The Dreaming Tree

Night Journal

2012-01-24T21:20:00.000-08:00

by Charles Wright

—I think of Issa, a man of few words:
The world of dew
Is the world of dew.
And yet . . .
And yet . . .

—Three words contain
                    all that we know for sure of the next life
Or the last one: Close your eyes.
Everything else is gossip,
                          false mirrors, trick windows
Flashing like Dutch glass
In the undiminishable sun.

—I write it down in visible ink,
Black words that disappear when held up to the light—
I write it down
               not to remember but to forget,
Words like thousands of pieces of shot film
                                            exposed to the sun.
I never see anything but the ground.

—Everyone wants to tell his story.
The Chinese say we live in the world of the ten thousand things,
Each of the ten thousand things
                               crying out to us
Precisely nothing,
A silence whose tune we’ve come to understand,
Words like birthmarks,
                      embolic sunsets drying behind the tongue.
If we were as eloquent,
If what we say could spread the good news the way that dogwood does,
Its votive candles
                  phosphorous and articulate in the green haze
Of spring, surely something would hear us.

—Even a chip of beauty
                      is beauty intractable in the mind,
Words the color of wind
Moving across the fields there
                              wind-addled and wind-sprung,
Abstracted as water glints,
The fields lion-colored and rope-colored,
As in a picture of Paradise,
                            the bodies languishing over the sky
Trailing their dark identities
That drift off and sieve away to the nothingness
Behind them
           moving across the fields there
As words move, slowly, trailing their dark identities.

—Our words, like blown kisses, are swallowed by ghosts
Along the way,
              their destinations bereft
In a rub of brightness unending:
How distant everything always is,
                                 and yet how close,
Music starting to rise like smoke from under the trees.

—Birds sing an atonal row
                         unsynchopated
From tree to tree,
                  dew chants
Whose songs have no words
                         from tree to tree
When night puts her dark lens in,
One on this limb, two others back there.

—Words, like all things, are caught in their finitude.
They start here, they finish here
No matter how high they rise—
                             my judgment is that I know this
And never love anything hard enough
That would stamp me
                   and sink me suddenly into bliss.

This Might Have Been a Goodbye

2012-01-20T19:30:00.000-08:00

by me

I searched for you in the frozen fields. Your face seemed to peer from the distant trees, around the piles of snow dotting the land between. Echoes of your voice rustled tall, ice-slicked grass, exhalations of cold wind. You were there until I looked, and then you were not. Your absence became its own presence, ubiquitous as the cold. The numbness in my cheeks became your breath, the aching in my fingers your touch, pulling me forward. I pushed through snow as deep as my shins, searching — for an eyelash, a thread from your favorite scarf, a strand of hair caught in the grass. You were there until I looked, and then you were not. The presence of your absence all I could find. Before long, every crunch of snow became your bones under my boots, cracking into shards, scattering in the boundless white until I could not tell you from the snow melting into the earth.

To Starr

2012-01-09T14:52:00.000-08:00

This post is dedicated to Starr, my dear friend of four years. She passed on December 12th at the age of 21. This is nowhere near sufficient, but she loved poetry. So for you, Starr.

The Man Moves Earth
by Cathy Song

The man moves earth
to dispel grief.
He digs holes
the size of cars.
In proportion to what is taken
what is given multiplies—
rain-swollen ponds
and dirt mounds
rooted with flame-tipped flowers.
He carries trees like children
struggling to be set down.
Trees that have lived
out their lives,
he cuts and stacks
like loaves of bread
which he will feed the fire.
The green smoke sweetens
his house.

The woman sweeps air
to banish sadness.
She dusts floors,
polishes objects
made of clay and wood.
In proportion to what is taken
what is given multiplies—
the task of something
else to clean.
Gleaming appliances
beg to be smudged,
breathed upon by small children
and large animals
flicking out hope
as she whirls by,
flap of tongue,
scratch of paw,
sweetly reminding her.

The man moves earth,
the woman sweeps air.
Together they pull water
out of the other,
pull with the muscular
ache of the living,
hauling from the deep
well of the body
the rain-swollen,
the flame-tipped,
the milk-fed—
all that cycles
through lives moving,
lives sweeping, water
circulating between them
like breath,
drawn out of leaves by light.

