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

fragment of poem, by Sappho (612-570 BC)

In my eyes he matches the gods, that man who
sits there facing you--any man whatever--
listening from closeby to the sweetness of your
voice as you talk, the

sweetness of your laughter: yes, that--I swear it--
sets the heart to shaking inside my breast, since
once I look at you for a moment, I can't
speak any longer,

but my tongue breaks down, and then all at once a
subtle fire races inside my skin, my
eyes can't see a thing and a whirring whistle
thrums at my hearing,

cold sweat covers me and a trembling takes
ahold of me all over: I'm greener than the
grass is and appear to myself to be little
short of dying

by Sappho

A Fixed Idea

What torture lurks within a single thought
When grown too constant; and however kind,
However welcome still, the weary mind
Aches with its presence. Dull remembrance taught
Remembers on unceasingly; unsought
The old delight is with us but to find
That all recurring joy is pain refined,
Become a habit, and we struggle, caught.
You lie upon my heart as on a nest,
Folded in peace, for you can never know
How crushed I am with having you at rest
Heavy upon my life. I love you so
You bind my freedom from its rightful quest.
In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.


by Amy Lowell

Elegy for the Personal Letter

I miss the rumpled corners of correspondence,
the ink blots and crossouts that show
someone lives on the other end, a person
whose hands make errors, leave traces.
I miss fine stationary, its raised elegant
lettering prominent on creamy shades of ivory
or pearl grey. I even miss hasty notes
dashed off on notebook paper, edges
ragged as their scribbled messages—
can't much write now—thinking of you.
When letters come now, they are formatted
by some distant computer, addressed
to Occupant or To the family living at—
meager greetings at best,
salutations made by committee.
Among the glossy catalogs
and one time only offers
the bills and invoices,
letters arrive so rarely now that I drop
all other mail to the floor when
an envelope arrives and the handwriting
is actual handwriting, the return address
somewhere I can locate on any map.
So seldom is it that letters come
That I stop everything else
to identify the scrawl that has come this far—
the twist and the whirl of the letters,
the loops of the numerals. I open
those envelopes first, forgetting
the claim of any other mail,
hoping for news I could not read
in any other way but this.


by Allison Joseph

The Ocean

Goodbye again. Say there is a little song in my head

and because of it I can't sleep or change my mind
about the future. Now the song runs all the way down

to the beach where I sit as if the sky

were my room now. No one, not even you,
can hear me singing. Not even me.

As if the music rose from the mouth of the ocean.

No mouth. Like rain before it reaches us.
Like wind twirling dresses on the clothesline.

Who has no one has the history of the ocean.

Lord, give me two more days. So that
the last moments may be with someone.


by Jason Shinder

Walking in a World Where We Are Sometimes Loved

---------A wind blows news the sunlight
has yellowed across the street.
---------We walk into a forest
-----------------and are lost. Either our cries
---------are heard or we bury ourselves
without God. This morning
---------was no different: new leaves
-----------------on the ground, a storm pouring
---------in through windows of that room
where we made love, thundering
---------doves flying out of our mouths.


by Timothy Liu

From a Gas Station Outside Providence

This kiss, unfinished, lips to receiver in the parking lot,
a pucker shot through a fiber optic wire
to an answering machine
toward switchboards and stations transmitting
in blips to satellites, this kiss
thrown earthward and shooting down
coils, around pipeline and electric power
lumbering underground,
up threads and transistors
and transference points.
This kiss is zeroes and ones jumbled
and tossed into a pneumatic system,
unscrambled at the end and scrawled
onto a tape recorder slowly rolling
at the side of your bed,
then slapping back, reverbed
off the ringer, a tinny phantom
of the smooch like a smack on
an aluminum can, up the same
veins through the belly of the same satellite
and softly to the side of my head;
this kiss is home before the next exhalation leaves.
I'm stooped in the booth,
pounding quarters into the slot;
yellow light droops over the asphalt,
and your ghost, too cool
and elusive with those hands and mouth
sings around me in the smell of gasoline;
whose mouth is this, scratched in static,
some droplet of a sigh, atomized,
and sputtering digitized into my room?

by Mike Doughty

Ground Waters

Yesterday, in snow's rare visit to this city,
my son and I raised his first snowman.
As we rolled the white boulders of its body
my pregnant belly nudged up against them like kin.

