Winter Love

I would like to decorate this silence,
but my house grows only cleaner
and more plain. The glass chimes I hung
over the register ring a little
when the heat goes on.
I waited too long to drink my tea.
It was not hot. It was only warm.


by Linda Gregg

Tea Drinking

The first cup moistens my lips and throat.
The second cup breaks my loneliness.
The third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some thousand volumes of odd ideographs.
The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration – all the wrongs of life pass out through my pores.
At the fifth cup I am purified.
The sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals.
The seventh cup – ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of the cool wind that raises in my sleeves.
Where is Elysium? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.


by Lu Ting

Invocation

Spirit,
in me accomplish your work--
the ineradicable work
that even as my strength begins to fail
you still build
as beautiful in the approaching ruin.

by Tom Sleigh

Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

by Mary Oliver

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.

By Stanley Kunitz

Good Intentions Paving Company (these are song lyrics)

Twenty miles left to the shore
Hello my old country hello
Stars are just beginning to appear
And I have never in my life before been here

And it's my heart, not me, who cannot ply
That base conclusion you may write
Watching me sit here bolt upright and cry
For no good reason at the Eastern sky

And the tilt of this strange nation
And the will to remain for the duration
Waving the flag, feeling it drag

Like a bump on a bump on a log, baby
Like I'm in a fist fight with a fog, baby
Step-ball-change and a pirouette
And .. and I regret, I regret

How I said to you, honey, just open your heart
When I've got trouble even opening a honey jar
And that right there is where we are

And I been 'fessing double fast
Addressing questions nobody asks
I'll get this joy off of my chest at last
And I will love you 'til the noise has long since passed

And I did not mean to shout, just drive
Just get us out, get home ..
A road too long to mention holds us up ..
Laid down by the good intentions paving company

All the weight of the thing we've been playing at, darlin'
I can see that you're wearing your staying hat, darlin'
For the time being all is well
Won't you love me a spell?

This is blindness beyond all conceiving
Well, behind us the road is leaving, yeah, leaving
And falling back
Like a rope gone slack

And the sauce strayed away but the ladle will stay
But I fell for you, honey, as easy as falling asleep
And that right there is the course I keep...

And no amount of talking
Is going to soften the fall
But, like after the rain, step out
Of the overhang, that's all

It had a nice a ring to it
When the old opera house
rang
So with a song I'm all ran
"Signed, sealed, delivered" I sang

And there is hesitation
And it always remains
Concerning you, me,
And the rest of the gang

And in a quiet hour
I feel I see everything

And am in love with the hook
Upon which everyone hangs

And I know you meant to show the extent
To which you gave a god dang
It rings real hot and real cold but I'm sold
I am home on that range

And I do hate to fold
Right here at the top of my game
When I've been trying with my whole heart and soul
To stay right here in the right lane

But it can make you feel over and old
Lord, you know it's a shame
When I only want for you to pull over and hold me
'Til I can't remember my own name


by Joanna Newsom

First They Came...

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.


by Martin Niemöller (regarding the inactivity of the German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power)

Untranslatable Song

        "Everyone needs one untranslatable song."
                    -Roberto Juarroz

On hearing the striped contralto of guinea fowl,
its mock opera quivers the parsley atop its head--

The song makes its imprint
in the air, making itself felt,
a felt world. Here, there,
the stunned silence
of knowing I will not remember
what I heard;

futures
that will never happen,
a fluidity we cannot achieve
except as a child
creating possibility.

This is the untranslatable song
hidden in the earth.


by Claudia Reder

In Chandler Country

California night. The Devil's wind,
the Santa Ana, blows in from the east,
raging through the canyon like a drunk
screaming in a bar.

The air tastes like
a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain?
The weather's fine as long as you don't breathe.
Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture,
lights turned out, windows shut against the storm,
and count your blessings.
Another sleepless night,
when every wrinkle in the bedsheet scratches
like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek,
when every ten-year whiskey tastes like sand,
and quiet women in the kitchen run
their fingers on the edges of a knife
and eye their husbands' necks. I wish them luck.

