Still I RiseMaya Angelou

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Shinji Moon; I Used Poetry As An Excuse For Sleeping With Someone Else

I no longer deserve to read beautiful poetry
when nothing inside of me is a mirror of the truth. I spent
eighteen years digging myself holes to fall into, and now
I cant lay across my bed without detonating all of the mines
I had set down.

How often is it three a.m. with you feeling
like youre standing beneath a landslide with your mouth
wide open?

Im beneath six feet of things that I can never take
back, and facts

are the only things these days strong enough to
break me.

The stone that I threw through my
garage window when I was eleven was real.

How I told my father that it was one of the
neighborhood boys
was not.

And
When I told you I loved you I meant it.

When another boy fucked me in the bed
where we would make love, all I wanted to do was

leave my body there for
good.

I am a carcass of regrets and apologies and things
that always go wrong before they never become
right.

The left side of my brain is where I keep
all the things that I should have said in the first place, and

the sentimental apologies that I carry around like
marbles in my head are more true to me than
what I have done.

The quadratic formula doesnt give me the answers that I want
it to, and the only thing I know for certain, is that

I would gladly die if it meant that you
would smile at me again.

"Morning"
Conchitina Cruz
You never know when somebody will walk away from you on a bright day on a busy street,
never looking back and

you cannot believe the slow disappearance, cannot believe what is moving away from your
reach until the busy street no longer needs its presence to look the same, because it is the same.

And the city offers you its fruits and fish, and the churchgoers lift their veils as they step out in
the open

and you know the picture is incomplete but it can stand for itself

and who are you to ask for more, who are you to insist on hunger?

"Drinking Wine"
Wisawa Szymborska

He looked at me, bestowing beauty,
and I took it for my own.
Happy, I swallowed a star.

I let him invent me
in the image of the reflection
in his eyes. I dance, I dance
in an abundance of sudden wings.

A table is a table, wine is wine
in a wineglass, which is a wineglass
and it stands standing on a table
but I am a phantasm,
a phantasm beyond belief,
a phantasm to the core.

I tell him what he wants to hear

about ants dying of love
under a dandelions constellation.
I swear that sprinkled with wine
a white rose will sing.

I laugh, and tilt my head
carefully, as if I were testing
an invention. I dance, I dance
in astounded skin, in the embrace
that creates me.

Eve from a rib, Venus from sea foam,
Minerva from the head of Jove
were much more real.

When hes not looking at me,
I search for my reflection
on the wall. All I see
is a nail on which a painting hung.

"Ready"
Rachel Barenblat
"So the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading bowls wrapped in their
cloaks upon their shoulders." Exodus 12:34

Youll need to travel light.
Take what you can carry: a book, a poem,
a battered tin cup, your child strapped
to your chest, clutching your necklace
in one hot possessive fist.

So the dough isnt ready. So your heart
isn't ready. You havent said goodbye
to the places where you hid as a child,
to the friends who arent interested in the journey,
to the graves youve tended.

But if you wait until you feel fully ready
you may never take the leap at all
and Infinity is calling you forth
out of this birth canal
and into the futures wide expanse.

Learn to improvise flat cakes without yeast.
Learn to read new alphabets.
Wear God like a cloak
and stride forth with confidence.
You wont know where youre going

but you have the words of our sages,
the songs of our mothers, the inspiration
wrapped in your kneading bowl. Trust
that what you carry will sustain you
and take the first step out the door.

"Had I Been the Virgin Mary I Would Have Said No"
William Dickey
A difficult problem in anatomy: how to attach wings
to the shoulder blades of humans and make them look workable

either the wings or the humans; carrying a tin trumpet
and accompanied by a minstrel band that used to tour the South

in the days before the germ theory had been discovered
Gabriel shuffles in to make this one-time limited offer

in an early illumination Mary is assumed into heaven
by the agency of a sky-blue openwork elevator cage

it does take careful thought; what is it about gods
that insists on making more gods out of human beings

crucifying them as one pits a peach, to release the seed?
what is it about the human imagination that insists on being used

by anybody in a beat-up 1936 Chevy with bruised fenders
selling Old Doctor Barmecide's indigestion powders

or demands the harsh ruffle of painfully-extended wings
pulling the back muscles out of true, demands

grace, as if without the mysterious secret ingredient
Mary was not yet Mary, only an opportunity?

Las Ruinas del Corazon, Eric Gamalinda

Juana the Mad married the handsomest man in Spain
and that was the end of it, because when you marry a man
more beautiful than you, they said you pretty much lost control
of the situation. Did she ever listen? No. When he was away
annexing more kingdoms, she had horrible dreams
of him being cut and blown apart, or spread on the rack,
or sleeping with exotic women. She prayed to the twin
guardians
of the Alhambra, Saint Ursula and Saint Susana, to send him
home

and make him stay forever. And they answered her prayers
and killed Philip the Handsome at twenty-eight.
Juana the Mad was beside herself with grief, and she wrapped
his body in oils and lavender, and laid him out in a casket of
lead,
and built a marble effigy of the young monarch in sleep,
and beside it her own dead figure, so he would never think
he was alone. And she kept his body beside her, and every day
for the next twenty years, as pungent potions filled the rooms,
she peeked into his coffin like a chef peeks into his pot,
and memories of his young body woke her adamant desire.

She wanted to possess him entirely, and since not even death
may oppose the queen, she found a way to merge death and life
by eating a piece of him, slowly, lovingly, until he was entirely
in her being. She cut a finger and chewed the fragrant skin,
then sliced thick portions of his once ruddy cheeks. Then she ate
an ear, the side of a thigh, the solid muscles of the chest,
then lunged for an eye, a kidney, part of the large intestine.
Then she diced his penis and his pebble-like testicles
and washed everything down with sweet jerez.

Then she decided she was ready to die.
But before she did, she asked the poets to record these moments
in song, and the architects to carve the song in marble,
and the marble to be selected from the most secret veins
of the earth and placed where no man could see it,
because that is the nature of love, because one walks alone
through the ruins of the heart, because the young must sleep
with their eyes open, because the angels tremble
from so much beauty, because memory moves in orbits
of absence, because she holds her hands out in the rain,
and rain remembers nothing, not even how it became itself.

"Love Story With Bad Moral"
Sarah Manguso
I already felt like an empty sink sitting there in my slip. And I could have skipped breakfast
altogether and not noticed. Nevertheless this is not a logical argument against breakfast. There
are always plenty of people who would if -- something. I don't know why I'm here. I often
return to the scene of the crime. Oh I have loved and lost, and oh there is no explanation. When
I asked my mother what she was thinking when she got married she said she was thinking,
Well, I'll be able to get out of this, too. When two people see each other again they will pick up
where they left off. In the paper a man from New Guinea speaks in the aftermath of a tidal
wave. The people will go back, but to a better place, he says. We will build new homes away
from the sea.

"El amenazado"
Jorge Luis Borges
Es el amor. Tendr que cultarme o que huir.
Crecen los muros de su crcel, como en un sueo atroz.
La hermosa mscara ha cambiado, pero como siempre es la nica.
De qu me servirn mis talismanes: el ejercicio de las letras,
la vaga erudicin, el aprendizaje de las palabras que us el spero Norte para cantar sus mares y
sus espadas,
la serena amistad, las galeras de la biblioteca, las cosas comunes,
los hbitos, el joven amor de mi madre, la sombra militar de mis muertos, la noche intemporal,
el sabor del sueo?
Estar contigo o no estar contigo es la medida de mi tiempo.
Ya el cntaro se quiebra sobre la fuente, ya el hombre se
levanta a la voz del ave, ya se han oscurecido los que miran por las ventanas, pero la sombra no
ha trado la paz.
Es, ya lo s, el amor: la ansiedad y el alivio de or tu voz, la espera y la memoria, el horror de
vivir en lo sucesivo.
Es el amor con sus mitologas, con sus pequeas magias intiles.
Hay una esquina por la que no me atrevo a pasar.
Ya los ejrcitos me cercan, las hordas.
(Esta habitacin es irreal; ella no la ha visto.)
El nombre de una mujer me delata.
Me duele una mujer en todo el cuerpo.
Translated from the Spanish
"The Threatened One"
Jorge Luis Borges
It is love. I will have to hide or flee.
Its prison walls grow larger, as in a fearful dream.
The alluring mask has changed,
but as usual it is the only one.
What use now are my talismans, my touchstones:
the practice of literature,
vague learning,
an apprenticeship to the language used by the flinty Northland
to to sing of its seas and its swords,
the serenity of friendship,
the galleries of the library,
ordinary things,
habits,
the young love of my mother,
the soldierly shadow cast by my dead ancestors,
the timeless night,
the flavor of sleep and dream?
Being with you or without you
is how I measure my time.
Now the water jug shatters above the spring,
now the man rises to the sound of birds,
now those who look through the windows are indistinguishable,
but the darkness has not brought peace.
It is love, I know it;
the anxiety and relief at hearing your voice,
the hope and the memory,
the horror at living in succession.
It is love with its own mythology,
its minor and pointless magic.
There is a street corner I do not dare to pass.
Now the armies surround me, the rabble.
(This room is unreal. She has not seen it.)
A woman's name has me in thrall.
A woman's being afflicts my whole body.
"Love Song"
Rainer Maria Rilke

How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark
in some quiet unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in the hand?
"2 A.M."
Dorianne Laux

When I came with you that first time
on the floor of your office, the dirty carpet
under my back, the heel of one foot
propped on your shoulder, I went ahead
and screamed, full-throated, as loud
and as long as my body demanded,
because somewhere, in the back of my mind,
packed in the smallest neurons still capable
of thought, I remembered
we were in a warehouse district
and that no sentient being resided for miles.
Afterwards, when I would unclench
my hands and open my eyes, I looked up.
You were on your knees, your arms
stranded at your sides, so still --
the light from the crooknecked lamp
sculpting each lift and delicate twist,
the lax muscles, the smallest veins
on the backs of your hands. I saw
the ridge of each rib, the blue hollow
pulsing at your throat, all the colors
in your long blunt cut hair which hung
over your face like a raffia curtain
in some south sea island hut.
And as each bright synapse unfurled
and followed its path, I recalled
a story I'd read that explained why women
cry out when they come -- that it's
the call of the conqueror, a siren howl
of possession. So I looked again
and it felt true, your whole body
seemed defeated, owned, having taken on
the aspect of a slave in shackles, the wrists
loosely bound with invisible rope.
And when you finally spoke you didn't
lift your head but simply moaned the word god
on an exhalation of breath -- I knew then
I must be merciful, benevolent,
impossibly kind.


Manana XVII Pablo Neruda
No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio
o flecha de chaveles que propagan el fuego:
te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva
dentro de si, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores,
y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo
el apretado aroma que acendio de la tierra.

Te amo sin saber como, ni cuando, ni de donde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
asi te amo porque no se amar de otra manera,

sino asi de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mia,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueno.
Sonnet XVII
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of the carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I live you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

PoemFrank O'Hara
Let's take a walk, you
and I in spite of the
weather if it rains hard
on our toes

we'll stroll like poodles
and be washed down a
gigantic scenic gutter
that will be

exciting! voyages are not
all like this you just put
your toes together then
maybe blood

will get meaning and a trick
become slight in our keeping
before we sail the open sea it's
possible

And the landscape will do
us some strange favor when
we look back at each other
anxiously

the fidelity of epitaphs (20 days later)Marty McConnell
you want to change something about your life
but your lover took both pairs of tweezers.
so you settle for shaving your legs again
and writing around one calf
in drunken pen the lines you keep
reciting to yourself from Maries poem
and which you will get
tattooed on that spot as soon

as the credit card company agrees
to pay for it: I am living.
I remember you. yesterday
you wrote a poem that began,
I go to work under a heavy
turban of grief and last week,
Gabi, Ive been drafting epitaphs
all day you find an old
pair of tweezers in the back
of the medicine cabinet

and get pulling. each sweet yank
a morsel of pain so good you begin
to understand those teenagers
who carve themselves into scarecrow
figurines. this small pain has
a location. a yes
and an end. what no one tells you
about grief is that it has no edges.
that no matter how much

you love the world, how grateful you are
for sunflowers and trashcans
and your unglamorously aging bones,
youll still have dreams
where youre screaming across a table
at each other about something, you cant
figure out why until you realize

she died. and here you are. a dull
pair of tweezers in a cluttered apartment,
crying on the floor. you want to make
something beautiful out of your life
but you never learned to paint
and youre nearly 37. you have

no children and you burn dinner
more often than you dance. you feel

like a cloth set down on something spilled.
useful but soiled. handy, but not essential.
maybe youll evaporate, or come apart

in the wash. maybe youll figure out
what binds you to this planet
is not a magnet, but a cord so fine
you can slide it across one hand, fold

your fingers around the slippery
umbilical. pull. here is sorrow.
pull. and here is bread. pull. some light
breaks across the linoleum. pull.
where do we go from here.

This Is Not an ElegyCatherine Pierce
At sixteen, I was illegal and brilliant,
my fingernails chewed to half-moons.
I took off my clothes in a late March
field. I had secret car wrecks,
secret hysteria. I opened my mouth
to swallow stars. In backseats
I learned the alchemy of guilt, lust,
and distance. I was unformed and total.
I swore like a sailor. But slowly the cops
stopped coming around. The heat lifted
its palms. The radio lost some teeth.

Now I see the landscape behind me
as through a Claude glass
tinted deeper, framed just so, bits
of gilt edging the best parts.
I see my unlined face, a thousand
film stars behind the eyes. I was
every murderess, every whip-
thin alcoholic, every heroine
with the silver tongue. Always young
Paul Newmans best girl. Always
a lightning sky behind each kiss.

Some days I watch myself
in the third person, speak to her
in the second. I say: I will
meet you in sleep. I will know you
by your stillness and your shaking.
By your second-hand gown.
By your bruises left by mouths
since forgotten. This is not
an elegy because I cannot bear
for it to be. It is only a tree branch
against the window. It is only a cherry
tomato slowly reddening in the garden.
I will put it in my mouth. It will
be sweet, and you will swallow.

You, neighboring God, if I sometimes Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated from the German by Marcus Dominick

You, neighboring God, if I sometimes
disturb you in long nights with hard knocking,
it is because I so rarely hear you breathe
and know: You are alone in your room.
And should you need anything, there is no one there
to offer you you the drink you reach for:
I listen always. Give me the slightest sign.
I'm very near.

There's only a thin wall between us
by chance; and it may be:
a call from your mouth or mine,
and it will collapse
without noise or sound.

Out of your images is the wall built.

And your images stand before you like names.
And when the light in me flares up,
by which my depths recognize you,
it is scattered in brilliance over your frame.

And my senses, which quickly wane,
are homeless and separated from you.

Black SeaMark Strand
One clear night while the others slept, I climbed
the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky
strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it,
the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming
like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long,
whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach
of a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer,
the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea,
and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light.
The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stood
on that lonely height watching the slow swells of the sea
break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear . . .
Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with all
that the world offers would you come only because I was here?

