,
I will never leave you alone.
WHAT IS REAL
By Tim Donnelly
And though we had fed long and well at the table
the talk always turned to whether to go on
regardless of what it might say about our moral sense
regardless of what it might cost us in the end,
or whether the time had come to surrender,
let the sum of our particles back into the flow
hoping they might in the longview recombine
into something of value, or of beauty, but humbler
than the human—not that we’d be able
to judge, not that we'll ever be able to know
what comes of what we did, or whether it was
worth it, like the towering alien humanoid at the start
of Ridley Scott's Prometheus, how it paces
to the edge of a powerful waterfall somewhere on what
appears to be a still primarily mineral Earth,
takes one last look at its oblong mothership
surveilling from a mist, removes its monklike robe
and drinks as if in ceremony from a cup
of animate metallic ooze that quickly disintegrates
its all too pale flesh, unleashing new organic matter
into the ecosystem, strands of DNA unzipping
haphazardly in the rush to mix it up with Earth’s
own chemistry and into offspring whose tumble
up it will never witness—not the earliest infinite-
simal blips or suppertime in old Persepolis, not opaque
dawn in Beijing or any single sentient being
separated a moment from the chaos, wholly
unobserved, in whom life sank down as if to test itself,
limitless, dark, spreading, unfathomably deep
and free. As if at play in ether, a meadow of
possibility skittering as axons of foam across the surface
swell of the North Sea. I felt once I belonged to
it in a way I would collapse the instant I began
measuring it in words: waves in blue profusion
dissolving into geological undulations and then
pulses in yellow sand. Here a snake crosses
my path again in Texas, the length of it like a dew-
damp privilege wriggled by a cloud-hid hand
conveying deep troughs and amplitudes back to the sun.
We do go on. Near movie's end, the last known
humanoid of the type to seed life on Earth
is uprooted from cryogenic sleep on a made-up moon
by a crew of corporate human blunderers it then
looks down on with informed disgust, killing off
in minutes all but one. In America, Baudrillard
says the products of our imagination remind us
what is real, the way weariness of existence is
how we come to feel, buried in all this abundance,
we are still alive. Hold on tight, my circumstance.
Tonight we're diving in. Tonight we'll find the bassline
subatomic-style, let particles of us entangle
knowingly with those of a gold encyclopedia
in the ruins of Vienna or an ear of teosinte across
an open border, a common source of being, before I
die-let us be, let being be, continuous, continuous.
WHAT IS THERE BEYOND KNOWING
By Mary Oliver
What is there beyond knowing that keeps
calling to me? I can't
turn in any direction
but it's there. I don't mean
the leaves' grip and shine or even the thrush's
silk song, but the far-off
fires, for example,
of the stars, heaven's slowly turning
theater of light, or the wind
playful with its breath;
or time that's always rushing forward,
or standing still
in the same—what shall I say—
moment.
What I know
I could put into a pack
as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it
on one shoulder,
important and honorable, but so small!
While everything else continues, unexplained
and unexplainable. How wonderful it is
to follow a thought quietly
to its logical end.
I have done this a few times.
But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing
in and out. Life so far doesn't have any other name
but breath and light, wind and rain.
If there's a temple, I haven't found it yet.
I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass
and the weeds.
WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?
By Kim Addonizio
I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.
WHAT THAT MOON LANGUAGE
By Hafiz
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them,
“Love Me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud;
Otherwise, someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us
To connect.
Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying,
With that sweet moon
Language,
What every other eye in this world
is dying to
Hear.
WHY I OPTED FOR THE MORE EXPENSIVE OIL AT JIFFY LUBE
By Julie Price Pinkert
This one is better for a car as old as yours, he says.
It won’t glob up, he says. And spring is almost here,
so of course you need a thicker oil.
And I say, So with this good oil my car will run better
and it’ll be washed and waxed every time I get in it?
Yes, he says. And you’ll never have to put another drop of gas in it.
And when I start the car, a big bag of money will appear in the back seat?
Yes, he says. And cash will shoot out your exhaust pipe
and people will be glad when they see you coming.
And will I look rested? Like I’ve gotten plenty of sleep every night?
That goes without saying, he says.
And when I roll over in bed and look at the man
who says he loves me, will I finally believe he loves me?
You, he says, won’t be able to believe anything else. Your heart
will soak up the goodness and you will smile and beam and sigh
like a pig in mud.
And what about my parents? I ask. Will this oil keep them from dying?
They’re very old.
Let’s call them and tell them the happy news, he says.
WILD, WILD
By Mary Oliver
This is what love is:
The dry rose bush the gardener, in his pruning, missed
Suddenly bursts into bloom.
A madness of delight; an obsession.
A holy gift, certainly,
But often, alas, improbable.
Why couldn’t Romeo have settled for someone else?
Why couldn’t Tristan and Isolde have refused
The shining cup
Which would have left peaceful the whole kingdom?
Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests
Of our lives.
Over and over Faust, standing in the garden, doesn’t know
Anything that’s going to happen, he only sees
The face of Marguerite, which is irresistible.
And wild, wild sings the bird.
YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS
By Red Hawk
On the way to the picnic I stop to buy
an apple pie and the big bag of corn chips,
my favorites.
We get there and drink beer, grill burgers
and have a good time.
Just to show what a good guy I am,
I leave them the rest of the apple pie
but I wrap and fold the corn chips carefully
and place them next to our cooler so
they will come home with us.
They are my favorites.
The next day I go to the kitchen for corn chips but
they are nowhere to be found; I look
everywhere and then
I go in the laundry room where she is
doing the wash and I ask her, Where
are the corn chips?
I left them there to be nice,
she says, and that is how the fight starts.
It goes on and on, but it ends the way
they always end: she is in tears and when
I try to comfort her by saying I love her, she
says, You don’t love me; you don’t
know what love is. And I am thinking,
not out loud of course, That’s a
goddamn lie, I love
those corn chips.
ENDNOTES
A terminal cataloguer of memories and experiences,
I keep lists of books and poems and other diversions.
Each speaks to some part of me
or some episode in my life.
This one continues to grow and evolve
even as I cull a few from time to time
to make room for the new
while keeping the rest
like a resume of accomplishments or failures
or a reminder of dos and do nots.
Cover photo: Barry Feinstein
Noteworthy entries omitted from reading too many times:
HOWL FOR CARL SOLOMON
By Allen Ginsberg
ITHAKA
By C.P. Cavafy
THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
By T.S. Eliot
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD
By Wallace Stevens