Tonight it seems that if I took the coins
out of my pocket and tossed them in the air
they'd stay a moment glistening like a net
slowly falling through dark water.
I remember
the headlights of the cars parked on the beach,
the narrow beams dissolving on the dark
surface of the lake, voices arguing
about the forms, the crackling radio,
the sheeted body lying on the sand,
the trawling net still damp beside it. No,
she wasn't beautiful – but at that age
when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty –
"Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?"

Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door
catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl.
Lean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm,
packs of coyotes come down from the hills
where there is nothing left to hunt.


by Dana Goia

In Broken Images

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the facts fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and clear in my broken images.

He, in a new confusion of his understanding;
I, in a new understanding of my confusion.


by Robert Graves

Falling in love is like owning a dog

First of all, it's a big responsibility,

especially in a city like New York.

So think long and hard before deciding on love.

On the other hand, love gives you a sense of security:

when you're walking down the street late at night

and you have a leash on love

ain't no one going to mess with you.

Because crooks and muggers think love is unpredictable.

Who knows what love could do in its own defense?

On cold winter nights, love is warm.

It lies between you and lives and breathes

and makes funny noises.

Love wakes you up all hours of the night with its needs.

It needs to be fed so it will grow and stay healthy.

Love doesn't like being left alone for long.

But come home and love is always happy to see you.

It may break a few things accidentally in its passion for life,

but you can never be mad at love for long.

Is love good all the time? No! No!

Love can be bad. Bad, love, bad! Very bad love.

Love makes messes.

Love leaves you little surprises here and there.

Love needs lots of cleaning up after.

Sometimes you just want to get love fixed.

Sometimes you want to roll up a piece of newspaper

and swat love on the nose,

not so much to cause pain,

just to let love know Don't you ever do that again!

Sometimes love just wants to go for a nice long walk.

Because love loves exercise.

It runs you around the block and leaves you panting.

It pulls you in several different directions at once,

or winds around and around you

until you're all wound up and can't move.

But love makes you meet people wherever you go.

People who have nothing in common but love

stop and talk to each other on the street.

Throw things away and love will bring them back,

again, and again, and again.

But most of all, love needs love, lots of it.

And in return, love loves you and never stops.

by Taylor Mali

www.taylormali.com

Mormon Missionaries Pay Me A Visit

I'm sitting on my lawn
enjoying a nice blunt cigar
watching children ride scooters
up and down the street
twilight gently falling,
swallows circling,
Mississippi Kites high overhead,
tree frog, sounds of sweet shadows

Then I see them in the corner of my eye,
two bikes slow
they can not pass a lost soul –
I'm too conspicuous –
I don't want this feeling, I want them
to pass me by

Good evening sir they say
I'm Elder Hansen says the first
I'm Elder Olson the second chokes
and then they wait
but all I can think to say:
You're kind of young to be elders, aren't you?
They launch into their sales pitch
about Restoration and Heavenly Father
while I recoil in smoke, then interrupt
If I convert do I have to give up this cigar?
They are not sure
but soon get back on track
like a loose wheel wobbling
until they finally bid me good evening.
I watch them roll away
and wonder
what gives them the audacity to interrupt me
while I am at worship

by Ken Hada

The School House

Boys crowd the iron bars
like jailbirds
in an old western

All singing the same song,
like an out of sync choir
'hey mista, hey mista
hey mista you hungry
hey mista you thirsty?'

The faces in the crowd
are cracked
the hands
stained orange

They look like
they've been eating
Cheetos made of
60-grit sandpaper

I call over the one
standing off to the side
refusing to belt out the same tune
with the rest of the chorus
his head down
his hands clean and tan

"How much?"

The tenors join in
as well as the baritones
immediately undercutting
one another

'Hey mista,
three for five,'
'no mista,
three for three'

For a third world country
they sure understand
commerce and trade —
supply and demand.