A Poem for S.Jessica Greenbaum
Because you used to leaf through the dictionary,
Casually, as someone might in a barber shop, and
Devotedly, as someone might in a sanctuary,
Each letter would still have your attention if not
For the responsibilities life has tightly fit, like
Gears around the cog of you, like so many petals
Hinged on a daisy. Thats why Ill just use your
Initial. Do you know that in one treasured story, a
Jewish ancestor, horseback in the woods at Yom
Kippur, and stranded without a prayer book,
Looked into the darkness and realized he had
Merely to name the alphabet to ask forgiveness
No congregation of figures needed, he could speak
One letter at a time because all of creation
Proceeded from those. He fed his horse, and then
Quietly, because it was from his heart, he
Recited them slowly, from aleph to tav. Within those
Sounds, all others were born, all manner of
Trials, actions, emotions, everything needed to
Understand who he was, had been, how flaws
Venerate the human being, how aspirations return
Without spite. Now for you, may your wifes
X-ray return with good news, may we raise our
Zarfs to both your names in the Great Book of Life.

Essay on AdamRobert Bringhurst
There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.
Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:
he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him.
Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.

The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth,
fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth,
nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between:
he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between these

is only an issue of whether the demons
work from the inside out or from the outside
in: the one
theological question.

Kingdom AnimaliaAracelis Girmay
When I get the call about my brother,
I'm on a stopped train leaving town
& the news packs into mefreight
though it's him on the other end
now, saying finefine

Forfeit my eyes, I want to turn away
from the hair on the floor of his house
& how it got there Monday,
but my one heart falls
like a sad, fat persimmon
dropped by the hand of the Turczyn's old tree.

I want to sleep. I do not want to sleep. See,

one day, not today, not now, we will be gone
from this earth where we know the gladiolas.
My brother, this noise,
some love [you] I loved
with all my brain, & breath,
will be gone; I've been told, today, to consider this
as I ride the long tracks out & dream so good

I see a plant in the window of the house
my brother shares with his love, their shoes. & there
he is, asleep in bed
with this same woman whose long skin
covers all of her bones, in a city called Oakland,
& their dreams hang above them
a little like a chandelier, & their teeth
flash in the night, oh, body.

Oh, body, be held now by whom you love.
Whole years will be spent, underneath these impossible stars,
when dirt's the only animal who will sleep with you
& touch you with
its mouth.

Yom Kippur, Taos, New MexicoRobin Becker
Ive expanded like the swollen door in summer
to fit my own dimension. Your loneliness

is a letter I read and put away, a daily reminder
in the cry of the magpie that I am

still capable of inflicting pain
at this distance.

Like a painting, our talk is dense with description,
half-truths, landscapes, phrases layered

with a patina over time. When she came into my life
I didnt hesitate.

Or is that only how it seems now, looking back?
Or is that only how you accuse me, looking back?

Long ago, this desert was an inland sea. In the mountains
you can still find shells.

Its these strange divagations Ive come to love: midday sun
on pink escarpments; dusk on gray sandstone;

toe-and-finger holes along the three hundred and fifty-seven foot
climb to Acoma Pueblo, where the spirit

of the dead hovers about its earthly home
four days, before the prayer sticks drive it away.

Today all good Jews collect their crimes like old clothes
to be washed and given to the poor.

I remember how my father held his father around the shoulders
as they walked to the old synagogue in Philadelphia.

Hanina's LettersElaina M. Ellis
I.
A friend once claimed she saw my hair spell words
in wild cursive on the pillow, while I drooled on into sleep.

A poet, even when you snore, she said. I said, I don't snore!
She said, Metaphor. I said, Right. But is it true about my hair?

Then I thought...it makes a certain sense:
the burning bush that is my hair, my hair that curls
because I am a Jew, would speak a burning word
or two out of the desert of my sleep. Oh,

that is deep! I said. She said, What? I said, Exactly. What?
What are we, if not poetry of family tree?

She said, But,
I said, What?

She said, What language did your hair leak onto pillow?
I said, You tell me!

She said, See, you were spelling fast. I didn't think to ask.
So I said, Language of the past!

You know that Jews read backwards, right?
She said, Books read right to left?

I said, Yes, time-travel style!
She said, We are in the future?
I said, Yes, and my hair is in the past.

She said nothing. I said, Hair is in the past!
She just laughed and said, I'm out. This is too queer,

and then she passed out on the couch. I watched her hair
for minutes in the moonlight. Straight as grass. Silent
as dew. I twirled my curls and sighed, it's true. It's queer
to be a poet. A poet and a Jew.

II.
Two thousand years ago, a teacher called Hanina
preached Torah. Tender. Always blushing,
as if it were a letter from a lover. Meanwhile,
the Romans roamed the desert, arm in arm
destroying all things Jew.
Hanina's friends warned,
They're coming for you, but still the Rabbi read sweet
messages from G-d, until the Romans found
a vestige of his teachings. They caught him,
reaching thirsty toward the heavens,
pulling stories from the text. The Romans told his students,
watch this lesson, while they rolled him up in the Torah,
and let a slow torch take the scroll. The students
cried, Hanina,
please, what do you see? The Rabbi called, The parchment,
it is burning. The letters are flying

free.

III.
Sixteen years ago, I left a love-note on the bathroom counter
in my parents' home. It was folded, like 8th grade notes were folded
back then. My mother found the note, unwrapped my secret,
and read it back to me from memory. I cried. Denied. Swore,

I'm not gay, we only play like this.
Don't want to kiss her, like I said!
Eww, no, don't want her in my bed,

and Mom just shook her head, then recommended therapy.
I found the note and burned it later (they can't prove
what they can't see) and we didn't talk about it again 'til I was 23,

but all that time, I knew they knew me.

Here's the thing:
despite the shame, I was relieved. The paper had burned,
but the truth was out there, flying free.

Rabbi Hanina: I am embers. I can feel that's nothing
new. It's queer to be a
poet,
to be a
poet. A Jew. It's queer to be a
poet. To be. To be a.
to b
e.
To Be.

All That Bravery Got Us NowhereHemant Mohapatra
This unnatural hour that I have slept in still
hungry from an unfinished early meal, you appear
with your full body and voice and ask me to write again. I
am sitting in a car, running late for my piano lesson, and you
are leaning at the door, telling me the trees have stopped
growing where you live. That youve walked across
two continents but the moon still refuses to leave you.

**

I hear youve started praying nowcut your hair
and stopped wearing blue. They say you suffered
for my art, for desire and despair. I suffered
for my quietude, for I thought freedom
meant something grander. Thankfully, our inequities
were even: clear and simple, the way horses grieve.
After a while, it became harder to realize I was
not talking to my refrigerator. I was, in fact, suffering.

**

In the dream, we are now climbing a staircase.
I am walking behind you, watching your milky calves
stroll in and out of your summer skirt. What do you understand
of love? you ask. Nothing, I say. And loss? Nothing.
Then why do you write about either?
I dont.

**

I write about you. You pause for a moment,
but do not turn back. Outside the window,
birds are turning into stone. Around the world, everyone
is entering a conversation.

September SongGeoffrey Hill
Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.

As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.

(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)

September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.

EverydayMike McGee
Everyday I rewrite her name across my ribcage
so that those who wish to break my heart
will know who to answer to later
She has no idea that Ive taught my tongue to make pennies,
and every time our mouths are to meet
I will slip coins to the back of her throat and make wishes


I wish
that someday
my head on her belly might be like home
like doubt to doubt resuscitation
because time is supposed to mean more than skin
She doesnt know that I have taught my arms to close around her clocks
so they can withstand the fallout from her Autumn

She is so explosive,
volcanoes watch her and learn
terrorists want to strap her to their chests
because she is a cause worth dying for
Maybe someday
time will teach me to pick up her pieces
put her back together
and remind her to click her heels
but she doesnt need a wizard to tell her that I was here all along

Lady
let us catch the next tornado home
let us plant cantaloupe trees in our backyard
then maybe together we will realize that we dont like cantaloupe
and they dont grow on trees
we can laugh about it
then we can plant things weve never heard of

Ive never heard of a woman
who can make flawed look so beautiful
the way you do

The word smitten is to how I feel about you
what a kiss is to romance
so maybe my lips to yours could be the penance to this confession
because I am the only one preaching your defunct religion
sitting alone at your altar, praising you out of faith

I cannot do this hard-knock life alone
You are all the softness a rock dreams of being
the mistakes the rain makes at picnics
when Mother Nature bears witness in much better places

So yes
I will gladly take on your ocean
just to swim beneath you
so I can kiss the bends of your knees
in appreciation for the work they do
keeping your head above water

Go to the limits of your longing Rainer Maria Rilke
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Letter to N.Y.Elizabeth Bishop
For Louise Crane

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

Brute DictationJules Gibbs
To outsmart the world youve got to
outsmart the metaphor, dismantle
the songs of childhood, say goodbye
to the only life you ever really had
the moment before the brute
dictation, before the grass drills
that could kill a man, when the egg
cracked, and you existed both yoked
and split. Write this down: I love you
now leave me alone; and in between
a bunch of us touched
and were touched, pried open,
and opened more, found
the world in the crude
the Amen in the wound.

The FistDerek Walcott
The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

Walking AloneLawrence Raab
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.
Wallace Stevens

It is night. For hours I have been walking,
wanting to see you, hoping you might
appear suddenly by the side of the road,
on a bridge, or in the arc of headlights
bending toward me. I have continued

beyond any place you might conceivably be.
Sunk into a dark hollow, between trees
and stone, the river goes where it has to go.
In the cold air I construct long conversations:
whatever we wouldnt say if you were here.

I recite poems. I return home and write more.
You are, of course, attending within them,
beautiful and calm, near a window
or by a bridge before winter. I fix you
safely, where we might find each other.

But something comes between us, like glass
or water, a distance I cannot avoid.
We meet by accident and fall away.
I come back here, compose another poem,
and walk about at night reciting it to you.

Everything I conceive as possible returns
to an ordered page. I wish I were blind.
I wish my fingers would drop off.
What are they doing, writing all this again?

Operation Wendy Ortiz
Forget the word sorrow.
Never use it in poems again.

Also discard
happy, joy,
all mention of nature as metaphor
(unless its fresh as milk
sprung from the breast)
and lose
love.

Rename these ideas, these constructs,
with names of cars,
or women (no Helens, no Cleopatras,
no Madonnas) or
extinct species.

Rework it all
until you yourself
are split open
as you echo the words
from the page into the air
into the spaces between
us

and I will bring
the suture.

Persephone Writes to Her MotherTara Mae Mulroy
Mother, he is a gentleman.
He is a builder with bricks of moonlight.
He knows the secret places of the earth.
He washes the sleep from the eyes of the souls.
He lets them look on beauty.
He lets them tell him they hate him.
In the mornings, I gather berries and apples.
I scrub his back with rind.
I weave spider-spit, eyelash.
He talks in his sleep: pudding, fire, discus,
the things he misses.
He breathes, Your body is my orchard.
I am undulating grass.
I am a field of wheat he parts with his fingers.
Poppies bloom in my veins.
When he kisses me, he tastes pomegranate.
The night crawls nearer.
The moans of the dead roll and swell.
Mother, we are well.

Poema 10Pablo Neruda
Hemos perdido aun este crepsculo.
Nadie nos vio esta tarde con las manos unidas
mientras la noche azul caa sobre el mundo.

He visto desde mi ventana
la fiesta del poniente en los cerros lejanos.

A veces como una moneda
se encenda un pedazo de sol entre mis manos.

Yo te recordaba con el alma apretada
de esa tristeza que t me conoces.

Entonces, dnde estabas?
Entre qu gentes?
Diciendo qu palabras?
Por qu se me vendr todo el amor de golpe
cuando me siento triste, y te siento lejana?

Cay el libro que siempre se toma en el crepsculo,
y como un perro herido rod a mis pies mi capa.

Siempre, siempre te alejas en las tardes
hacia donde el crepsculo corre borrando estatuas.

Clenched Soul (Poem 10)Pablo Neruda
We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.
translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin

The Cinnamon PeelerMichael Ondaatje
If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under the rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

BearhugMichael Ondaatje
Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks to me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?

Cherry Blossoms Shinji Moon
The trees of my childhood
are not the trees of your
childhood.

Let me tell you about my
cedars; my forsythias
and honeysuckles;
the way I used to plant
cherry pits in the front lawn
because I was greedy for their
blossoming.

Lift up my skirt and Ill show you
where the blackberry brushes had
scratched me.

Lay me down in a hammock
hung between your childhood and the
man you have become today.

And well kiss once, twice,
and a third time for luck

beneath the cherry blossom petals
that I had fallen asleep beneath
when I was too young to know anything
but innocence.

And the dark bark will be a darker midnight
against the spring it blossoms.

Skeletal. Moonless.
So heavy from the
rain.

And your hand will fold a flower
behind my ear.

And the petals will be
so extraordinarily
pale.

The Shadow Voice Margaret Atwood
My shadow said to me:
what is the matter


Isn't the moon warm
enough for you
why do you need
the blanket of another body


Whose kiss is moss


Around the picnic tables
The bright pink hands held sandwiches
crumbled by distance. Flies crawl
over the sweet instant


You know what is in these blankets


The trees outside are bending with
children shooting guns. Leave
them alone. They are playing
games of their own.


I give water, I give clean crusts


Aren't there enough words
flowing in your veins
to keep you going.

In the Days of Awe Robin Becker
I Amidah

Hear my personal prayer, the words of my mouth and the meditation
of my heart that I may find a way back through love
In the hospital room packed in blood-soaked cotton the new mother lay
animal-exhausted technicians whisked the child away in the first
hours there was fear O teach me to withhold judgment

of the one who took my place who said yes when I said no
whose days opened to the child when my days foreclosed
she who conceived of joy where I imagined the crossbar
against my chest subjugation of family life the double
harness the never ending tasks the clamp and vise

II Shofar

The shofar blasts birthday of the world of our dominion
over nature in the Kingdom of the Lord our God Ruler
of the Universe Then why am I weeping into this tissue?
What is this child to me who refused to stay and raise him?
What is the broken covenant, this yoke?