Willingly

2011-12-27T18:36:00.000-08:00

by Tess Gallagher

When I get up he has been long at work,
his brush limber against the house.
Seeing him on his ladder under the eaves,
I look back on myself asleep in the dream
I could not carry awake. Sleep
inside a house that is being painted,
whole lifetimes now only the familiar cast
of morning light over the prayer plant.
This “not remembering” is something new
of where you have been.

What was settled or unsettled in sleep
stays there. But your house
under this steady arm is leaving itself
and you see this gradual surface of
new light covering your sleep
has the greater power.
You think now you felt brush strokes or
the space between them, a motion
bearing down on you—accumulation
of stars, each night of them
arranging over the roofs of entire cities.

His careful strokes whiten the web,
the swirl of woodgrain blotted
out like a breath stopped
at the heart. Nothing has changed
you say, faithlessly. But something has
cleansed you past recognition. When
you stand near his ladder looking up
he does not acknowledge you,
and as from daylight in a dream you see
your house has passed from you
into the blessed hands of others.

This is ownership, you think, arriving
in the heady afterlife of paint smell.
A deep opening goes on in you.
Some paint has dropped onto your shoulder
as though light concealed an unsuspected
weight. You think it has fallen through
you. You think you have agreed to this,
what has been done with your life, willingly.

Human Beauty

2011-11-29T10:36:00.000-08:00

by Albert Goldbarth

If you write a poem about love ...
the love is a bird,

the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death ...

the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames

you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between

our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,

a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night

in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box

of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white

confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.

The Ache of Marriage

2011-11-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

by Denise Levertov

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.

This Morning

2011-10-16T16:59:00.000-07:00

by Raymond Carver

This morning was something. A little snow
lay on the ground. The sun floated in a clear
blue sky. The sea was blue, and blue-green,
as far as the eye could see.
Scarcely a ripple. Calm. I dressed and went
for a walk -- determined not to return
until I took in what Nature had to offer.
I passed close to some old, bent-over trees.
Crossed a field strewn with rocks
where snow had drifted. Kept going
until I reached the bluff.
Where I gazed at the sea, and the sky, and
the gulls wheeling over the white beach
far below. All lovely. All bathed in a pure
cold light. But, as usual, my thoughts
began to wander. I had to will
myself to see what I was seeing
and nothing else. I had to tell myself this is what
mattered, not the other. (And I did see it,
for a minute or two!) For a minute or two
it crowded out the usual musings on
what was right, and what was wrong -- duty,
tender memories, thoughts of death, how I should treat
with my former wife. All the things
I hoped would go away this morning.
The stuff I live with every day. What
I've trampled on in order to stay alive.
But for a minute or two I did forget
myself and everything else. I know I did.
For when I turned back I didn't know
where I was. Until some birds rose up
from the gnarled trees. And flew
in the direction I needed to be going.

1926

2011-09-27T12:38:00.001-07:00

by Weldon Kees

The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.

Hermits

2011-09-21T14:23:00.000-07:00

by James Galvin

The more I see of people, the more I like my dog.
And this would be good country if a man could eat scenery.

The lake’s ice gives light back to the air,
Shadows back to water.

In wet years the land breathes out,
And a crop of limber pines jumps into the open
Like green pioneers.
In dry years
Beetles kill them with roadmaps
Under the skin.

The land breathes in.
The sun goes down,
And the whole sky cracks like rivermud in drought.

A few trees make it each time,
As if some tide carried them out, away from the others.

They say a tree that falls in timber
Goes down in good company:
Snow drifts in and it all goes soft.

They say a ghost is a ghost
That doesn’t know it’s dead yet.

Those limber pines die standing, lightning-struck, wind broke,
And enough good pitch
For a hermit’s winter.

The cabin stood; the man was long dead.
Packrats nested in the firewood,
And a crowd of medicine bottles held forth on the shelf.

When hermits die
They close their eyes. They never hear
The parson sermonize how somewhere
There is hope where no hope was.

Tanglefoot,
Dead-On-Your-Feet,
A chance to be alone for a chance to be abandoned,
Everything is lost or given.

Hermits never know they’re dead till the roof falls in.