I pay the quiet one
the original price
he runs off to
fetch my order
while the others insult me
in broken English

'Get the fuck out of yourself,'
one says
while hoisting up
his middle finger

They laugh
and take turns
showing off
hand signals

Flipping birds and
throwing up gang signs
one even air-pumps
two orange fingers in the pink
and one cracked pinky in the stink

They are very proud
of the foul language
and gestures
they've learned
at this fucked up school house

The constant rotation
of young Marines
who stand guard by the
front gate of the base
always take time to play professor

Children
teaching
children

The clean boy
returns with my order
and even says
'thank you mista'
for his tip

The others
smirk at
him

Modesty is not often rewarded
on this playground

They are vulgar
because it gets attention
and attention means orders
and orders mean tips

Who needs textbooks
when you can make
more money
than your father
by saying 'fuck'
and running to grab sodas


by Mark Fayloga

--
The School House is about the ‘runners’ at Forward Operating Base Joker. At almost all of the FOBs and observation posts you can find a way to have somebody go out into town to pick you up desert groceries: soda, flatbread, rice … even chickens. Most posts out here have makeshift outdoor kitchens, so the men get together on many nights for cookouts instead of eating sodium-packed rations. But no post has a system in place quite like at FOB Joker. The base is right by a bazaar and market, so not only is there more to choose from, it’s more readily available. It’s like walking into a bank but instead of a bunch of tellers behind counters and glass windows there are a bunch of pre-adolescent boys on top of a mud wall behind iron bars all vying for your attention money. -M.F.

The Benefits of Ignorance

If ignorance is bliss, Father said,
shouldn't you be looking blissful?
You should check to see if you have
the right kind of ignorance. If you're
not getting the benefits that most people
get from acting stupid, then you should
go back to what you always were—
being too smart for your own good.


by Hal Sirowitz

Misery Loves Company

Sometimes I feel miserable,
Father said, but unlike you I don't
make a big deal of it. I just see it
as the price you pay for being human—
getting my share of the unhappiness.
Whereas, you go to a doctor to talk
about your problems, blowing them up
until they're out of proportion. I
don't blame your doctor for having
a keen eye for business—the longer
you see him the more money
he gets. I just hope he's not planning
on making you his permanent customer.


by Hal Sirowitz

Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet

At this height, Kansas
is just a concept,
a checkerboard design of wheat and corn

no larger than the foldout section
of my neighbor's travel magazine.
At this stage of the journey

I would estimate the distance
between myself and my own feelings
is roughly the same as the mileage

from Seattle to New York,
so I can lean back into the upholstered interval
between Muzak and lunch,

a little bored, a little old and strange.
I remember, as a dreamy
backyard kind of kid,

tilting up my head to watch
those planes engrave the sky
in lines so steady and so straight

they implied the enormous concentration
of good men,
but now my eyes flicker

from the in-flight movie
to the stewardess's pantyline,
then back into my book,

where men throw harpoons at something
much bigger and probably
better than themselves,

wanting to kill it, wanting
to see great clouds of blood erupt
to prove that they exist.

Imagine being born and growing up,
rushing through the world for sixty years
at unimaginable speeds.

Imagine a century like a room so large,
a corridor so long
you could travel for a lifetime

and never find the door,
until you had forgotten
that such a thing as doors exist.

Better to be on board the Pequod,
with a mad one-legged captain
living for revenge.

Better to feel the salt wind
spitting in your face,
to hold your sharpened weapon high,

to see the glisten
of the beast beneath the waves.
What a relief it would be

to hear someone in the crew
cry out like a gull,
Oh Captain, Captain!
Where are we going now?

by Tony Hoagland

The God Abandons Antony (1911)

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

By Constantine P. Cavafy
Translated (from Greek) by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Mandragora

Pour me red wine from out the Venice flask,
------Pour faster, faster yet!
The joy of ruby thought, I do not ask,
------Bid me forget!

Breathe slumbrous music round me, sweet and slow,
------To honied phrases set!
Into the land of dreams I long to go.
------Bid me forget!