III Tashlikh

By a small stream as is customary
we cast into the water with its drift
of leaves our quarrels like stones our envies
and resentments O Lord You do not maintain anger
but delight in forgiveness

IV Aleinu

You take me down to the nursery to see
Joseph in his little cap of many colors
with hi jaundice and his brisk efficient keepers
Will you be kind? Cleanse my mind of wickedness
Teach me to attain a heart of wisdom

In the synagogue the families praise all fruitbearing trees
and cedars all wild beasts and cattle I watch a woman
and her teenage daughter confer lean into each other
They hold the mahzor between them their mouths shape the beautiful
Hebrew I do not know how to read except in transliteration

V Teshuvah

Turn from evil and do good the Psalmist says turning
Round the turn turn the key clock the turn turn in time
time to turn words into footsteps to lead the young colt to the field
to turn from the old year the old self You are ready
to turn and be healed only face only begin

VI Amidah

Inscribe him in the Book of Life for Your sake living God
She opened up the book of her body again and again
She would not stop trying though I mocked her a year
ended and a year began I had no imagination for family life
inhabiting sadly that place for years

inhabiting sadly that place for years with me who chose
to keep my faith with those who sleep in dust she chose
against the quiet house and noiseless rooms she chose
to bear her mortal womans hare and split her life in two
or three or four she said I know what you want I want more

VII Avinu malkeinu

Avinu malkeinu inscribe us in the Book of Deliverance
Avinu malkeinu inscribe us in the Book of Merit
Avinu malkeinu inscribe us in the Book of Forgiveness
Sarah beseeched God for a child and brought forth Isaac
And Sally brought forth Joseph Amen

A voice commands the lightning that cleaves stones
A voice shatters stately cedars
A voice twists the trees and strips the forest bare
The devout say In your love for your neighbor will you find God
They say Days are scrolls Write only what you want remembered

VIII Kedushah

We believe that God abides in mystery in a diaspora of dust
in the obsessive the compulsive the disordered in the lonely
in the bosses in the unendurable in the technological
and pharmaceutical failures in the very old
in the newborn in memory in kindness in acts of lovingkindness

We believe that God abides in the unfit in those unshielded
by luck or faith and by bad luck made abject by the unctuous
I believe in the uncomputerized and the demoralized
the belittled and benumbed gazing like dumb beasts
like my sister groping mid-seizure back to speech

IX Mourners Kaddish

Bless my sister who could not endure bless her failure to thrive
and bless my parents in their magnificent witness
Sanctify this Day of Remembrance Grant them peace
from the clichd language of condolence cards Be merciful to those
who passed Your blessed days in a curtained room of shame

In the public place in the hall outfitted with a simple ark
the mourners stand Whom shall I dread? we ask with our private
dreads on our civic faces We are an assembly of stunned
children called to recite Yit-gadal ve-yit kadash shmei raba
There is always someone to mourn Look around

X The Fast of Yom Kippur

Look around the congregation atones we certify regret
we recall our transgressions and those who transgressed against us
Where is my milk? Joseph cries and she feeds him The Torah
teaches repentance I remember my zayde, a shrunken man
at the front of the shul fasting By the last Aleinu he could not stand

My father brought smelling salts the son who did not know
the prayers sat with his father His life was one long prayer
in the hereness of God On the maternity floor food and flowers
Choose life! shouts baby Joseph tightly bound in a cotton blanket
Im afraid its time to go says the kind nurse after visiting hours

XI Selihot

The days of women and men are as grass.
They flourish as flowers in the field.
The wind passes over them and is gone,
and no one can recognize where they grew.

XII Amidah

Inscribe for me a childless life O lift me
to the Book of Many Forms that I might find another way
to honor my father and mother their agony of bereavement
Let me understand the girl child I was beloved as Joseph in his coat
of many colors, favored by his father hated by his brothers

and by his brothers thrown into the pit Then to live among strangers
in Egypt far from family Bind me to these friends and to this child
that I may learn my true relation to the people of this story
Sanctify difference and refusal bless
the lesbians the child with two mothers Amen

The Opposite of NostalgiaEric Gamalinda
You are running away from everyone
who loves you,
from your family,
from old lovers, from friends.

They run after you with accumulations
of a former life, copper earrings,
plates of noodles, banners
of many lost revolutions.

You love to say the trees are naked now
because it never happens
in your country. This is a mystery
from which you will never

recover. And yes, the trees are naked now,
everything that still breathes in them
lies silent and stark
and waiting. You love October most

of all, how there is no word
for so much splendor.
This, too, is a source
of consolation. Between you and memory

everything is water. Names of the dead,
or saints, or history.
There is a realm in which
---no, forget, it,

its still too early to make anyone understand.
A man drives a stake
through his own heart
and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia

begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves
and the leaves take over
and again he has learned
to let go.

After Youve GoneT. R. Hummer
Therell be a difference in the moonlight,
Something missing, something added
The color of the track a neutrino cuts
Through heavy water in a mineshaft.
Therell be a sentimental re-sorting
Of all detritus: locks of hair, humus, grit,
Photographs of strangers dancing,
Refugees at a distant border Leaning on each other, locked
In someones exhausted arms.
That, and a spell of deadening repetitions:
The bass line of planets revolving,
Dark-toned as the dirty chemistry
That revises you, sums you up.

Mouthful of Forevers Clementine von Radics
I am not the first person you loved.
You are not the first person I looked at
with a mouthful of forevers. We
have both known loss like the sharp edges
of a knife. We have both lived with lips
more scar tissue than skin. Our love came
unannounced in the middle of the night.
Our love came when wed given up
on asking love to come. I think
that has to be part
of its miracle.
This is how we heal.
I will kiss you like forgiveness. You
will hold me like Im hope. Our arms
will bandage and we will press promises
between us like flowers in a book.
I will write sonnets to the salt of sweat
on your skin. I will write novels to the scar
of your nose. I will write a dictionary
of all the words I have used trying
to describe the way it feels to have finally,
finally found you.
And I will not be afraid
of your scars.
I know sometimes
its still hard to let me see you
in all your cracked perfection,
but please know:
whether its the days you burn
more brilliant than the sun
or the nights you collapse into my lap
your body broken into a thousand questions,
you are the most beautiful thing Ive ever seen.
I will love you when you are a still day.
I will love you when you are a hurricane.

White PetalsTim Dlugos
The Republic lies in the blossoms of Washington. Robert Bly

White petals
drop into the dark river.
Heedless of political significance,
they ride out to the sea like stars.

I'm the space explorer.
I travel to a planet
where there are no plants or animals.
Everyone lives in harmony.
I don't want to go home.

I'm the pioneer man and the pioneer woman,
both at the same time.
I build my house with my own hands,
and it's beautiful,
with simple, perfect lines.

I'm the farmer waiting for the vegetables
to grow, so I can eat.
I'm the hunter aiming at the bear.
I don't want to shoot it, but my family needs meat.
The bear gives me a long dumb animal look.
We'll use his skin for blankets,
his fat to light our lamps.
Our cabin will stink all night.

I'm the cabin boy who graduates to captain.
Shipboard sex is rough, but it suits my taste.
I'm the man on the steps of the house
where the President's widow lives.
All night I wait for the stranger
to get out of his car
so I can flash my look of recognition.

I'm the cowpoke who sleeps with his horses.
I'm the man who loves dogs.
I'm the cranky President sneaking away
to swim in the Potomac.

I'm the black man.
I close my eyes
and it gets dark inside.

I feel the sun on my face.
I see the light through my eyelids.
It's bright, intelligent
free of all cares.

I'm the heir of a great American family.
My success is guaranteed.
Unexpected tragedy is all that can stop me.
I'm the popular senator teaching his son to shave.

Room in AntwerpLaure-Anne Bosselaar
Dust covers the window, but light slips through--
it always does--through dust or cracks or under doors.

Every day at dusk, the sun, through branches,
hits a river's bend & sends silver slivers to the walls.

No one's there to see this. No one.
But it dances there anyway, that light,

& when the wind weaves waves into the water
it's as if lit syllables quivered on the bricks.

Then the sun sinks, swallowed by the dark. In that dark
more dust, always more dust
settles--sighs over everything.

There is no silence there, something always stirs
not far away. Small rags of noise.

Rilke said most people will know only a small corner of their room.

I read this long ago & still don't know how to understand
that word only, do you?

Where are you? I think of you so often
and search for you in every face that comes between me & dust,
me & dusk--first love, torn corner from this life.

Traveling Stephen Dunn
If you travel alone, hitchhiking,
sleeping in woods,
make a cathedral of the moonlight
that reaches you, and lie down in it.
Shake a box of nails
at the night sounds
for there is comfort in your own noise.
And say out loud:
somebody at sunrise be distraught
for love of me,
somebody at sunset call my name.
There will soon be company.
But if the moon clouds over
you have to live with disapproval.
You are a traveler,
you know the open, hostile smiles
of those stuck in their lives.
Make a fire.
If the Devil sits down, offer companionship,
tell her you've always admired
her magnificent, false moves.
Then recite the list
of what you've learned to do without.
It is stronger than prayer.

Happiness Severity IndexRebekah Remington
Though in the lower standard deviation, I fall, the statistician says,
within the normal range of happiness. Therefore, no drugs today.

What about tomorrow? What if doodling stars isnt enough?
Will I be asked to color the rainbow one more time?

Name three wishes that might come true?
List everything Ive been given within a minute?

Though within the normal range of happiness, I score poor
on bird appreciation, poor on oboe joy. My responses, in fact,

seem to indicate an overall confusion concerning joy itself.
What did I mean that during parties I choose the sofa

like a sick cat? That when tattoos are dispensed Im first
in line? That books full of other peoples misery

make the beach infinitely more pleasant? Stargazing is another weakness.
Too much I examine the patch of dirt where nothing grows

where buried curiosa arent deep enough, though in Short Answer
Im all for dancing alone in a silken robe. Friends call.

Mostly the machine answers. Mozart makes me cry.
I kill spiders without guilt. To make up for this

I take the kids to the golden arches play area.
A positive indicator. Also, interest in the existential

is minimal. I approve of make-up and ice cream.
When I wake early, I get out of bed. When I wallow

in planetary counterpoint, it never lasts. And heres what really saves me:
if I were a ghost Id be Casper. If I were a tradition

Id be a dreidel. I like the rain. When the boat drifts off
I wave. When the dog runs off I follow.

Mad Girl's Love SongSylvia Plath
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

Three of CupsMarty McConnell
At some point it becomes true that all stories
are love stories. all making, love making.
I didn't make this rule. but it binds me
all the same. I wish there were a law
against condescending against love. against
the economy of fear that says your joy
means less joy for me as if love
were pie, or money, or fossil fuel
dug or pumped from the earth, gone
when it's gone. it's just not true. the heart
with its gift for magnificent expansion
is not coal. not fruit set to spoil or the dollar
cringing in its wallet. when you say darling,
the world lights up at its edges. when mouths
find mouths and minds follow or minds find
minds and mouths, hands, hips, toes, follow
how about you call that sacred. how about you raise
your veined right hand and swear on the blood
that branches there, yes. I take this crush
to be my lawful infatuation. I will bend toward joy
until the bending's its own pleasure. I will memorize
photographs and street maps, I will acquiesce
to the maudlin urgency of pop songs and dance,
and dance there's a perfection only the impossible kiss
possesses. there are notes you can only hear naked
in the dark of a room to which you will never
return. anything that moves the world toward light
is a blessing. why not take it with both hands,
lift it to your lips like a broth of stars. this
is the substance that holds our little atoms together
into bodies. this sweet paste of longing
is all that binds us to the earth.
and all we know of the gods.

Talking in the DarkBilly Merrell
Before college, before high school, before my voice
finally cracked, before I could do my first pull-up,
and long before my first real kiss, you and I

held the same girls hands. First Karen, then Tiffany,
then Jessica. And by the time you kissed Amy, I knew
it wasnt her I wanted to kiss. I spent the night at your house

and we talked in the dark until we fell asleep. Those years
were short ones, seem shorter now. I hated myself for lying
so still in the bed beside you, as awkward as a body

and as inarticulate. I have never wanted to kiss you,
only hold you now and then or be held. I know now
that you wouldnt have cared and just wanted to be

trusted. I have pictures of us with girls at dances.
Im wearing my fathers dress shirt. It balloons away
from my body. But you are right there next to me,

in my shirts reach. Later you wont stand so close, and Amy
will have to pose us, pleading closer. No, no. Closer.

We Are Hard on Each OtherMargaret Atwood
i

We are hard on each other
and call it honesty,
choosing our jagged truths
with care and aiming them across
the neutral table.

The things we say are
true; it is our crooked
aims, our choices
turn them criminal.


ii

Of course your lies
are more amusing:
you make them new each time.

Your truths, painful and boring
repeat themselves over & over
perhaps because you own
so few of them


iii

A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?


iv

Does the body lie
moving like this, are these
touches, hair, wet
soft marble my toungue runs over
lies you are telling me?

Your body is not a word,
it does not lie or
speak truth either.

It is only
here or not here.

Tulips Clay Matthews
For three days I have seen sun and rain and now
snow falling but it has slowed to a blunder almost,
a blight. Winter. January 8th. I try to give the season
credit for its importance as one part of the cycle, thinking
pain is life, thinking pain is only weakness leaving the body,
thinking the cold is that which gives meaning to warmth,
our bodies finally finding each other in the morning
after a long night rolling one way and then the other
on either side of the bed. To divide and conquer. The division
is really all thats needed you see the other is just aftermath
just war just silence just misunderstanding and today I fear
there is too much of this in the world I fear that were not getting it
right as people. I am not a dreamer like I used to be.
I dont know if I believe in great things anymore
but that doesnt mean great things cant happen. When it was
April 7:30 and the sun was just going down and the streetlights
were coming on and the children were out in the streets
the neighbors with their dog, slapping at his mouth
while he barked, the two of us on the porch drinking something
on ice I dont remember but I remember the cold of it going down
I remember asking St. Francis for the birds just a little bit longer.
These days it is more St. Anthony I call upon saying I think I have
lost my soul I think I have lost what I want to say, saying Tony, Tony,
Tony, please come around. The trees are so stark against the sky
today I feel a bit like I am living in a picture which is to say
I feel surreal and held in one place and held tenderly by the hand
of someone I once knew, folded and tucked away by someone else,
placed in one of those boxes we all have where we put
the things we cannot let go of, the things we want to keep
but not see, nor need to, and I think the heart is like that sometimes
that it holds distantly to what it might as well just let go.
I tell myself a thousand stories about myself. I tell myself You are
a good man, you are a bad man, you are wasting your life,
you are doing something right. From one day to the next
I am in love with myself or I am looking at myself disgusted
and tired of all the bullshit I repeat to one person after another
I meet on the streets or at family gatherings, all the same things
I have said over and over and over when wanting only to say
I really dont want to talk or I really dont even like you
or You are my family, my friend, why are we speaking
to each other like we havent known each other our whole lives,
like we werent there in that world of childhood together,
like we didnt talk about girls or our lives in the future
or the big goddamn possibility of everything we might be
there is too little of that these days too little of you saying to me
I want more, I am not myself, of me saying to you I just want you
to not talk about the weather or the next president or all the children
even though I love the children we spend so much time outside
their world just looking in, the brothers and sisters and friends
and cousins, thinking Once life was that simple, once we smiled,
once we cried, once we ran through the house naked
with no thoughts of the windows or other humans no thoughts
of the real estate market except the large expanse of a room
as it stretched out in front, thinking I bet by god I can run
all the way to the other side. Now we run away, or rather
we do not run but we turn from each other very politely,
we spend a long time at doors and sometimes I have the urge
to say something very important to someone, sometimes
it is right on my tongue and I feel like I could make their life better
just by uttering a few words because people have done this thing
for me and I want to give it back and I can sometimes see
them wanting to give it back but we do not give it back, only
a hug which is the closest we can get or care to get or know how
anymore. We are real people. All grown up now. And I remember
going back to my hometown and running into some older woman
who knew me as a child, who I couldnt remember if I wanted to
(and I do), who sees only the child in me held in a six-foot body,
sees not my mistakes, my faults, the ins and outs of thirty years
of making people proud and upsetting people, winning awards
and wrecking cars and doing drugs or staying sober they see
none of that, only the child as man, that mannish boy
and we have nothing at all to say to each other so they just stand
back and smile, and hug me as if I was something tender
enough to break, small enough not to notice, unless looking
very hard, very hard as I have grown older now to become.
And I think sometimes I am too much of a man being man.
I am too much jealousy, too much indifference, too much
paranoia as it comes on, too much guilt. I drag the guilt around
like a dead shadow, a heavy shadow, and sometimes
I dont even know what I feel guilty for, only that it seems
I should, that it is my destiny. Day to day I am happy or hurting
or both and not knowing how not to be, not knowing how
to be everything I want to be for you, everything I feel like I can be,
everything I feel like we can all be for each other, goddamnit
Im dreaming again, it seems again I am a dreamer, but I dont care
today, I dont even care about knowing how my caring comes to me,
how I care so much, how I do. Winter. Im taking it for what it is.
The longest season, it seems. The darkest. The hardest
and by some accounts that makes it worth the most in the end,
worth every bit of blossoming I can stand.

