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.