Lay not the rose's bloom against my cheek,
------With chill tears she is wet.
The wrinkled poppy is the flower I seek.
------Bid me forget!

Where is delight? And what are pleasures now?
------Moths that a garment fret.
The world is turned memorial, crying, "Thou
------shalt not forget!"


by Mary E. Coleridge

Just to Feel Human

A single apple grew on our tree, which
was some kind of miracle because it was a
pear tree. We walked around it scratching
our heads. "You want to eat it?" I asked
my wife. "I'd die first," she replied. We
went back into the house. I stood by the
kitchen window and stared at it. I thought
of Adam and Eve, but I didn't believe in Adam
and Eve. My wife said, "If you don't stop
staring at that stupid apple I'm going to go
out there and eat it." "So go," I said, "but
take your clothes off first, go naked." She
looked at me as if I were insane, and then
she started to undress, and so did I.


by James Tate

When the Horses Gallop Away From Us, It's a Good Thing

I always find it strange—though I shouldn't—how creatures don't
---------care for us the way we care for them.
Horses, for instance, and chipmunks, and any bird you'd name.
Empathy's only a one-way street.

And that's all right, I've come to believe.
It sets us up for ultimate things,

---------and penultimate ones as well.
It's a good lesson to have in your pocket when the Call comes to
-----call.


by Charles Wright

Slow Drag Blues

I don't believe in sex

after marriage.
---My wife does, just

not with me.
---I plead the Fifth

of whisky. I am close

to perfecting a theory
---of forgettability.

Grief a dog
---that keeps dogging me---

Good Grief,
---I say. It's me

he's teaching to beg---

my next anniversary
---is newspaper, yesterday's---

lining my cage---
---Tomorrow the day

I hope to learn to stay.


by Kevin Young

i've come again

i've come again
like a new year
to crash the gate
of this old prison

i've come again
to break the teeth and claws
of this man-eating
monster we call life

i've come again
to puncture the
glory of the cosmos
who so mercilessly
destroys humans

i am the falcon
hunting down the birds
of black omen
before their flights

i gave my word
at the outset to
give my life
with no qualms
i pray to the Lord
to break my back
before i break my word

how do you dare to
let someone like me
intoxicated with love
enter your house

you must know better
if i enter
i'll break all this and
destroy all that

if the sheriff arrives
i'll throw the wine
in his face
if your gatekeeper
pulls my hand
i'll break his arm

if the heavens don't go round
to my heart's desire
i'll crush its wheels and
pull out its roots

you have set up
a colorful table
calling it life and
asked me to your feast
but punish me if
i enjoy myself

what tyranny is this?

by Rumi

understudy

She just wants an understudy, a body
double for the days when she does
not feel like appearing in any of the roles
she has assumed and/or been assigned.
She places an ad in the paper. Wanted:
one wife, mother, daughter, neighbor,
friend. Live-in OK. Own car necessary.
No lines to memorize; everything ad-
libbed. No days off.


by Beverly Rollwagen

Piano Dreams

Sometimes I'm Bobby Short
at the Carlyle Hotel where fur-tipped
women trip in from the cold
on the thick padded arms of their men.
They sparkle with new snow
and old money. But it's me
they want to see. Leaning
into the keys, I play Autumn in New York,
Misty and I've Got You Under My Skin.
The golden women tilt their heads
with a faraway look in their eyes,
and run jeweled fingers tenderly
over crystal champagne rims.
I launch into You do Something to Me
and they raise their glasses
and drink.

Sometimes I'm back
in that huge green ballroom
with the white doors
over the restaurant on High Street.
It's late spring – recital time –
and I'm supposed to practice my solo
here for 45 minutes. It's hot
so I'm thinking about the community pool, not
the Mazurka from Les Sylphides, and how
I'll ask my mother to drop me off there
after lunch. But then Stephanie Woodruff
from homeroom steps in the white door.
"Oh that's so pretty," she says, "Don't stop playing."
And she executes a little faux mazurka step
around the room, laughing –
and I laugh too and play it faster
and better than I ever have.
And she keeps dancing and I keep playing
and this is how I learn
whatever it is I know about art
and everything I know
about imagination.