What's Wrong With Sage Cohen
making love to your
husband who no longer

lives with you the night
before you leave for your

weekend retreat just
because he, having

agreed to overlap your
early departure to care

for your small son, appears
in the bathroom naked

and erect as you sit steeping.
Whats wrong with slipping

under the lifted wing he has made
of the covers, against the breastbone

of the bird your two bodies make.
Whats wrong with finding him

more beautiful at this distance:
lens adjusted to the immediate

taste of his tongue that has become
its own language since leaving you.

Whats wrong with taking him in
the way you would a galaxy

on a moonless night, this
pattern you have traveled by

dipping its cup
and spilling light.
The first girl Rob Macdonald
When I say that she was the greatest,
I mean that she resembled a circus.
She was not brightly colored,
nor was she composed
of three rings, but
under a tent in the middle of
a starlit field
on a summer night,
you could see her
in just a t-shirt
and forget how unhappy
the elephants were.

they're always curious Irena Klepfisz
they're always curious about what you eat as if you were
some strange breed still unclassified by darwin & whether
you cook every night & wouldn't it be easier for you to
buy frozen dinners but i am quick to point out that my intra-
venous tubing has been taken out & they back up saying i
could never cook for one person but i tell them it's
the same exactly the same as for two except half

but more they're curious about what you do when the urge
is on & if you use a coke bottle or some psychedelic dildo
or electric vibrator or just the good old finger or whole
hand & do you mannippppulllaaatttte yourself into a clit
orgasm or just kind of keep digging away at yourself & if
you mind it & when you have affairs doesn't it hurt when it's
over & it certainly must be lonely to go back to the old finger

& they always cluck over the amount of space you require
& certainly the extra bedroom seems unnecessary & i try to
explain that i like to move around & that i get antsy when
i get the urge so that it's nice to have an extra place
to go when you're lonely & after all it seems small compen-
sation for using the good old finger & they're surprised be-
cause they never thought of it that way & it does seem reason-
able come to think of it

& they kind of probe about your future & if you have a will or
why you bother to accumulate all that stuff or what you plan
to do with your old age & aren't you scared about being put
away somewhere or found on your bathroom floor dead after
your downstairs neighbor has smelled you out but then of course
you know couples live longer for they have something to live
for & i try to explain i live for myself even when in love but
it's a hard concept to explain when you feel lonely

Eclipse Pamela Rossow
it was not enough to be
drenched in your sun
showers; to have your
fingers trail moonlight
through my hair; for your
blazing lips to lock noon
heat between us;
I needed more than
galaxies between my
thighs; day breaks in
your smiles starlight
in your eyes; I tasted
forever on your tongue;
heard always in your
heartbeat; outlined we
on your chest
It was enough to be cast
in shadow; to have my
sundial blotted out by your
clouds; to see the negligible
pebbles in the hourglass; to
know the darkened cemetery
in your mouth was too much.

I think I should have loved you presentlyEdna St Vincent Millay
I think I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
And caught your hand against my cheek and breast;
And all my pretty follies flung aside
That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,
Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,
Spread like a chart my little wicked ways.
I, that had been to you, had you remained,
But one more waking from a recurrent dream,
Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,
And walk your memory's halls, austere, supreme,
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two.

FloodKim Addonizio
How images enter you, the shutter of the body
clicking when you're not even looking:
smooth chill of satin sheets, piano keys, a pastry's glazy crust
floating up, suddenly, so the hairs along your arm
lift in that current of memory, and your tongue tastes
the sweet salt of a lover as he surges
against you, plunges towards the place you can't
dive into but which is deepening each moment
you are alive, the black pupil widening,
the man going down and in, the food and
champagne and music and light, there is no bottom to this,
silt and murk of losses that won't ever settle,
and the huge unsleeping fish, voracious for pleasure,
and the soundless fathoms where nothing
yet exists, this minute, the next, the last
breath let out and not returning, oh hold
on to me as the waters rise, don't be afraid,
we are going to join the others, we are going
to remember and tell them everything.

After BattleKaren Lepri
As after battle, we examine each others skin, trace the surface
From shoulder to shoulder and then down the spine, to the calf
And returning to the chest, its cavity & beat:
You are here
Amazingly whole. What you lost, undetectable. We have
Already forgotten the epithets of insult blazoned
On our brows. The high points have turned dull in the eaves
Of purpose, memory: ears tune forward. Somehow, injured
We become most familiar, sub-species unto sub
Species, and then peculiar. What ordinary causes of war
We weave into tales of centaurs, imps, & other
Animals. What makes us human is not enough to explain
The anger love breeds. The narrow stretches that pump to
And fro the heart. Entering & leaving, the blood warms. The heat,
Both plot & message: o the sweat I wipe away, the sweat
You wipe away.

Because Ill Never Swim in Every OceanCatherine Pierce
Want is ten thousand blue feathers falling
all around me, and me unable to stomach
that I might catch five but never ten thousand.
So I drop my hands to my sides and wait
to be buried. I open a book and the words
spring and taunt. Flashesmotel, lapidary,
piranhaof every story, every poem Ill never
know well enough to conjure in sleep.
Whats the point of words if I cant
own them all? I toss book after book
into my imaginary trashcan fire.
Or I think Ill learn piano. At the first lesson,
were clapping whole and half notes
and this is childish, Im better than this.
Id like to leave playing Ravel. Id like
to give a concerto on Saturday. So I quit.
I have standards. Then on Saturday,
I have a beer, watch a telethon. Or
we watch a documentary on Antarctica.
The interviewees are from Belarus, Lima, Berlin.
Everyone speaks English. Everyone names
a philosopher, an ethos. One man carries a raft
on his back at all times. I went to Nebraska once
and swore it was a great adventure. It was.
I think of how Ill never go to Antarctica,
mainly because I dont much want to. But
I should want to. I should be the girl
with a raft on her back. When I think
of all the mountains and monuments
and skyscapes I havent seen, all the trains
I should take, all the camels and mopeds
and ferries I should ride, all the scorching
hikes I should nearly die on, I press
my body down, down into the vast green
couch. If I step out the door, the infinity
of what Ive missed will zorro me across
the face with a big L for Lazy. Sometimes
I watch finches at the feeder, their wings small
suns, and have to grab the sill to steady myself.
Metaphorically, of course. Im no loon.
Lookeven my awestruck is half-assed.
But Im so tired of the small steps
the pentatonic scale, the frequent flyer
hoarding, the one exquisite sentence
in a forest of exquisite sentences.
There is a globe welling up inside of me.
Mountain ranges ridging my skin,
oceans filling my mouth. If I stay still
long enough, I could become my own world.

If They Come in the NightMarge Piercy
Long ago on a night of danger and vigil
a friend said, why are you happy?
He explained (we lay together
on a cold hard floor) what prison
meant because he had done
time, and I talked of the death
of friends. Why are you happy
then, he asked, close to
angry.

I said, I like my life. If I
have to give it back, if they
take it from me, let me
not feel I wasted any, let me
not feel I forgot to love anyone
I meant to love, that I forgot
to give what I held in my hands,
that I forgot to do some little
piece of the work that wanted
to come through.

Sun and moonshine, starshine,
the muted light off the waters
of the bay at night, the white
light of the fog stealing in,
the first spears of morning
touching a face
I love. We all lose
everything. We lose
ourselves. We are lost.

Only what we manage to do
lasts, what love sculpts from us;
but what I count, my rubies, my
children, are those moments
wide open when I know clearly
who I am, who you are, what we
do, a marigold, an oakleaf, a meteor,
with all my senses hungry and filled
at once like a pitcher with light.

Cuttings (Later)Theodore Roethke
This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

Now That I am in Madrid I Can ThinkFrank O'Hara
I think of you
and the continents brilliant and arid
and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air
as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning
and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York

see a vast bridge stretching to the humbled outskirts with only you
Standing on the edge of the purple like an only tree
and in Toledo the olive groves' soft blue look at the hills with silver
like glasses like and old ladies hair
It's well known that God and I don't get along together
It's just a view of the brass works for me, I don't care about the Moors
seen through you the great works of death, you are greater

you are smiling, you are emptying the world so we can be alone together.

Waiting for This Story to End Before I Begin AnotherJan Heller Levi
All my stories are about being left,
all yours about leaving. So we should have known.
Should have known to leave well enough alone;
we knew, and we didnt. You said lets put
our cards on the table, your card
was your body, the table my bed, where we didnt
get till 4 am, so tired from wanting
what we shouldnt that when we finally found our heads,
wed lost our minds. Love,I wanted to call you
so fast. But so slow you could taste each
letter licked into your particular and rose-like ear.
L, love, for lets wait. O, for oh no, lets not. V
for the precious v between your deep breasts
(and the virtue of your fingers
in the voluptuous center of me.)

Okay, E for enough.
Dawn broke, or shattered. Once weve made
the promises, its hard to add the prefix if. . . .
But not so wrong to try.
That means taking a lot of walks,
which neither of us is good at,
for different reasons, and nights up till 2
arguing whose reasons are better.
Time and numbers count a lot in this. 13
years my marriage. 5 years you my friend.
4th of July weekend when something that begins
in mist, by mistake (whose?), means too much
has to end. I think we need an abacus to get our love
on course, and one of us to oil the shining rods
so we can keep the crazy beads clicking,
clicking. It wasnt a question
of a perfect fit. Theoretically,
it should be enough to say I left a man
for a woman (90% of the world is content
to leave it at that. Oh, lazy world) and when the woman
lost her nerve, I left
for greater concerns: when words like autonomy
were useful, I used them, I confess. So I get
what I deserve: a studio apartment he paid the rent on;
bookshelves up to the ceiling she drove
the screws for. And a skylight I sleep alone
beneath, and two shiny quarters in my pocket
to call one, then the other, or to call one
twice. Once, twice, I threatened to leave him
remember? Now that Ive done it, he says
he doesnt. Im in a phonebooth at the corner of Bank
and Greenwich; not a booth, exactly,
but two sheets of glass to shiver between.
This is called being street-smart: dialing
a number that you know wont be answered,
but the message you leave leaves proof that you tried.
And this, my two dearly beloveds, is this called
hedging your bets? I fish out my other
coin, turn it over in my fingers, press
it into the slot. Hold it there. Let it drop.

Heres What Our Parents Never Taught Us Shinji Moon
Heres what our parents never taught us:

You will stay up on your rooftop until sunlight peels away the husk of the moon,
chainsmoking cigarettes and reading Baudelaire, and
you will learn that you only ever want to fall in love with someone
who will stay up to watch the sun rise with you.

You will fall in love with train rides, and sooner or later you will
realize that nowhere seems like home anymore.

A woman will kiss you and youll think her lips are two petals
rubbing against your mouth.

You will not tell anyone that you liked it.
Its okay.
It is beautiful to love humans in a world where love is a metaphor for lust.

You can leave if you want, with only your skin as a carry-on.

All you need is a twenty in your pocket and a bus ticket.
All you need is someone on the other end of the map, thinking about the supple
curves of your body, to guide you to a home that stretches out for miles
and miles on end.

You will lie to everyone you love.
They will love you anyways.

One day youll wake up and realize that you are too big for your own skin.

Molt.
Dont be afraid.

Your body is a house where the shutters blow in and out
against the windowpane.

You are a hurricane-prone area.
The glass will break through often.

But its okay. I promise.

Remember,
a stranger once told you that the breeze
here is something worth writing poems about.

La MigraPat Mora
Let's play La Migra
I'll be the Border Patrol.
You be the Mexican maid.
I get the badge and sunglasses.

You can hide and run,
but you can't get away because I have a jeep. I can take you wherever I want, but don't
ask questions because I don't speak Spanish. I can touch you wherever I want but don't
complain too much because I've got boots and kick--if I have to, and I have handcuffs. Oh,
and a gun. Get ready, get set, run.

Let's play La Migra You be the Border Patrol. I'll be the Mexican woman. Your jeep has a
flat, and you have been spotted by the sun. All you have is heavy: hat, glasses, badge,
shoes, gun. I know this desert, where to rest, where to drink. Oh, I am not alone. You
hear us singing and laughing with the wind, Agua dulce brota aqui, aqui, aqui, but since
you can't speak Spanish, you do not understand. Get ready.

You Being In Lovee.e. cummings
you being in love
will tell who softly asks in love,

am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely
to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean:
entirely having in my careful how
careful arms created this at length
inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasureyou go from several
persons: believe me that strangers arrive
when i have kissed you into a memory
slowly, oh seriously
that since and if you disappear

solemnly
myselves
ask life, the question how do i drink dream smile

and how do i prefer this face to another and
why do i weep eat sleepwhat does the whole intend
they wonder. oh and they cry to be, being, that i am alive
this absurd fraction in its lowest terms
with everything cancelled
but shadows
what does it all come down to? love? Love
if you like and i like,for the reason that i
hate people and lean out of this window is love,love
and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason
that i do not fall into this street is love.

Ars Poetica Dorothea Lasky

I wanted to tell the veterinary assistant about the cat video Jason sent me
But I resisted for fear she'd think it strange
I am very lonely
Yesterday my boyfriend called me, drunk again
And interspersed between ringing tears and clinginess
He screamed at me with a kind of bitterness
No other human had before to my ears
And told me that I was no good
Well maybe he didn't mean that
But that is what I heard
When he told me my life was not worthwhile
And my life's work the work of the elite.
I say I want to save the world but really
I want to write poems all day
I want to rise, write poems, go to sleep,
Write poems in my sleep
Make my dreams poems
Make my body a poem with beautiful clothes
I want my face to be a poem
I have just learned how to apply
Eyeliner to the corners of my eyes to make them appear wide
There is a romantic abandon in me always
I want to feel the dread for others
I can feel it through song
Only through song am I able to sum up so many words into a few
Like when he said I am no good
I am no good
Goodness is not the point anymore
Holding on to things
Now that's the point

Letter to Myself, in Remission, from Myself, Terminal Anya Krugovoy Silver

You'll come to hate your own poems,
read them as pretty wisps of colorful thinking,
all those images just a splash of colored oil
sloshed over a pool gone rancid. Admit it.
Atheists always scared you. And no wonder.
Those nights you switched on the fan so no one
could hear you scream into your pillow, weeping
and biting your own hands like a motherless
monkey, banded to a body that despised you,
a suit of coals with a jammed-shut zipper.
Instead of the truth, you took refuge in stories
and souls, wore the word survivor like a pink nimbus.
All the while, my dear, I waited, knowing
you'd catch up to me one day. I'm holding the black-
backed mirror to your face. Look into it.

for women who are 'difficult' to love. Warsan Shire
you are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn't you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can't make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.

I Am Asking You to Come Back Home Jo Carson
I am asking you to come back home
before you lose the chance of seein me alive.
You already missed your daddy.
You missed you uncle Howard.
You missed Luciel.
I kept them and I buried them.
You showed up for the funerals.
Funerals are the easy part.

