The Wild Under the Wilderness

 by Ansley Clark

 

 

Touching the dune grasses and their tall glow

an easy way to locate oneself

 

I have a pile of something here     elemental nouns

which disperse     like seasonal insects

 

quinces poach in pink cinnamon syrup

plant cuttings on the windowsill embroider

 

water with soft roots    and suddenly I am more

committed to everything than I realized 

 

isn't this just

so consistently my weakness    that I want to stay 

 

stay here I mean    on earth

accumulating these little houses

 

and I tie this old     childhood love around my waist

while I wade out farther and I wade out farther 

Beggar's Song

 by Gregory Orr

 

Here’s a seed. Food

for a week. Cow skull

in the pasture; back room

where the brain was:

spacious hut for me.

Small then, and smaller.

My desire’s to stay alive

and be no larger

than a sliver

lodged in my own heart.

And if the heart’s a rock

I’ll whack it with this tin

cup and eat the sparks,

always screaming, always

screaming for more.

 

To Be Alive

 by Gregory Orr 

To be alive: not just the carcass 

But the spark. That's crudely put, but… 

 

If we're not supposed to dance, 

Why all this music?

Wild Pear Tree

by Kaveh Akbar

 

it’s been January for months in both directions      frost
over grass like pale fungus like
mothdust     the branches of the pear tree are pickling
in ice white as the long white line running from me
to the smooth whales frozen in chunks of ocean
from their vast bobbing to the blackwhite
stars flowering into heaven     the hungry cat gnaws
on a sliver of mirror and I have been chewing
out my stitches wondering which
warm names we should try singing
wild thyme cowslip blacksnake      all the days
in a year line up at the door and I deflect each saying no
you will not be needed one by one they skulk off
into the cold      the cat hates this place more than he loves
me he cannot remember the spring when I fed him
warm duck fat daily nor the kitchen vase filled with musky blue
roses nor the pear tree which was so eager to toss its fruit so sweet
it made us sleepy     I stacked the pears on the mantle
until I ran out of room and began filling them into
the bathtub     one evening I slid in as if into a mound
of jewels      now ghost finches leave footprints
on our snowy windowsills     the cat paces
through the night listening for their chirps
have frosted over      ages ago we guzzled
all the rosewater in the vase still we check for it
nightly     I have forgotten even
the easy prayer I was supposed to use          our memories
in emergencies     something something I was not
born here I was not born here I was not

Anything Can Happen

 by Seamus Heaney

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

The Wind, One Brilliant Day

 by Antonio Machado

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

"In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I'd like all the odor of your roses."

"I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead."

"Well then, I'll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain."

The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
"What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?"

corydon & alexis, redux

by D. A. Powell 

and yet we think that song outlasts us all:  wrecked devotion
the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself and grows in clusters

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god's own ribs



what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches
yearning for that vernal beau.   for don't birds covet the seeds of the honey locust
and doesn't the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats foraged in the meadow
kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare:  how this longing grabs me by the nape



guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs and brush

what was his name? I'd ask myself, that guy with the sideburns and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I'd expire with him on my tongue



silly poet, silly man:  thought I could master nature like a misguided preacher
as if banishing love is a fix.   as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes

 

From the Long, Sad Party

by Mark Strand 

 

Someone was saying 

something about shadows covering the field, about 

how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning 

and the morning goes. 

 

Someone was saying 

how the wind dies down but comes back, 

how shells are the coffins of wind 

but the weather continues. 

 

It was a long night 

and someone said something about the moon shedding its

    white 

on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead 

but more of the same. 

 

Someone mentioned 

a city she had been in before the war, a room with two

    candles 

against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching. 

We began to believe 

 

the night would not end. 

Someone was saying the music was over and no one had

    noticed. 

Then someone said something about the planets, about the

    stars, 

how small they were, how far away.

Snow at the End of the Year

 by Lex Runciman

Tired and achy, Now wants to slump into an overstuffed chair,

there to read a thick book, for the eighth time, on a day

 

the window discloses snow's white all shapes and contours

and a maildrop's blue on stilts. Now does not want to think

about what is most needed to be thought about, wants to withdraw

 

into some gauzy comfort that corrects injustice, feeds the hungry,

warms the freezing, unshackles doors, wide-opens borders, comforts

the worried, calms the angry, and heals the ill. Now wants to dream

 

whale calls, coyote yips, all communications among the roots of trees,

even the arpeggios of coal happy to stay in the ground forever…

 

First sleep, then the waking.

Now rises, looks out, makes its plans, its hopeful step-by-step

for thaw in the gutter, clean water on its way to the sea.

 

Lethargy no more, Now says, again begin again.

God speaks to each of us

 by 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 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.

— from The Book of a Monastic Life (I, 59)

You are not surprised at the force of the storm

 by Rainer Maria Rilke

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—

you have seen it growing.

The trees flee. Their flight

sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:

he whom they flee is the one

you move toward. All your senses

sing him, as you stand at the window.

 

The weeks stood still in summer. 

The trees' blood rose. Now you feel

it wants to sink back

into the source of everything. You thought

you could trust that power

when you plucked the fruit;

now it becomes a riddle again,

and you again a stranger.

 

Summer was like your house: you knew

where each thing stood.

Now you must go out into your heart

as onto a vast plain. Now

the immense loneliness begins.

 

The days go numb, the wind

sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

 

Through the empty branches the sky remains.

It is what you have.

Be earth now, and evensong.

Be the ground lying under that sky.

Be modest now, like a thing

ripened until it is real,

so that he who began it all

can feel you when he reaches for you. 

— from The Book of Pilgrimage (II, 1)

Lady Lazarus

 by Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?—

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.