And sometimes
I'm my Dad's old friend, Morty Ackerman
from Albany, who finally got tired
of hauling his combo from one
snowed-in lounge to another,
and took a job at a nudist colony
outside Sarasota. He said clothing
was optional for the staff and the talent.
He usually wore Bermuda shorts and a bow tie.
But on New Year's Eve, the story went,
just his "white tie and tail."
He claimed the ladies didn't wait
to be asked onto the dance floor—they just drifted
up there by themselves, dipping and twirling
like nymphs around the Steinway. He said
he played like some kind of crazed piano god.
He said they danced
right into January.

by Marcia F. Brown

Nostalgia

It was darker then, in the nights when the cars
Came sliding around the traffic circle, when the headlights
Speckled with rain traveled the bedroom walls
and vanished; when the typewriter, the squeaking chair,
the slow voice of the radio stirred the night air like a fan.
Of course, the ones we loved were beautiful—
slim, dark-haired, intent on their books.
The rain came swishing against the lamp-lit windows.
The cat purred in his chair. A clock sang,
and we lay nearly asleep, almost dreaming,
almost alone, nearly gone—the days fly so;
and the nights, like sleep, disappear without memory.


by Dawn Potter

San Francisco (excerpt from Six Urban Love Songs)

Pierced tongue. Do-it-yourself lisp.

What is this? Penitence? Native wisdom?

Mutilation? or signal: I'll do anything.

Was it a dare? or a careful plan? Did it sting—

or ache—and does the food get caught—

and should such a person work in a restaurant?

Customers' stomachs can turn—or does desire

turn to her—to wish—to feel the fire

glide over the silver (or is it gold?) pin?

And you, my darling, with your end-

less speculation: Is he—is she—gay?

Does he or she want you—or me—or either way?

Why do you need to know? I am here.

This is my body; eat. Unwrap. Disappear.

by Kate Light

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.


by W. H. Auden

Crossing the Loch

Remember how we rowed toward the cottage
on the sickle-shaped bay,
that one night after the pub
loosed us through its swinging doors
and we pushed across the shingle
till water lipped the sides
as though the loch mouthed 'boat'?

I forgot who rowed. Our jokes hushed.
The oars' splash, creak, and the spill
of the loch reached long into the night.
Out in the race I was scared:
the cold shawl of breeze,
and hunched hills; what the water held
of deadheads, ticking nuclear hulls.

Who rowed, and who kept their peace?
Who hauled salt-air and stars
deep into their lungs, were not reassured;
and who first noticed the loch's
phosphorescence, so, like a twittering nest
washed from the rushes, an astonished
small boat of saints, we watched water shine
on our fingers and oars,
the magic dart of our bow wave?
It was surely foolhardy, such a broad loch, a tide,
but we live—and even have children
to women and men we had yet to meet
that night we set out, calling our own
the sky and salt-water, wounded hills
dark-starred by blaeberries, the glimmering anklets
we wore in the shallows
as we shipped oars and jumped,
to draw the boat safe, high at the cottage shore.


by Kathleen Jamie

After a Long Silence (excerpt)

Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.

by W. B. Yeats

The Far Field

I

I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

II

At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, --
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.
I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole's elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, --
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, --
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.
-- Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I'll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.
I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

III

The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;
Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, --
At first a swift rippling between rocks,
Then a long running over flat stones
Before descending to the alluvial plane,
To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the crabs bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, --
I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.
I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.

IV

The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around, --
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.
A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born falls on his naked ears.
His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.
All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, --
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

by Theodore Roethke

A Eros

He aqui que te cacé por el pescuezo
a la orilla del mar, mientras movías
las flechas de tu aljaba para herirme
y vi en el suelo tu floreal corona.