You even missed that dog you left.
I dug him a hole and put him in it.
It was a Sunday morning, but dead animals
dont wait no better than dead people.

My mamma used to say she could feel herself
runnin short of the breath of life. So can I.
And I am blessed tired of buryin things I love.
Somebody else can do that job to me.
Youll be back here then; you come for funerals.

Id rather you come back now and got my stories.
Ive got whole lives of stories that belong to to you.
I could fill you up with stories,
stories I aint told nobody yet,
stories with your name, your blood in them.
Aint nobody gonna hear them if you dont
and you aint gonna hear them unless you get back home.

When I am dead, it will not matter
how hard you press your ear to the ground.

Long Road Paulina Barda
I love you night and day
As a star in the distant sky.
And I mourn for this one thing alone
That to love, our lifetime was so short.

A long road to heavens shining meadow
And never could I reach its end.
But a longer road leads to your heart
Which to me seems distant as a star.

High above the arch of heaven bends
And light so clear is falling.
Like a flowring tree the world is blooming.
Overwhelmed, my heart both cries and laughs.


"After a Greek Proverb" - A. E. Stallings


We're here for the time being, I answer to the query--
Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

We dine sitting on folding chairs--they were cheap but cheery.
We've taped the broken window pane, TVs still out of whack.
We're here for the time being, I answer to the query.

When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry,
But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Sometimes when I'm feeling weepy, you propose a theory:
Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack.
We're here for the time being, I answer to the query--

We stash bones in the closet when we don't have time to bury,
Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Twelve years now and we're still eating off the ordinary:
We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack.
We're here for the time being, we answer to the query,
But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

You who never arrived Rainer Maria Rilke
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

Untitled because no title is good enough Mindy Nettifee
if a man is only as good as his word,
then i want to marry a man with a vocabulary like yours.

the way you say 'dicey' and 'delectable' and 'octogenarian'
in the same sentence--
that really turns me on,
the way you describe the oranges in your backyard
using 'anarchistic' and 'intimate' in the same breath.

i would follow the legato and staccato of your tongue
wrapping around your diction
until listening became more like dreaming,
and dreaming became more like kissing you.

i want to jump off the cliff of your voice
into the suicide of your stream of consciousness.
i want to visit the place in your heart where the wrong words die.
i want to map it out with a dictionary and points of brilliant light
until it looks more like a star chart than a strategy for communication.
i want to see where your words are born.
i want to find a pattern in their astrology.

i want to memorize the script of your seductions.
i want to live in the long-winded epics of your disappointments,
in the haiku of your epiphanies.
I want to know all the names you've given your desires.
i want to find my name among them,
'cause there is nothing more wrecking-sexy than the right word.
i want to thank whoever told you there was no such thing as a synonym.
i want to throw a party for the heart-break that turned you into a poet.

and if it is true that a man is only as good as his word
then, sweet jesus,
let me be there the first time you are speechless,
and all your explosive wisdom
becomes a burning ball of sun in your throat,
and all you can bring yourself to utter is oh god,
oh, god....

After All This Richard Jackson
After all this love, after the birds rip like scissors
through the morning sky, after we leave, when the empty
bed appears like a collapsed galaxy, or the wake of
disturbed air behind a plane, after that, as the wind turns
to stone, as the leaves shriek, you are still breathing
inside my own breath. The lighthouse on the far point
still sweeps away the darkness with the brush of an arm.
The tides inside your heart still pull me towards you.
After all this, what are these words but mollusk shells
a child plays with? What could say more than the eloquence
of last night's constellations? or the storm anchored by
its own flashes behind the far mountains? I remember
the way your body wavers under my touch like the northern
lights. After all this, I want the certainty of hidden roots
spreading in all directions from their tree. I want to hear
again the sky tangled in your voice. Some nights I can
hear the footsteps of the stars. How can these words
ever reveal the secret that waits in their sleeping light?
The words that walk through my mind say only what has
already passed. Beyond, the swallows are still knitting
the wind. After a while, the smokebush will turn to fire.
After a while, the thin moon will grow like a tear in a curtain.
Under it, a small boy kicks a ball against the wall of
a burned out house. He is too young to remember the war.
He hardly knows the emptiness that kindles around him.
He can speak the language of early birds outside our window.
Someday he will know this kind of love that changes
the color of the sky, and frees the earth from its moorings.
Sometimes I kiss your eyes to see beyond what I can imagine.
Sometimes I think I can speak the language of unborn stars.
I think the whole earth breathes with you. After all this,
these words are all I have to say what is impossible to think,
what shy dreams hide in the rafters of my heart, because
these words are only a form of touch, only tell you I have no life
that isn't yours, and no death you couldn't turn into a life.

I Have Dreamed of You so Much by Robert Desnos
I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make
your dear voice come alive again?

I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my
chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many
days and years, I would surely become a shadow.

O scales of feeling.

I have dreamed of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up.
I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who
counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and
face of some passerby.

I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much
with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow the
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

Nocturne Frank OHara
Theres nothing worse
than feeling bad and not
being able to tell you.
Not because youd kill me
or it would kill you, or
we dont love each other.
Its space. The sky is grey
and clear, with pink and
blue shadows under each cloud.
A tiny airliner drops its
specks over the UN Building.
My eyes, like millions of
glassy squares, merely reflect.
Everything sees through me,
in the daytime Im too hot
and at night I freeze; Im
built the wrong way for the
river and a mild gale would
break every fiber in me.
Why dont I go east and west
instead of north and south?
Its the architects fault.
And in a few years Ill be
useless, not even an office
building. Because you have
no telephone, and live so
far away; the Pepsi-Cola sign,
the seagulls and the noise.

Boston Aaron Smith
I've been meaning to tell
you how the sky is pink
here sometimes like the roof
of a mouth that's about to chomp
down on the crooked steel teeth
of the city,

I remember the desperate
things we did
and that I stumble
down sidewalks listening
to the buzz of street lamps
at dusk and the crush
of leaves on the pavement,

Without you here I'm viciously lonely

and I can't remember
the last time I felt holy,
the last time I offered
myself as sanctuary

*

I watched two men
press hard into
each other, their bodies
caught in the clubs
bass drum swell,
and I couldnt remember
when I knew Id never
be beautiful, but it must
have been quick
and subtle, the way
the holy ghost can pass
in and out of a room.
I want so desperately
to be finished with desire,
the rushing wind, the still
small voice.


Alcohol Franz Wright
You do look a little ill.

But we can do something about that, now.

Cant we.

The fact is youre a shocking wreck.

Do you hear me.

You arent all alone.

And you could use some help today, packing in the
dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and
grinning with terror flowing over your legs through
your fingers and hair . . .

I was always waiting, always here.

Know anyone else who can say that.

My advice to you is think of her for what she is:
one more name cut in the scar of your tongue.

What was it you said, To rather be harmed than
harm, is not abject.

Please.

Can we be leaving now.

We like bus trips, remember. Together

we could watch these winter fields slip past, and
never care again,

think of it.

I dont have to be anywhere.

Eclipse Pamela Rossow
it was not enough to be
drenched in your sun
showers; to have your
fingers trail moonlight
through my hair; for your
blazing lips to lock noon
heat between us;
I needed more than
galaxies between my
thighs; day breaks in
your smiles starlight
in your eyes; I tasted
forever on your tongue;
heard always in your
heartbeat; outlined we
on your chest
It was enough to be cast
in shadow; to have my
sundial blotted out by your
clouds; to see the negligible
pebbles in the hourglass; to
know the darkened cemetery
in your mouth was too much.

After Battle Karen Lepri
As after battle, we examine each others skin, trace the surface
From shoulder to shoulder and then down the spine, to the calf
And returning to the chest, its cavity & beat:
You are here
Amazingly whole. What you lost, undetectable. We have
Already forgotten the epithets of insult blazoned
On our brows. The high points have turned dull in the eaves
Of purpose, memory: ears tune forward. Somehow, injured
We become most familiar, sub-species unto sub
Species, and then peculiar. What ordinary causes of war
We weave into tales of centaurs, imps, & other
Animals. What makes us human is not enough to explain
The anger love breeds. The narrow stretches that pump to
And fro the heart. Entering & leaving, the blood warms. The heat,
Both plot & message: o the sweat I wipe away, the sweat
You wipe away.

A Scrabble Tile Poem Mike Keith
Through sentient, gauzy flame I view life's dread,
quixotic, partial joke. We're vapour-born,
by logic and emotion seen as dead.

Plain cording weds great luxury ornate,
while moon-beams rise to die in Jove's quick day;
I navigate the puzzle-board of fate.

Wait! Squeeze one hundred labels into jibes,
grip clay and ink to form your topic - rage;
await the vexing mandate of our lives.

I rush on, firm, to raid my aged tools,
but yet I touch an eerie, vain, blank piece,
as oxide grown among life's quartz-paved jewels.

Once zealous Bartlebooth, a timid knave,
portrayed grief's calm upon a jigsaw round;
yet now he lies, fixed quiet in his grave.

Just so we daily beam our pain-vexed soul
with fiery craze to aim large, broken core
and quest in vain to find the gaping hole.

Because Ill Never Swim in Every Ocean Catherine Pierce
Want is ten thousand blue feathers falling
all around me, and me unable to stomach
that I might catch five but never ten thousand.
So I drop my hands to my sides and wait
to be buried. I open a book and the words
spring and taunt. Flashesmotel, lapidary,
piranhaof every story, every poem Ill never
know well enough to conjure in sleep.
Whats the point of words if I cant
own them all? I toss book after book
into my imaginary trashcan fire.
Or I think Ill learn piano. At the first lesson,
were clapping whole and half notes
and this is childish, Im better than this.
Id like to leave playing Ravel. Id like
to give a concerto on Saturday. So I quit.
I have standards. Then on Saturday,
I have a beer, watch a telethon. Or
we watch a documentary on Antarctica.
The interviewees are from Belarus, Lima, Berlin.
Everyone speaks English. Everyone names
a philosopher, an ethos. One man carries a raft
on his back at all times. I went to Nebraska once
and swore it was a great adventure. It was.
I think of how Ill never go to Antarctica,
mainly because I dont much want to. But
I should want to. I should be the girl
with a raft on her back. When I think
of all the mountains and monuments
and skyscapes I havent seen, all the trains
I should take, all the camels and mopeds
and ferries I should ride, all the scorching
hikes I should nearly die on, I press
my body down, down into the vast green
couch. If I step out the door, the infinity
of what Ive missed will zorro me across
the face with a big L for Lazy. Sometimes
I watch finches at the feeder, their wings small
suns, and have to grab the sill to steady myself.
Metaphorically, of course. Im no loon.
Lookeven my awestruck is half-assed.
But Im so tired of the small steps
the pentatonic scale, the frequent flyer
hoarding, the one exquisite sentence
in a forest of exquisite sentences.
There is a globe welling up inside of me.
Mountain ranges ridging my skin,
oceans filling my mouth. If I stay still
long enough, I could become my own world.

Steps Frank O'Hara
How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridgets steeple leaning a little to the left

here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that paintings not so blue

wheres Lana Turner
shes out eating
and Garbos backstage at the Met
everyones taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the parks full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense were all winning
were alive

the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Buildings no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)

and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining

oh god its wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

A Myth of Devotion Louise Glck
When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.
Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness
Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting.
A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn't everyone want love?
He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.
Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns
That's what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there'd be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.
Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn't imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.
He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone's Girlhood.
A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you
but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you're dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.

Is/Not Margaret Atwood
Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise
sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavities
you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,
nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow/traveller
Give up this medical concern,
buttoned, attentive,
permit yourself anger
and permit me mine
which needs neither
your approval nor your surprise
which does not need to be made legal
which is not against a disease
but against you,
which does not need to be understood
or washed or cauterized,
which needs instead
to be said and said.
Permit me the present tense.

The Last Love Letter From An Entomologist Jared Singer
dear sarah
im sorry
we have to get a divorce
i know that seems like a really odd way to start a love letter but let me explain:
its not you
its definitely not me
its just human beings dont love as well as insects do
i love you... far too much to let what we have be ruined by the failings of our species
im going to leave you now, while i still remember you fondly

i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night
i know you would never do anything, you never do but..
i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night

did you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes
her brain, destroys her receptors for pheromones, sensing the change, the male fly does the
same. when two flies love each other they do it so hard, they can never love anything else ever
again. if either one of them dies before procreation can happen both sets of genetic code are lost
forever. now that is dedication.

after i broke up with elizabeth we spent three days dividing everything we had bought together
like if i knew what pots were mine like if i knew which drapes were mine somehow the pain
would go away

after two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut down
while he still has control over his motor functions
he flops onto his back, offers his soft underbelly up to his lover like a gift
she then proceeds to lovingly, so lovingly dice him into tiny cubes
spooning every morsel into her mouth
she wastes nothing
even the exoskeleton is devoured
she does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed them
now that is selflessness

i could never do that for you

so i have a new plan
im gonna leave you now
im gonna spend the rest of my life committing petty injustices
i hope you do the same
i will jay walk at every opportunity
i will steal things i could easily afford
i will be rude to strangers
i hope you do the same
i hope reincarnation is real
i hope our petty crimes are enough to cause us to be reborn as lesser creatures
i hope we are reborn as flies
so that we can love each other as hard as we were meant to.

Crushworthy R. Eirik Ott
I want someone
to have a crush on me
for a change

to notice
when I dont come to class
and wonder if Im okay

to get nervous
when I enter the cafe,
to fumble
with her papers
and books,
to pick at her clothing
and check
her reflection
in salt shakers and napkin holders

to catch her breath
when she sees me from across campus,
tug on her best friends collar
and point with her eyes
and whisper loudly,
There he is!

to run around the block
as quickly
and nonchalantly
as she can
just to walk past me
make eye contact
and smile
to look into my big brown eyes
(such long lashes!)
from across the room
and think, Yes

to look at my full kissing lips
and think, Oh yes

to hear my voice
and imagine
how her name
would sound

if I said it
if I whispered it
if I

Oh yes

I want someone
to make up nicknames for me

to talk about me in code
I saw Backpack Boy today
in the library
in the Romantic Lit. section

I saw Steel-Toed Boots Boy
talking to some girl
(some girl!)
in the bookstore today

I want someone
to go straight home
every night
and check her answering machine
just in case
just in case

and check the phone cord
and check the battery
and check the tape
and make sure the goddamned blinking light
isnt burned out

just in case

I want someone to say,
Youre wrong about him
because you dont know him
the way I know him,

because she can just tell

that Im a good person
must be
a good person
gotta be
a good person
because I write poetry about my mom and my cats

and because she likes me so much
for some reason
some unexplainable psychic supernatural reaction
to me

me.