By evening, its body leaned to the left so impossibly
I kept checking the window for its collapse.
In the morning, even more so, the body straining
groundward as if to grasp the carrot nose
that had fallen and lay now half-covered in slush.

My son, who hasn't yet been around the block
with gravity, suspects nothing. I remember
last summer when he skinned his shin on the sidewalk.
I watched his eyes register the body's betrayal.
Yet he seems not to notice the snowman's state,
the degree of recline, how little it would take
to return it to an idea of itself.

All over the neighborhood,
snowmen assume such inspired angles,
splayed skywards as if in appeal to their place of origin,
kneeling for their own beheadings,
canted in prayer, tipsy
with the song of their own slow-going.

The relief obvious in their frozen hulking masses
to rejoin the fluid grace of ground waters.
The truth is: before I became a mother,
I knew the body's longing to be lost.
An untrustworthy lover bound
to forsake us, I'd rather do the leaving
than be left.

But now, as we walk home in the dusk,
my two-year old riding my hip,
patting my cheeks with his mittened hands,
I never want to leave this earth.
Inside the baby tumbles and reels,
already knowing where the body will take us,
that we have no choice but to follow its lead.


by Alison Apotheker

The Painter of the Night

Someone called in a report that she had

seen a man painting in the dark over by the

pond. A police car was dispatched to go in-

vestigate. The two officers with their big

flashlights walked all around the pond, but

found nothing suspicious. Hatcher was the

younger of the two, and he said to Johnson,

"What do you think he was painting?" Johnson

looked bemused and said, "The dark, stupid.

What else could he have been painting?" Hatcher,

a little hurt, said, "Frogs in the Dark, Lily-

pads in the Dark, Pond in the Dark. Just as

many things exist in the dark as they do in

the light." Johnson paused, exasperated. Then

Hatcher added, "I'd like to see them. Hell,

I might even buy one. Maybe there's more out

there than we know. We are the police, after-

all. We need to know."

by James Tate

The Searcher

I saw the same young woman
twice in walking boots
hefting a backpack
as if on some wilderness hike
but she was in the suburbs
with map and compass
two days running I noticed her
she didn't look at me
and seemed in no distress
her stride was purposeful
an anthropologist perhaps
in search of other lives
the better to recognise her own.
I wondered where she'd camp
and if from behind shy walls
of brick veneer she might coax
someone to share her food and fire.
The sight of her solitary plod
made me think how easy
it is to lose direction and
once lost how hard to find
a way back home.


by Adrian Caesar

The Man on My Porch Makes Me an Offer

Above all houses in our town
I've always loved this blue one you own
With its round turret and big bay window.
Do you dream about it the way I do?
Wouldn't you be just as happy
On a street with more trees
In a larger house, whose columned porch
Impresses every passer-by?
Does it seem fair that you've won the right
To gaze from these windows your whole life
Merely because you saw them first,
And consign me to a life of envy?
I'll gladly assume more than your mortgage,
More than the new brickwork and roof repair.
Often I've noticed your wife and daughter
Waiting on the porch, peering down the street
For your car, a handsome, modest pair,
And I'm sure I can make them happy,
Happier than you can,
You who have other projects to work on.
I would live for you the one life
You'd have wanted to live, had you stayed,
And you can walk free, away from town,
Out beyond the suburbs, to that quiet place
Where the small voice of your true self
May be heard, if anywhere, and each day
You can wake up feeling your powers
Still increasing, which is happiness,
While I lose myself in the life you made
And did not want enough,
Happy when the space you left is filled.


by Carl Dennis

Animals

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days


by Frank O'Hara