Como a un muñeco destripé tu vientre
y examiné sus ruedas engañosas
y muy envuelta en sus poleas de oro
hallé una trampa que decía: sexo.

Sobre la playa, ya un guiñapo triste,
te mostré al sol, buscón de tus hazañas,
ante un corro asustado de sirenas.

Iba subiendo por la cuesta albina
tu madrina de engaños, Doña Luna,
y te arrojé a la boca de las olas.

by Alfonsina Storni


To Eros (translated by Kay Short)

I caught you by the neck
on the shore of the sea, while you shot
arrows from your quiver to wound me
and on the ground I saw your flowered crown.

I disemboweled your stomach like a doll's
and examined your deceitful wheels,
and deeply hidden in your golden pulleys
I found a trapdoor that said: sex.

On the beach I held you, now a sad heap,
up to the sun, accomplice of your deeds,
before a chorus of frightened sirens.

Your deceitful godmother, the moon
was climbing through the crest of the dawn,
and I threw you into the mouth of the waves.

by Alfonsina Storni

Mother to Son

Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

by Langston Hughes

secret

She just wants to know your secret.
She won't tell if you've had an affair,
or your face lifted, or when you last made
love. She won't tell if you're pilfering
from the office, or gambling when you're
supposed to be at the hospital visiting
your mother, or what you would do
for money. Strangers tell her the most
unlikely things, and she never repeats
them. Once, a woman told her she
carried a gun. Silver with a mother-of
pearl inlay on the handle, a little jewel.
She opened her purse, and the gun
rested in its own velvet pocket, ready and
dangerous. Like every secret.


by Beverly Rollwagen

Porcelain

As when a long forgetfulness lifts suddenly, and what
we'd forgotten—as we look at it squarely, then again
refuse to look—is our own
----------------------------------inconsequence, yes, it was
mostly like that, sex as both an act of defacement and—
as if the two were the same thing—votive offering,
insofar as the leaves
-----------------------------also were a kind of offering, or could
at least be said to be, as they kept falling the way leaves
do: volitionless, from different heights, and in the one direction.



by Carl Phillips

Dedication: To an unknown reader

Like rays once shed
By a spent star
The words of a dead
Poet are,
That through bleak space
Unchecked fly on,
Though hand, heart, face,
To dust are gone;
And you who read
Shall only guess
What thorn-sharp need,
What loneliness,
What love, lust, dream,
Shudder or sigh
Lit the long beam
That meets your eye:
Nor, guess you never
So well, so true,
Shall comfort ever
Reach from you
To me, an old
Black shrivelled sphere,
Who has been cold
This million year.


by Jan Struther

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.


by Philip Larkin

Deliberate

So by sixteen we move in packs
learn to strut and slide
in deliberate lowdown rhythm
talk in a syn/co/pa/ted beat
because we want so bad
to be cool, never to be mistaken
for white, even when we leave
these rowdier L.A. streets—
remember how we paint our eyes
like gangsters
flash our legs in nylons
sassy black high heels
or two inch zippered boots
stack them by the door at night
next to Daddy’s muddy gardening shoes.

by Amy Uyematsu

Employed

She just wants to be employed
for eight hours a day. She is not
interested in a career; she wants a job
with a paycheck and free parking. She
does not want to carry a briefcase filled
with important papers to read after
dinner; she does not want to return
phone calls. When she gets home, she
wants to kick off her shoes and waltz
around her kitchen singing, "I am a piece
of work."


by Beverly Rollwagen

Essential

She just wants to keep her essential
sorrow. Everyone wants her to
be happy all the time, but she doesn't
want that for them. There is value in
the thread of sadness in each person.
The sobbing child on an airplane, the
unhappy woman waiting by the phone,
a man staring out the window past his
wife. A violin plays through all of them,
one long note held at the beginning and
the end.