I want someone
to mark her calendar
He talked to me today
to wonder
what I would smell like
after a long warm sleep
under a down comforter

to close her eyes
and picture
what our kids would look like

to write silly wretched wonderful
poetry
about me

for a change

Dear City Conchitina Cruz
Permit us to refresh your memory: what comes from heaven is always a blessing, the enemy is
not the rain. Rain is the subject of prayer, the kind gesture of saints. Dear City, explain your
irreverence: in you, rain is a visitor with nowhere to go. Where is the ground that knows only
the love of water? What are the passageways to your heart? Pity the water that stays and rises
on the streets, pity the water that floods into houses, so dark and filthy and heavy with rats and
dead leaves and plastic. How ashamed water is to be what you have made it. What have you
done to its beauty, its graceful body in pictures of oceans, its clear face in a glass? We walk
home and cannot see our feet in the flood. We forget to thank the gods for their kindness. We
look for someone to blame and turn to you, wretched city, because we are men and women of
honor, we feed our children three meals a day, we never miss an election. The only explanation
is you, dear city. This is the end of our discussion. There is no other culprit.


Totally like whatever, you know? Taylor Mali
In case you hadnt noticed,
it has somehow become uncool to sound like you know what youre talking about?
Or believe strongly in what youre saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences arent, like, questions? You know?
Declarative sentences - so-called
because they used to, like, DECLARE things to be true
as opposed to other things which were, like, not -
have been infected by a totally hip
and tragically cool interrogative tone? You know?
Like, dont think Im uncool just because Ive noticed this;
this is just like the word on the street, you know?
Its like what Ive heard?
I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions, okay?
Im just inviting you to join me in my uncertainty?
What has happened to our conviction?
Where are the limbs out on which we once walked?
Have they been, like, chopped down
with the rest of the rain forest?
Or do we have, like, nothing to say?
Has society become so, like, totally
I mean absolutely You know?
That weve just gotten to the point where its just, like
whatever!
And so actually our disarticulation ness
is just a clever sort of thing
to disguise the fact that weve become
the most aggressively inarticulate generation
to come along since
you know, a long, long time ago!
I entreat you, I implore you, I exhort you,
I challenge you: To speak with conviction.
To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks
the determination with which you believe it.
Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker,
it is not enough these days to simply QUESTION AUTHORITY.
You have to speak with it, too.

Going There - Jack Gilbert
Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart Jack Gilbert
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.


Science Fiction Story - Chris Killen
I will meet you again in the future. It will be 100 years from now. We will be evolved. We will
be larger. We will be gentle with each other. When I try to touch your hand, my hand will feel
like water. Your hand will feel like a fish. We will be evolved in different directions. We will be
so gentle and evolved we wont even be able to lift our glasses to our mouths. We will just sit
in a bar, looking at the glasses, and being incredibly gentle with each other. You will gently
slap my face. I will gently say something cruel. We will gently torture each other, not saying
any of the things weve been thinking for the last 100 years.

We will not say, Ive missed you, or, You look good, or, I think Ive made a terrible mistake.

We will be too futuristic to say those things.

There will be mobile phones made of water and seeds, 1 millimetre in diameter.

There will be children that look like shrivelled dogs.

Every thing ever will have a slot to put money in, and when you put money in the slot the
thing will vibrate.

There will be tinfoil, inflatable shoes, and holographic statues of the cast of Friends.

Everything will be okay.

The sun will be burnt out it will be like a black floating acorn and it will be dark in the bar,
and I wont be able to see if you are crying.

The Space Between - Elena Georgiou
stuck in an unnamed place
half way between love and in love,
you call me late at night and ask
if i'm sleeping. i tell you, i'm writing.
you ask about what? love, i say.

when i write about us, i stop myself
from saying we make love or we have sex.
i search for a euphemism that won't bind me,
won't define us. i arrive at the phrase
move together. and only now, in writing
this poem, do i see how fitting it is.

the way we moved together vertically
is what made me want to move with you
horizontally. music joined us,
but even in the joining, i didn't know
how to behave, how much or how little
to say, how to choose to be me.

an old friend told me if i feel
smaller than myself with a lover
this is the wrong lover for me.

yes, i make myself smaller; i shrink
my politics, my conversation. i shrink
in mind, but i grow in body.

and don't think i don't know
when the movements are fluid
we look for ways to draw each other
nearer, name each other soulmates.

i have been a two-time witness
to how easily the soul-thread can be
cut, leaving the so-called soulmate
dangling in an empty world of one.

the same old friend comes back
to say a lover should love
in me what i love in myself.

trouble is, we don't know what we love
in each other. we exchange tapes of songs
to hint at the possibility of a feeling,
admitting nothing, partially exposed
in lyrics so, if pushed, we can deny
we meant the words that way.

we skirt around edges hoping
the space between will stop closeness
because close is where we are
fighting ourselves not to be.

i preach distance to you. i inflict it
on myself. i invent barriers like age-gaps
and bad-timing. but only now, in writing
this poem, do i learn how the word
distance can magnetize lovers.

you obey my demands. you don't
call. we don't speak, but you find
a strand of my hair in your freezer
and i still write with the taste of
you in my mouth.

Maybe I Need You - Andrea Gibson
The winter I told you I think icicles are magic
you stole an enormous icicle from a neighbors shingle
and gave it to me as a gift
I kept it in my freezer for seven months
until the day I hurt my foot
I needed something to reduce the swelling
love isn't always magic
sometimes its just melting
or its black and blue
where it hurts the most
last night I saw your ghost
pedaling a bicycle with a basket
towards a moon as full as my heavy head
and i wanted nothing more than to be sitting in that basket
like ET with my glowing heart glowing right through my chest
and my glowing finger pointing in the direction of our home
two years ago I said I never want to write our break up poem
you built me a time capsule full of big league chew
and promised to never burst my bubble
I loved you from our first date at the batting cages
when I missed 23 balls in a row
and you looked at me
like I was a home run in the ninth inning of the world series
now every time I hear the word love I think going going
the first week you were gone
I kept seeing your hand wave goodbye
like a windshield wiper in a flooding car
and the last real moment I believed the hurricane would let me out alive
yesterday i carved your name into the surface of an ice cube
then held it against my heart til it melted into my aching pores
today i cried so hard the neighbors knocked on my door
and asked if I wanted to borrow some sugar
I told them I left my sweet tooth in your belly button
love isn't always magic
but if I offered my life to the magician
if I told her to cut me in half
so tonight I could come to you whole
and ask for you back
would you listen
for this dark alley love song
for the winter we heated our home from the steam off our own bodies
I wrote too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speak
But I know now it doesn't matter how well I say grace
if I am sitting at a table where I am offering no bread to eat
So this is my wheat field
you can have every acre love
this is my garden song
this is my fist fight
with that bitter frost
tonight I begged another stage light to become that back alley street lamp that we danced
beneath
the night your warm mouth fell on my timid cheek
as i sang maybe i need you
off key
but in tune
maybe i need you the way that big moon needs that open sea
maybe i didn't even know i was here til i saw you holding me
give me one room to come home to
give me the palm of your hand
every strand of my hair is a kite string
and I have been blue in the face with your sky
crying a flood over iowa so you mother will wake to venice
lover I smashed my glass slipper to build a stained glass window for every wall inside my chest
now my heart is a pressed flower and a tattered bible
it is the one verse you can trust
so I'm putting all of my words in the collection plate
I am setting the table with bread and grace
my knees are bent
like the corner of a page
I am saving your place

Ecstasy - Sharon Olds
As we made love for the third day,
Cloudy and dark, as we did not stop,
but went into it and into it and
did not hesitate and did not hold back we
rose through the air, until we were up above
timber line. The lake lay
icy and silver, the surface shirred,
reflecting nothing. The black rocks
lifted around it into the grainy
sepia air, the patches of snow
brilliant white, and even though we
did not know where we were, we could not
speak the language, we could hardly see, we
did not stop , rising with the black
rocks into the black hills, the black
mountains rising from the hills. Resting
on the crest of the mountains, one huge
cloud with scalloped edges of blazing
evening light, we did not turn back,
we stayed with it, even though we were
far beyond what we knew, we rose
into the grain of the cloud, even though we were
frightened, the air hollow, even though
nothing grew there, even though it is a
place from which no one has ever come back.


Objects of My Affection - Tara Michelle Ziniuk
Your girlfriend's rib cage cracks, bone against headboard, when you fuck her in my bed. In
every poem she hits her head. Her small body breaks uncontrollably under your hot hand. A
broken girl cannot cry. I am left here.

A tree house. Three new vines. Expired birthday party balloons. Raw cane sugar. Remnants are
just that: reminders. My name is stamped with a stallion, the paper store, tiny icons remind me
of you. Everything else small i Anna.

Your mouth on her makes you forget lyrics, the song you chose your name from. Makes you
think about girls marked with black ink tattoos, thousands of miles down the coast. The song
the radio played (the day you thought your life might be important) led to a crush on a deadly-
wrong girl.

Your heart faltered over a dead dog.

When the song I loop tells me every little thing she does is magic, I think about older men and
awards shows. We have an amicable conversation about pop songs and the girls who cover this
one. It is stark, naked, and maimed. It is also Anna. The girlfriend who still wears your bruises
after three and a half years. You stole her youth, though you are the same age.

I want Anna's health insurance, to get me through the night. Her warm whiskey offerings. A
prescription to cure me of her cold.

Variation On The Word Love Margaret Atwood
This is a word we use to plug
holes with. Its the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isnt what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.

Then theres the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
Its not love we dont wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. Its a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.

Our Feet on the Word Welcome - By Karen Ann Capc
Nobody comes back
The same as when they left.
The doorway is no longer a portal
To safety but the yawning gap
Between us.
We lost the keys,
Love, and broke off the knobs
A long, long time ago.

I Have Dreamed Of You So Much Robert Densos, trans. Paul Auster
I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make
your dear voice come alive again?
I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my
chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many
days and years, I would surely become a shadow.
O scales of feeling.
I have dreamed of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up.
I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who
counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and
face of some passerby.
I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much
with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow the
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

Eighteen Days Without You Anne Sexton
December 18th
Swift boomerang, come get!
I am delicate. You've been gone.
The losing has hurt me some, yet
I must bend for you. See me arch. I'm turned on.
My eyes are lawn-colored, my hair brunette.
Kiss the package, Mr. Bind!
Yes? Would you consider hurling yourself
upon me, rigorous but somehow kind?
I am laid out like paper on your cabin kitchen shelf.
So draw me a breast. I like to be underlined.
Look, lout! Say yes! Draw me like a child. I shall need
merely two round eyes and a small kiss.
A small o. Two earrings would be nice. Then proceed
to the shoulder. You may pause at this.
Catch me. I'm your disease.
Please go slow all along the torso
drawing beads and mouths and trees
and o's, a little graffiti and a small hello for I grab, I nibble, I lift, I please.
Draw me good, draw me warm.
Bring me your raw-boned wrist and your
strange, Mr. Bind, strange stubborn horn.
Darling, bring me this an hour of undulations, for
this is the music for which I was born.
Lock in! Be alert, my acrobat
and I will be soft wood and you the nail
and we will make fiery ovens for Jack Sprat
and you will hurl yourself into my tiny jail
and we will take a supper together and that
will be that.

Last Words - Michael Symmons Roberts
(i)

You have a new message:

Kiss the kids goodbye from me

Keep well, keep strong, you know
I'm sure, but here's to say I love you.
I lay these voice-prints

like a set of tracks, to stop

you getting lost among the tall trees
beneath the break-less canopy,
on the long slow walk you take
from here without me.



(ii)

You have a new message:

I do not want to leave you this
magnetic print, this digit trace,
my coded and decoded voice.

I do not want to leave you.

If I had a choice, my last words
would be carried to your window
on three slips of sugar paper in
the beaks of birds of paradise.
The words would say,

I'm sure you know,

I love you.



(iii)

You have a new message:

I throw my voice across the city,

but it meets such a cacophony

we overload the network.

Countless last words divert

on to backup spools and hard drives.
Systems analyst turns archaeologist:

his fingertips, as delicate as brushes,
sift through sediment of conferences,
helpline hints, arguments and cold calls,
searching for the ones that say

You know, I'm sure, I love you.



(iv)

You have a new message:

This is the voice you hear in dreams,
this is the tape you cannot

bear to play. This is the voice-mail
you keep in a sealed silk bag

in a tin box in the attic.

But the message is out - in

the sick-beds and the darkened rooms;
in the billowing curtains

and the hush so heavy

you can hear the pulse in your wrists.
The message is out, in the ether,

in the network of digits and wires.

I know, you're sure, I love you.



(v)

You have a new message:

Dont remember this, dont save

this message. Keep instead
the pictures of last Sunday

in the park when summer

leaves were turning, Rollerbladers

hand-in-hand, our boys

throwing fists of cut grass at each other.
Think of the extravagance of green,
and think especially of the sky,

its blinding cloudlessness.

You know, I'm sure, but here's

to say I love you.



(vi)

You have a new message:

This is the still, small voice

you longed to hear among the ruins.
This is the voice you fished

with microphones on long lines,
lowered into cracks between

the rocks of this new mountain.

And your ears ache with the effort,
the sheer will to listen, to conjure
my words, your name on my lips,
out of nowhere. Here's to say.



(vii)

You have a new message:

When a city is wounded,

before it moans, before it kneels,

it draws a breath, and keeps it,

as though all phones are on hold,
all radios de-tuned, cathedrals locked
and all parks vacant.

It becomes a windless forest.

But remember, silence is not absence.
Learn to weigh them,

one against the other.

Each room of our house contains

a different emptiness. Listen.

Then break it. Say

you know, I'm sure, I love you.



(viii)

You have a new message:

Do not forget the beauty of aeroplanes,
those long, slow pulses from the sun
which passed above our garden as

we lay out in the heat. Do not forget
their gentle night-time growl,

and how we used to picture people in them
- sleeping, talking, just as we were,
how we used to guess the destinations.

Do not forget the grace of aeroplanes,
the majesty of skyscrapers.

You know, I'm sure.



(ix)

You have a new message:

Still, a year on, you rifle through
black boxes, mail-boxes, voice-boxes,
in search of my final words.

You hunt them in the white noise
between stations on the radio, the blank
face of a TV with the aerial pulled out.
You walk in crowds, wondering

if my words were passed to him,

or her, as messenger. If I'd had time

to leave you words, you know, I'm sure,
they would have been I love you.



(x)

You have a new message:

Now, my voice stored on your mobile,

I can tell you fifty times a day

how much I love you. "Tell the kids,"

I say. I don't know if you still do.
Sometimes, when you're out of town,

on trains, or in the shadow of tall buildings
You lose the signal. The network breaks.
You hear vowels splinter in my throat,

as if struck by a sudden despair.



(xi)

You have a new message:

Where did my last words go?

Out and out on radio waves

into the all-engulfing emptiness,
fading to a whisper as they cross

from sky, to space, to nothing.

Or in, and in, as litany repeated

in your heart until all tape is obsolete.

Each cadence, every tongue-tick,
every breath is perfect, as you say
my words: You know, I'm sure.



(xii)

You have a new message:

There is nothing new in this.

My voice has printed like a bruise,

like a kiss, like a kiss so strong

it leaves a bruise. I love you.

You know it, I'm sure.

Beyond the smoking ruins,

smoking planes, and empty rooms,
above and beyond is a network.

A matrix of souls,

as fragile as lace,

but endless and unbreakable.

To save the message, press.

To Celia Ben Jonson
DRINK to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not wither'd be;
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent'st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee!

Home Thoughts, From Abroad Robert Browning
Oh, to be in England
Now that Aprils there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In Englandnow!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdropsat the bent sprays edge
Thats the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little childrens dower
Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Death Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

When We Two Parted Lord Byron
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted,
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning
Sank chill on my brow -
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o'er me -
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well: -
Long, long shall I rue thee
Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met -
In silence I grieve
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee? -
With silence and tears.

