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.

* * *