by Beverly Rollwagen

Vigil

Life is too short to sleep through.
Stay up late, wait until the sea of traffic ebbs,
until noise has drained from the world
like blood from the cheeks of the full moon.
Everyone else around you has succumbed:
they lie like tranquillised pets on a vet's table;
they languish on hospital trolleys and friends' couches,
on iron beds in hostels for the homeless,
under feather duvets at tourist B&Bs.
The radio, devoid of listeners to confide in,
turns repetitious. You are your own voice-over.
You are alone in the bone-weary tower
of your bleary-eyed, blinking lighthouse,
watching the spillage of tide on the shingle inlet.
You are the single-minded one who hears
time shaking from the clock's fingertips
like drops, who watches its hands
chop years into diced seconds,
who knows that when the church bell
tolls at 2 or 3 it tolls unmistakably for you.
You are the sole hand on deck when
temperatures plummet and the hull
of an iceberg is jostling for prominence.
Your confidential number is the life-line
where the sedated long-distance voices
of despair hold out muzzily for an answer.
You are the emergency services' driver
ready to dive into action at the first
warning signs of birth or death.
You spot the crack in night's façade
even before the red-eyed businessman
on look-out from his transatlantic seat.
You are the only reliable witness to when
the light is separated from the darkness,
who has learned to see the dark in its true
colours, who has not squandered your life.


by Dennis O'Driscoll

At the Mystic Aquarium

Still sun blind, I wheel your chair
through the darkened room
to the largest tank, where hammerheads swim
in the aquamarine glow, the torpedo of their bodies
sleeking past you beyond the glass.
Wanting respite from the heavy pushing,
wanting unburdened time to take in
the small brilliant lives of darting reef fish,
for once, I leave you, brake on and safe.
But when I turn away into the milling crowd,
it is I who fall—only a few feet from you, tripping
over a small girl, my body old, heavy,
coming down on her, her arms flailing,
trying to fight it back.
She lets out a cry that rips straight through
and her mother snatches her up, snaps at me in anger.
Sorry. Sorry. I say again and again
as I try with no luck to struggle to my feet,
straining against the dark and the gravity,
thinking how hard it is to rise
from the downthrust of weight and age,
aware of shame's bloodrush, tears beginning
as if I were the hurt child, the one who needed saving.
Suddenly I hate your wheelchair,
the knees that will not hold you, your blocked heart.
I want you here at my elbow, your hand pulling me up,
your arm gripping my shoulder, comforts in my ear.
But you've never even noticed, hooked as you are
to the aqua light, flashing points of the teeth,
the flat implacable eyes.


by Patricia Fargnoli

Poem by the Bridge at Ten-shin

This jungle poem is going to be my last.

This space walk is.

Racing in a cab through springtime Central Park,

I kept my nose outside the window like a dog.

The stars above my bed at night are vast.

I think it is uncool to call young women Ms.

My darling is a platform I see stars from in the dark,

And all the dogs begin to bark.

My grunting gun brings down her charging warthog,

And she is frying on white water, clinging to a log,

And all the foam and fevers shiver.

And drink has made chopped liver of my liver!

Between my legs it's Baudelaire.

He wrote about her Central Park of hair.



I look for the minuterie as if I were in France,

In darkness, in the downstairs entrance, looking for the light.

I'm on a timer that will give me time

To see the way and up the stairs before the lights go out.

The so delicious Busby Berkeley dancers dance

A movie musical extravaganza on the staircase with me every night.

Such fun! We dance. We climb. We slip in slime.

We're squirting squeezes like a wedge of lime!

It's like a shout.

It's what minuterie is all about.

Just getting to the landing through the dark

That has been interrupted for a minute is a lark.

And she's so happy. It is grand!

I put my mobile in her ampersand.

The fireworks are a fleeting puff of sadness.

The flowers when they reach the stars are tears.

I don’t remember poems I write.

I turn around and they are gone.

I do remember poor King Richard Nixon’s madness.

Pierre Leval, we loved those years!

We knocked back shots of single malt all night.

Beer chasers gave dos caballeros double vision, second sight—

Twin putti pissing out the hotel window on the Scottish dawn.

A crocodile has fallen for a fawn.