Lies I've told my 3 year old recently - Raul Gutierrez
Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.
The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.
Everyone knows at least one secret language.
When nobody is looking, I can fly.
We are all held together by invisible threads.
Books get lonely too.
Sadness can be eaten.
I will always be there.

The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina - Miller Williams
Somewhere in everyone's head something points toward home,
a dashboard's floating compass, turning all the time
to keep from turning. It doesn't matter how we come
to be wherever we are, someplace where nothing goes
the way it went once, where nothing holds fast
to where it belongs, or what you've risen or fallen to.

What the bubble always points to,
whether we notice it or not, is home.
It may be true that if you move fast
everything fades away, that given time
and noise enough, every memory goes
into the blackness, and if new ones come-

small, mole-like memories that come
to live in the furry dark-they, too,
curl up and die. But Carol goes
to high school now. John works at home
what days he can to spend some time
with Sue and the kids. He drives too fast.

Ellen won't eat her breakfast.
Your sister was going to come
but didn't have the time.
Some mornings at one or two
or three I want you home
a lot, but then it goes.

It all goes.
Hold on fast
to thoughts of home
when they come.
They're going to
less with time.

Time
goes
too
fast.
Come
home.

Forgive me that. One time it wasn't fast.
A myth goes that when the years come
then you will, too. Me, I'll still be home.

Let There Be No More - Gemino Abad
Let there be no more
Legends on the moon.
Why play childrens games
With an explained fact?
The moon is dead, and cold,
As any dragon fact.
To explain is to fix
Even the orbit of change.
The way moonbeams fall
Must respect or discipline;
And as we wake, submit
To interpretation of dreams.

The Same Old Figurative Joel Toledo
Yes, the world is strange, riddled with difficult sciences
and random magic. But there are compensations, things we do
perceive: the high cries and erratic spirals of sparrows,
the sky gray and now giving in to the regular rain.

Still we insist on meaning, that common consolation
that every now and then makes for beauty. Or disaster.

Listen. The new figures are simply those of birds,
the whole notes of their now flightless bodies snagged
on the many scales of the city. And its just some thunder,
the usual humming of wires. It is only in its breaking

that the rain gives itself away. So come now and assemble
with the weather. Notice the water gathering on your cupped
and extended handsfamiliar and wet and meaningless.

You are merely being cleansed. Bare instead
the scarred heart; notice how its wild human music
makes such sense. Come the divining
can wait.
Let us examine the wreckage.


Things my son should know after I've died - Brian Trimboli
I was young once. I dug holes
near a canal and almost drowned.
I filled notebooks with words
as carefully as a hunter loads his shotgun.
I had a father also, and I came second to an addiction.
I spent a summer swallowing seeds
and nothing ever grew in my stomach.
Every woman I kissed,
I kissed as if I loved her.
My left and right hands were rivals.
After I hit puberty, I was kicked out of my parents house
at least twice a year. No matter when you receive this
there was music playing now.
Your grandfather isnt
my father. I chose to do something with my life
that I knew I could fail at.
I spent my whole life walking
and hid such colorful wings.

Reality Demands Wisawa Szymborska
Reality demands
that we also mention this:
Life goes on.
It continues at Cannae and Borodino,
at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.

There's a gas station
on a little square in Jericho,
and wet paint
on park benches in Bila Hora.
Letters fly back and forth
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a moving van passes
beneath the eye of the lion at Chaeronea,
and the blooming orchards near Verdun
cannot escape
the approaching atmospheric front.

There is so much Everything
that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
Music pours
from the yachts moored at Actium
and couples dance on the sunlit decks.

So much is always going on,
that it must be going on all over.
Where not a stone still stands,
you see the Ice Cream Man
besieged by children.
Where Hiroshima had been
Hiroshima is again,
producing many products
for everyday use.
This terrifying world is not devoid of charms,
of the mornings
that make waking up worthwhile.

The grass is green
on Maciejowice's fields,
and it is studded with dew,
as is normal grass.

Perhaps all fields are battlefields,
those we remember
and those that are forgotten:
the birch forests and the cedar forests,
the snow and the sand, the iridescent swamps
and the canyons of black defeat,
where now, when the need strikes, you don't cower
under a bush but squat behind it.

What moral flows from this? Probably none.
Only that blood flows, drying quickly,
and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.

On tragic mountain passes
the wind rips hats from unwitting heads
and we can't help
laughing at that.

Variation On The Word Sleep - 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 as 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.

Spaces - Arkaye Kierulf
1.
In this room I was born. And I knew I was in the wrong place: the world. I knew pain was to
come. I knew it by the persistence of the blade that cut me out. I knew it as every baby born to
the world knows it: I came here to die.
2.
Somewhere a beautiful woman in a story I do not understand is crying. If I strain hard enough
I will hear a song in the background. She is holding a letter. She is in love with Peter. I am in
love with her.
3.
Stand on the floor where its marked X. I am standing by your side where its marked Y. We
are a shoulders length apart. Im so close you can almost smell the perfume. If I step ten paces
away from you, there could be a garden between us, or a table and some chairs. If I step another
20 paces there could be a house between us. If I continue to walk away from you in this way,
tramping through walls and hovering above water, in 80,150,320 steps I will bump into you. I
can never get away from you, and will you remember me? Distance brings us closer. There is
no distance.
4.
In 1961 I was in Berlin. It was a dusty Sunday in August. In the radio news was out that
Ulbricht had convinced Khrushchev to build a wall around West Berlin. I remember it
precisely: By midnight East German troops had sealed off the zonal boundary with barbed wire.
The streets along which the barrier ran had been torn up. I lived in that street. It was the day
after my birthday. I remember the dust covering the sky. I remember being scared. Father had
not returned from the other side. The Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse had orders to shoot
anyone who would attempt to defect. Father had not returned.
5.
Happiness is simple.
Sadness forks into many roads.
6.
Before the time of Christ, Aristotle believed that the earth was the center of the universe
because he needed a stationary reference point against which to measure all other motions: a
rock falling, a star reeling through the sky, his heart beating against his chest like a club. He
needed to believe in certainty, in absolute space. Without it, the world would not be known
absolutely. Without it, the world cannot be known.
Twenty centuries later Hendrik Lorentz needed to believe that every single molecule in the
universe must move through a stationary material called the aether, as every human being in
his various turnings must move through God. Scientists looked everywhere for proof of this
aether. And everywhere they found nothing.
7.
I have sometimes been accused of being a bore. I beg to differ: people laugh at my jokes, and Im
handsome. I would like now to talk more about myself: I dont like going to airports and
hospitals. They make me uneasy. In both cases, somebody is always going to leave. I was born
in 1983, and have never been to Berlin. But I have a memory of being in Berlin in 1961. I have a
memory of something that never happened.
I would like to elaborate on myself, but you will understand if I talk instead about the sky in
Berlin in 1961: it was covered with dust. There were no birds. There was no sky.
8.
Memory is brutal because precise.
9.
She said: give me more space. I said: dont you love me anymore? She said: give me more space.
I said: why? Did I do something wrong? Is there something wrong? Is there someone else?
When did you stop loving me? In what precise moment? In what room? What city?
I held her tight as one whos about to lose his own life holds on. Then she said: give me more
space. I said: no.
10.
I have only one purpose: to live intensely.
11.
I wish I never met you
and I wish you never left.
You taste like a river in June.
12.
Im going to say something important. Look at my face. Ignore my eyes. Just listen to me. But
listen only to the timbre of my voice, not to what I am saying. They are different. They are two
different rooms. The first is an exhibition of despair, the second only an explanation.
The first is all you have to listen to. So listen carefully because I cannot repeat myself:
Everything/ one suspects to be true/ is true.
13.
In 1879 a boy is born in Germany. At age five hed throw a chair at his violin teacher and chase
him out. In time he would develop the capacity to withdraw instantaneously from a crowd into
loneliness. At twenty-six he would publish his theory of relativity in Annalen der Physik. He
looks crazy, but he is certain: there is no aether, no absolute space.
14.
Sometimes they thought it was the words.
What they wanted to say could not be said.
They fixed the TV, vacuumed the rug,
dusted the furniture, looked out the window.
Sometimes she would purposefully lose hold of
a plate and it would smash to the floor.
Then they would have something to say,
only to begin to say it then stop.
15.
Look at this box. It is empty except for a diary, a book, and this picture in my hand. Now look
at this picture. It weighs nothing and occupies almost zero space. I can slip it in anywhere and
it will fit: inside the diary, under the box, through a crack on the wall. If I tear it several times,
it will occupy a different volume, many and various. It mutates, you see. If I burn it, it will
smoke into the air. It will take up a whole expanse.
16.
How many more times
are you going to let the world
hurt you?
17.
My father is an incorrigible storyteller. He would tell the same stories in different ways. I
wouldnt know which ones to believe. So I believed all of them. There is no story that is not
true, said Uchendu.
Father would point at the TV. He would repeat lines, rehearse the beginnings and ends,
explicate with his hands the elaborate twists and turns of every road.
He said: I am dying.
I said: But arent all of us dying.
18.
And I thought the world
was about this leaving,
not about anybodys leaving
but about this leaving.
The next day it was the same.
19.
A beautiful woman walks into a room. The room is dark. There are no windows. There is one
light bulb but any time now it will go off. I pretend not to notice and look away, my heart
beating against my chest like a club. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the
background. What other forms of happiness are there than this?
20.
In 1989 the Berlin wall falls down.
21.
I believe in love only when it rains.
22.
To appreciate the value of land, one need only look into a painting: so much beauty. Buying
land means buying the layers of beauty directly above it. It means buying the sky above it. And
the birds above it, the clouds, the gods.
In truth you are buying a corner of the universe. You are saying: this is my room. You are
saying: I live here. Here I exist.
23.
Your sadness is immaterial. You did
not come into the world to be happy.
~
You came to suffer/survive.
24.
How many words have you spoken in your life?
How many did you mean?
How many did you understand?
25.
Somebody picks up a phone. He dials a number. His voice travels a thousand miles into another
country. On the other end somebody picks up and hears the voice. Who is this? This is me.
The phone is hung up. The voice travels back a thousand miles.
Elsewhere somebody picks up a phone and before he could dial forgets the number.
26.
Sometimes wars are waged because there are too many people in too few rooms.
27.
Memory is incompletelost.
The world is incompletevanishing.
Nothing more happens. You open your eyes and its over.
Memory is brutal.
Memory is precise.
28.
In the next room people I do not know are talking with hushed voices. Their secret slips out
the window like a cat. It is raining, and I press my ear to the wall. I imagine that one of them is
smoking a cigarette. I imagine that one of them is covering his mouth in surprise.
29.
When my aunt died the doctors said the fat clogged her arteries. Every week she visited the
hospital, and every week the vein on her wrist had to be ripped out so a catheter could be stuck
into her body to suck out her blood. You could see the plasma pass through a filter and then
back to the body. If you put your ear to her wrist you would hear her heart.
Before my uncle died the heart attacks were so excruciating he said hed prefer to just die. They
transported him to the hospital, and on the way to the emergency room his heart gave. Mother
said my uncle ate too much pork and drank too much beer. She wonders if hes going to be
happy in heaven.
30.
In some house in some province in some country in some novel there is a story of a man a
father a child a lover who dies because of too much sadness.
31.
Nobody thought that what was wrong was the love.
32.
She said: give me more space.

For Example, A Flower- Arkaye Kierulf
We are protected from so much pain. For example: graves.
The earths roots and brown-black blood are busy

covering the soft, violated bodies of our loves.
Death is a secret, and the rain with its many hands

washes off the streets to the gutters deaths thick surprise.
The automatic shutter of the eye never fails,

the courtesies of the tongue. What goes on in the rooms of houses
is guarded from us by the hardwood doors,

the carefully closed windows. Whatever was said or done,
night will come, eagerly, to clean up.

And death will shield us, in time,
from the suns megalithic promise:

Tomorrow, the same day.
Tomorrow, the same day.

For example: A flower
is the most beautiful lie.

The End - Arkaye Kierulf
You must have felt it working in your bones. Its begun: The papers
print the same stories over and over, and have you checked

the obituaries? Already, nobody remembers

how their first kiss went. The phone keeps ringing and ringing
when nobodys home. Between our skins is a necessary friction

that separates us forever. Look: space. Somewhere, a lost key. Its begun:
What was once the wind or an echo or an accidental sweetness

is now a bird outside your window singing with perfect pitch and timbre
the song thats on all our tongues, cut. What pulls from the earth to exist

the earth pulls back into itself: this and this and this is mine. You own nothing.
Our bodies breathe to a rhythm, to one direction, to one regression. Its begun:

The truth stares us down like an owl: Theres no place to go: You own nothing.

In the dark you hear movement - a squeak, a hiding. The heart opens, closes, opens.

Ginsberg- Julia Vinograd
No blame. Anyone who wrote Howl and Kaddish
earned the right to make any possible mistake
for the rest of his life.
I just wish I hadnt made this mistake with him.
It was during the Vietnam war
and he was giving a great protest reading
in Washington Square Park
and nobody wanted to leave.
So Ginsberg got the idea, Im going to shout
the war is over as loud as I can, he said
and all of you run over the city
in different directions
yelling the war is over, shout it in offices,
shops, everywhere and when enough people
believe the war is over
why, not even the politicians
will be able to keep it going.
I thought it was a great idea at the time
a truly poetic idea.
So when Ginsberg yelled I ran down the street
and leaned in the doorway
of the sort of respectable down on its luck cafeteria
where librarians and minor clerks have lunch
and I yelled the war is over.
And a little old lady looked up
from her cottage cheese and fruit salad.
She was so ordinary she would have been invisible
except for the terrible light
filling her face as she whispered
My son. My son is coming home.
I got myself out of there and was sick in some bushes.
That was the first time I believed there was a war.

Antilamentation - Dorianne Laux
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

What Was - Kim Addonizio
The streets fill with cabs and limos,
with the happy laughter of the very drunk;
the benches in Washington Square Park,
briefly occupied by lovers, have been reclaimed

by men who stretch out coughing under the Chronicle.
We're sitting on the cold slab
of a cathedral step, and to keep myself
from kissing you I stare at the cartoony

blue neon face of a moose, set over the eponymous
restaurant, and decide on self-pity
as the best solution to this knot
of complicated feelings. So much, my love,

for love; our years together recede,
taillights in the fog that's settled in. I breathe
your familiar smell - Tuscany Per Uomo,
Camel Lights, the sweet reek of alcohol - and keep

from looking at your face, knowing
I'm still a sucker for beauty. Nearby, a man decants
a few notes from his tenor sax, honking his way
through a tune meant to be melancholy. Soon

I'll drive home alone, weeping and raging,
the radio twisted high as I can stand it -
or else I'll lean toward you, and tell you
any lie I think will bring you back.

And if you're reading this, it's been years
since then, and everything's too late
the way it always is in songs like this,
the way it always is.

Love, We Must Part Now - Philip Larkin
Love, we must part now: do not let it be
Calamitous and bitter. In the past
There has been too much moonlight and self-pity:
Let us have done with it: for now at last
Never has sun more boldly paced the sky,
Never were hearts more eager to be free,
To kick down worlds, lash forests; you and I
No longer hold them; we are husks, that see
The grain going forward to a different use.

There is regret. Always, there is regret.
But it is better that our lives unloose,
As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,
Break from an estuary with their courses set,
And waving part, and waving drop from sight.

XV from "Twenty-One Love Poems" - Adrienne Rich
If I lay on that beach with you
white, empty, pure green water warmed by the Gulf Stream
and lying on that beach we could not stay
because the wind drove fine sand against us
as if it were against us
if we tried to withstand it and we failed -
if we drove to another place
to sleep in each other's arms
and the beds were narrow like prisoners' cots
and we were tired and did not sleep together
and this was what we found, so this is what we did -
was the failure ours?
If I cling to circumstances I could feel
not responsible. Only she who says
she did not choose, is the loser in the end.


Out There - Jackie Kay
Now you are out there in the wild seas;
your small boat battering at the big waves.
The night is darker than you'd have ever believed;
each cruel wave soaks you right through.

There is no lighthouse light, no rescue party.
The small moon is shrunk like a dehydrated brain.
The stars are shattered empty bottles of wine.
And you are out there alone, my own one.

And there is nothing I can do for you,
I can't throw you a line; I can't get help.
I'm stuck here shivering on the shore watching
your dark boat your bleak bow braving the loss.

You cling to the wheel, sway from side to side.
Waves, the height of houses, smash and toss.

Backward Poem - Bob Hicok
The poem ends in death so Ill walk it

backward home. The heart of an 87 year-old woman
starts on July 7th and immediately doctors
syringe morphine from her veins

and her daughter puts a tissue

together and steps from the room. Theres
a general turning from dark to light
and what she said to grandchildren

then she says to grandchildren now

only the words face the other way and blood
removes itself from scraped knees and all
her photographs resolve to black

as she lowers the camera from her eye

and sleeps it back into the box. She waves
as if erasing the sky amid the turned-around
hissing of the ocean and the elated

leaves retrieve their green and jump
into the trees and sex culminates with something
like warm proximity, a simple radiant fact.
Remembering her body old, she frets

the evaporation of liver spots

and tightening of skin, interrogates the mirror
as gravity gives the curves back and begins
her first date with my grandfather

operating a quick strangers stride.

And soon Ill send the poem the other way and soon
shell turn soft in bed as my mother shreds a blue
and powdery thing into finer dust

and just before the inevitable

Ill write a baby seeing the sky for the first time
floats with antecedent, which naturally molts
to the last wind to touch the body

is all the body becomes. If times

no more than the flesh of space arching its back, whats
to stop the limber words from making geraniums
bloom in winter, whats to bind

my grandmother to an oath of death?

I declare her young now and leaning on a sill with color
supplying the field, throats of the flowers open
to the pilgrimage of bees, the sun

dead above hoarding the shadows for itself.


Last Night John Cornwall
Last night your mouth on mine was counterfeit,
Losing its meaning along the way.

And in this morning's shadows the bed
Holds shape but nothing else. Perhaps,

Perhaps there could be reason, perhaps
There could be cause, or maybe you have

Simply lost the interest of love I had thought
We shared. Whatever happens now my smile

Cannot be the same, the way in which I fold the patterns
Of my life will not be the same,

Your mouth last night on mine counterfeit,
Watching the blooms of disengagement follow

The patterns of stars that come
In the night's sky that have nothing to do

With us at all, save colour in misgivings,
Like the tragedy that smiles at the misery

One simple action can unfold, your mouth,
Last night, on mine, counterfeit.

The Quiet World - Jeffrey McDaniel
In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

Leaving the Motel - W.D. Snodgrass
Outside, the last kids holler
Near the pool: they'll stay the night.
Pick up the towels; fold your collar
Out of sight.
That sooner or later others
Would accidentally find.
Check: take nothing of one another's
And leave behind
Your license number only,
Which they won't care to trace;
We've paid. Still, should such things get lonely,
Leave in their vase
An aspirin to preserve
Our lilacs, the wayside flowers
We've gathered and must leave to serve
A few more hours;
That's all. We can't tell when
We'll come back, can't press claims;
We would no doubt have other rooms then,
Or other names.

Lines - Martha Collins
Draw a line. Write a line. There.
Stay in line, hold the line, a glance
between the lines is fine but don't
turn corners, cross, cut in, go over
or out, between two points of no
return's line of flight, between
two points of view's a line of vision.
But a line of thought is rarely
straight, an open line's no party
line, however fine your line,
consider the shortest distance from x
to y, let x be me, let y be you.

A Thing of Beauty (Endymion) - John Keats
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.


Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back - Jeffery McDaniel
I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row
has agreed to publish my collected letters to you.

The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility.

Unfortunately I never mailed the best one,
which certainly was one of a kind.

A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking,

I surrendered my identity in your eyes.

Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny,

the way monogamy is funny, the way
someone falling down in the street is funny.

I entered a revolving door and emerged
as a human being. When you think of me
is my face electronically blurred?

I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest
satellite dish in the universe, your smile
as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.

Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.

I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash,
how I once held the soft audience of your hand.

I've been ignored by prettier women than you,
but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence
so far, without spilling a drop.


Dulce et Decorum Est - Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
(It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country)

How to Sleep - Dorianne Laux
Let your mountainous forehead
with its veins of bright ore
ease down, the deep line
between your brows flatten,
unruffle the small muscles
below your temples, above
your jaws, let the grimace
muscles in your cheekbones
go, the weeping muscles
sealing your eyes. Die into
the pillow, calm in the knowledge
that you will someday cease, soon
or late, late or soon, the song
you're made of will stop, your body
played out, the currents pulsing
through your brain drained
of their power, their purpose,
will frizzle out through
your fingertips, private sparks
leaping weakly onto the sheets
where you lay breathing
and then not breathing.
Lay your head down and relax
into it: death. Accept it.
Trick yourself like this.
Hover in a veil of ethers.
Call it sleep.

Long Distance II - Tony Harrison
Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

Degrees Of Gray In Philipsburg - Richard Hugo
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done.

The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can't wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs--
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won't fall finally down.

Isn't this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn't this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don't empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I'll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You're talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it's mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Sonnet XL - Edna St. Vincent Millay
Loving you less than life, a little less
Than bitter-sweet upon a broken wall
Or bush-wood smoke in autumn, I confess
I cannot swear I love you not at all.
For there is that about you in this light--
A yellow darkness, sinister of rain--
Which sturdily recalls my stubborn sight
To dwell on you, and dwell on you again.
And I am made aware of many a week
I shall consume, remembering in what way
Your brown hair grows about your brow and cheek,
And what divine absurdities you say:
Till all the world, and I, and surely you,
Will know I love you, whether or not I do.

All Of Me - Mark Roper
So all of me, why not take all of me -
the one with so many certificates,
the failure, the one who can't cope,
the boy who never grew up,
the boy who grew up too early;

strong silent one, son-but-not-father,
one who believes, one who'd like to,
one who can't, one who'd never say,
he who never shows his feelings,
he who wears his heart on his sleeve;

man who cannot cry, inner child,
buffoon, kind man, the good boy,
only-as-good-as-his-next-joke boy,
the guy who at certain moments,
that other guy and all the rest;

him who lets it all flow over him,
him crippled by disappointment,
the liar, the cheat, stranger on the CV.
Mr. Polite, Mr. Charm, Mr. Bitter, Mr. Vague,
and all the others you'll say I've left out;

the one who likes you one who doesn't,
one who'll touch you the one who won't,
one who'll get carried away, one who'll watch,
the judge, the jury, the one on trial,
the innocent victim, the guilty as charged,

o all of me why not take all of me

Waving Goodbye - Gerald Stern
I wanted to know what it was like before we
had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we
had minds to move us through our actions
and tears to help us over our feelings,
so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend
and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her
as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her,
walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek,
and turned my head after them as an animal would,
watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts,
her smiling face and her small hand just visible
over the giant pillows and coat hangers
as they made their turn into the empty highway.

Daddy Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Elms - Louise Gluck
All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms.

To A Mathematician - Jan Kochanowski

He discovered the age of the sun and he knows
Just why the wrong or the right wind blows.
He has looked at each nook of the ocean's floor
But he doesn't see that his wife is a whore.

In Defence Of Drunkards - Jan Kochanowski
Earth, that drinks rain, refreshes the trees:
Oceans drink rivers: stars quaff up the seas:
So why should they make such a terrible fuss
Over insignificant tipplers like us?

Essay on the Personal - Stephen Dunn
Because finally the personal
is all that matters,
we spend years describing stones,
chairs, abandoned farmhouses
until we're ready. Always
it's a matter of precision,
what it feels like
to kiss someone or to walk
out the door. How good it was
to practice on stones
which were things we could love
without weeping over. How good
someone else abandoned the farmhouse,
bankrupt and desperate.
Now we can bring a fine edge
to our parents. We can hold hurt
up to the sun for examination.
But just when we think we have it,
the personal goes the way of
belief. What seemed so deep
begins to seem naive, something
that could be trusted
because we hadn't read Plato
or held two contradictory ideas
or women in the same day.
Love, then, becomes an old movie.
Loss seems so common
it belongs to the air,
to breath itself, anyone's.
We're left with style, a particular
way of standing and saying,
the idiosyncratic look
at the frown which means nothing
until we say it does. Years later,
long after we believed it peculiar
to ourselves, we return to love.
We return to everything
strange, inchoate, like living
with someone, like living alone,
settling for the partial, the almost
satisfactory sense of it.

ode on melancholy - john keats
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

after awhile - veronic shoffstall
After a while you learn
the subtle difference between
holding a hand and chaining a soul
and you learn
that love doesn't mean leaning
and company doesn't always mean security.
And you begin to learn
that kisses aren't contracts
and presents aren't promises
and you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes ahead
with the grace of woman,
not the grief of a child
and you learn
to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow's ground is
too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down
in mid-flight.
After a while you learn
that even sunshine burns
if you get too much
so you plant your own garden
and decorate your own soul
instead of waiting for someone
to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure
you really are strong
you really do have worth
and you learn
and you learn
with every goodbye, you learn...

I Am Not Yours - Sarah Teasdale
I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love - put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

Consummation of Grief - Charles Bukowski
I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines. . .
it matters little
very little love is not so bad
or very little life
what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

The Night, The Porch - Mark Strand

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting
For something whose appearance would be its vanishing---
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us much, and was never written with us in mind.

Coasting Toward Midnight at the Southeastern Fair - David Bottoms
Stomach in my throat
I dive on rails and rise like an astronaut,
orbit this track like mercury sliding
around a crystal ball.
Below me a galaxy of green and blue neon
explodes from the midway to Industrial Boulevard,
and red taillights comet one after another
down the interstate toward Atlanta.

In the hot dog booth the Lions are sick of cotton candy.
Along the midway Hercules feels the weight of his
profession,
Mother Dora sees no future
in her business,
the tattooed lady questions the reason
behind each symbol drawn indelibly beneath her flesh.

We all want to break our orbits,
float like a satellite gone wild in space,
run the risk of disintegration.
We all want to take our lives in our own hands
and hurl them out among the stars.

I Thought on His Desire for Three Days - Linda Gregg
I draw circles around me and holy boundries Nietzche

I chose this man, consciously, deliberately.
I thought on his desire for three days
and then said yes. In return, it was summer.
We lay on the grass in the dark and he placed
his hand on my stomach while the others
sang quietly. It was prodigious to know
his eagerness. It made me smile calmly.
That was the merging of opposite powers.
He followed me everywhere, from room to room.
Every single thing was joyous: storms, meals,
the story about the face that was the world.
There was the sound of Chicago buses stopping
near my house according to winter, summer,
raining. Shadows moved over the floor
as the sun went across the sky. I was a secret
there because you were married. I am here
to tell you I did not mind. Existence
was more valuable than that. When I was
a very young woman. I wrote: A new spirit/
I have a new spirit/I made it myself/I dance
now alone before the mirror/There is a flower.
The leaves are a little sad/No light comes
out of the black part/with its five purple
dots of color/near the center/Oh, my dead thing/
I have a new spirit/I made it myself. In Chicago,
a police siren ran through my heart even though
it was not for me. I was strong, I knew where
I was. I knew what I had achieved. When the wife
called and said I was a whore, I was quiet,
but inside I said, perhaps. It has been raining
all night. Summer rain. The liveliness of it keeps
me awake. I am so happy to have lived.

For What Binds Us - Jane Hirshfield
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever theyve been set down---
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
Theres a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest---

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

Wound Cream - Brian Patten
Perhaps it is the way Loves promoted;
Youd think it came in a jar,
Something that could be spread
Over all that bothers us,
A heal-all, a wound cream,
A media promoted fairytale
Gutted of darkness.

Though its contradictions
Nail us to each other
And the hunger for it
Can be our undoing,
We still use it as a prop,
As proof we are living.

How hard to do other than
Give it precedence, forgetting
How friendship outlives it,
Commits fewer crimes,
Wears its name at times.

Time and Materials
Gerhard Richter: Abstrakt Bilden

1.

To make layers,
As if they were a steadiness of days:

It snowed; I did errands at a desk:
A white flurry out the window thickening; my tongue
Tasted of the glue on envelopes.

On this day sunlight on red brick, bare trees,
Nothing stirring in the icy air.

On this day a blur of color moving at the gym
Where the heat from bodies
Meets the watery, cold surface of the glass.

Made love, made curry, talked on the phone
To friends, the one whose brother died
Was crying and thinking alternately,
Like someone falling down and getting up
And running and falling and getting up.


2.

The object of this poem is not to annihila

To not annih

The object of this poem is to report a theft,
In progress, of everything

That is not these words
And their disposition on the page.

The object o f this poem is to report a theft,
In progre ss of everything that exists
That is not th ese words
And their d isposition on the page.

The object of his poe is t epor a theft
In rogre f ever hing at xists
Th is no ese w rds
And their disp sit on o the pag

3.

To score, to scar, to smear, to streak,
To smudge, to blur, to gouge, to scrape.

"Action painting," i.e.,
The painter gets to behave like time.

4.

The typo would be "painting."

(To abrade.)

5.

Or to render time and stand outside
The horizontal rush of it, for a moment
To have the sensation of standing outside
The greenish rush of it.

6.

Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger
Or desire can rip a life apart,

Some wound of color.

Robert Hass

Star Dust - Frank Bidart
Above the dazzling city lies starless
night. Ruthless, you are pleased the price of one

is the other. That night

dense with date palms, crazy with the breath-
less aromas of fresh-cut earth,

black sky thronging with light so thick the fixed

unbruised stars bewildered
sight, I wanted you dazzled, wanted you drunk.

As we lie on our backs in close dark parallel furrows newly

dug, staring up at the consuming sky, light
falling does not stop at flesh: each thing hidden, buried

between us now burns and surrounds us,

visible, like breath in freezing air. What you ignore or refuse
or cannot bear. What I hide that I ask, but

ask. The shimmering improvisations designed to save us

fire melts to law. I touched the hem of your garment. You opened
your side, feeding me briefly just enough to show me why I ask.

Melancholy, as if shorn, you cover as ever each glowing pyre

with dirt. In this light is our grave. Obdurate, you say: We
are darkness. We are the city

whose brightness blots the stars from night.