I live flap copy for a children’s book.

He wants to lick. He wants to look.

A tiny goldfinch is his Cupid.

Love of cuntry makes men stupid.

It makes men miss Saddam Hussein!

Democracy in Baghdad makes men think

Monstrosity was not so bad.

I followed Gandhi barefoot to

Remind me there is something else till it began to rain.

The hurricane undressing of democracy in Baghdad starts to sink

The shrunken page size of the New York Times, and yet we had

A newspaper that mattered once, and that is sad,

But that was when it mattered. Do

I matter? That is true.

I don’t matter but I do. I lust for fame,

And after never finding it I never was the same.

I roared into the heavens and I soared,

And landed where I started on a flexing diving board.

I knew a beauty named Dawn Green.

I used to wake at the crack of Dawn.

I wish I were about to land on Plymouth Rock,

And had a chance to do it all again but do it right.

It was green dawn in pre-America. I mean

Great scented forests all along the shore, which now are gone.

I’ve had advantages in life and I pronounce Iraq “Irrock.”

The right schools taught me how to tock.

I’m tocking Turkey to the Kurds but with no end in sight.

These peace tocks are my last. Goodbye, Iran. Iran, good night.

They burned the undergrowth so they could see the game they hunt.

That made the forest a cathedral clear as crystal like a cunt.

Their arrows entered red meat in the glory

Streaming down from the clerestory.

Carine Rueff, I was obsessed—I was possessed! I liked your name.

I liked the fact Marie Christine Carine Rue F was Jewish.

It emphasized your elegance in Paris and in Florence.

You were so blond in Rue de l’Université!

The dazzling daughter of de Gaulle’s adviser Jacques Rueff was game

For anything. I’m lolling here in Mayfair under bluish

Clouds above a bench in Mount Street Gardens, thinking torrents.

Purdey used to make a gun for shooting elephants.

One cannot be the way one was back then today.

It went away.

I go from Claridge’s to Brands Hatch racing circuit and come back

To Claridge’s, and out and eat and drink and bed, and fade to black.

The elephants were old enough to die but were aghast.

The stars above this jungle poem are vast.

To Ninety-second Street and Broadway I have come.

Outside the windows is New York.

I came here from St. Louis in a covered wagon overland

Behind the matchless prancing pair of Eliot and Ezra Pound.

And countless moist oases took me in along the way, and some

I still remember when I lift my knife and fork.

The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned

Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.

The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound

That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.

The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.

They’re watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.

The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.

The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that’s missing.

by Frederick Seidel

Number 8

It was a face which darkness could kill
--------in an instant
a face as easily hurt
----by laughter or light
'We think differently at night.'
--------she told me once
lying back languidly
--------And she would quote Cocteau
'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
----'whom I am constantly shocking'
Then she would smile and look away
----light a cigarette for me
--------sigh and rise
and stretch
----her sweet anatomy
--------let fall a stocking


by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Never give all the heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

by William Butler Yeats

The Riddle of the World

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Whether he thinks too little, or too much;
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confused;
Still by himself, abused or disabused;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

by Alexander Pope

Of Love

I have been in love more times than one,
thank the Lord. Sometimes it was lasting
whether active or not. Sometimes
it was all but ephemeral, maybe only
an afternoon, but not less real for that.
They stay in my mind, these beautiful people,
or anyway people beautiful people to me, of which
there are so many. You, and you, and you,
whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe
missed, Love, love, love it was the
core of my life, from which, of course, comes
the word for the heart. And, oh, have I mentioned
that some of them were men and some were women
and some--now carry my revelation with you--
were trees. Or places. Or music flying above
the names of their makers. Or clouds, or the sun
which was the first, and the best, the most
loyal for certain, who looked so faithfully into
my eyes, every morning. So I imagine
such love of the world-- its fervency, its shining, its
innocence and hunger to give of itself--I imagine
this is how it began.


by Mary Oliver

Happiness

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
their women and children and a keg of beer and an
accordion.

by Carl Sandburg