Optimism

2011-09-03T18:35:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Dunn

My friend the pessimist thinks I'm optimistic
because I seem to believe in the next good thing.
But I see rueful shadows almost everywhere.
When the sun rises I think of collisions and AK-47s.
It's my mother's fault, who praised and loved me,
sent me into the dreadful world as if
it would tell me a story I'd understand. The fact is
optimism is the enemy of happiness.
I've learned to live for the next good thing
because lifelong friends write good-bye letters,
because regret follows every timidity.
I'm glad I know that all great romances are fleshed
with failure. I'll take a day of bitterness and rain
to placate the gods, to get it over with.
My mother told me I could be a great pianist
because I had long fingers. My fingers are small.
It's my mother's fault, every undeserved sweetness.

Piano Lesson

2011-07-18T22:20:00.000-07:00

by Faith Shearin

My eyes open before the sun drops its yolk into the sky
and a girl upstairs is practicing scales. I imagine the arch
of her hand, the way her skirt might pause above the knee.

In the street I hear a victim, a paper cup, a man who talks
physics with a pigeon; a pair of girls blow bubblegum bubbles
at the sky. Perhaps an old woman dreams of her childhood

on a park bench while the man beside her decides to leave
his wife. The world is complicated: an open window,
my head pressed to a pillow where I find a tidal action:

so many bodies rolling onto the planet, so many others
turning back. In a cafe I may someday light a cigarette,
remember the last person who did not love me, open my

mouth to see if it speaks smoke or words. But these days
I wake up wondering: how will I fit all this life in one life?
I need a map, a vocabulary list; I can't learn the world

fast enough. I want to be like the girl upstairs who has braced
herself before a grand piano and taught her own blind fingers to sing.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

2011-06-24T08:37:00.000-07:00

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Mother of Nothing

2011-06-13T17:46:00.000-07:00

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Sister, the stars have no children.
The stars pecking at each night's darkness
above your trailer would shine back at themselves
in its metal, but they are too far away.
The stones lining your path to the goats
know themselves only as speechless, flat,
gray-in-the-sun.
What begins and ends in the self
without continuance in any other.

You who stand at preschool fences
watching the endless tumble and slide,
who answer the mothers' Which one is yours?
with blotted murmur and turning away,
listen. Any lack carried
too close to the heart
grows teeth, nibbles off
corners. I heard one say
she had no talent,
another, no time, and there were many
without beauty all those years,
and all of them shrinking.
What sinks to the bottom of the pond
comes up with new colors, or not at all.

We sank, and there was purple,
voluptuous merging of purple and blue,
a new silence living
in the houses of our bodies.
Those who wanted and never received;
who were born without hands,
who had and then lost; the Turkish mother
after the earthquake
with five silent children lined before her,
the women of Beirut
bearing water to their bombed out rooms,
the fathers in offices
with framed photographs of children on their desks,
and their own private knowledge
of all the hard words.

And we held trees differently
then, and dried plates differently,
because waiting dulls the senses
and when you are no longer waiting,
something wakes up. My cousin said
It's not children, it's a matter of making
life. And I saw the streets opening into the future,
cars passing, mothers with car seats,
children waving out the rear window,
keeping count of all who waved back,
and would we life our hearts and answer them,
and when we did, what would we say?
And the old preposterous stories of nothing
and everything finally equalling one another
returned in the night. And like relatives,
knew where the secret key was hidden
and let themselves in.

-----

Fern Hill

2011-06-11T19:01:00.000-07:00

by Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and
cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was
air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the
nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking
warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would
take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

-----

I often think that poetry is as much about speaking as it is about writing. Poetry is about using language in unexpected ways, and that includes the way language sounds, in the ear and on the tongue. It's for that reason that I've lately been trying to read more poetry aloud to myself, so I can hear it as well as enjoy it on the page.

In that spirit, I've recorded myself reading this poem. This may or may not be something I continue to do in future posts; but I would like to practice reading aloud, and here is the fruit of my first practice session:

(I emphasize the word practice, because I know I need it.)

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

2011-06-06T17:45:00.001-07:00

by e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

The Obligation to Be Happy

2011-05-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

by Linda Pastan

It is more onerous
than the rites of beauty
or housework, harder than love.
But you expect it of me casually,
the way you expect the sun
to come up, not in spite of rain
or clouds but because of them.

And so I smile, as if my own fidelity
to sadness were a hidden vice—
that downward tug on my mouth,
my old suspicion that health
and love are brief irrelevancies,
no more than laughter in the warm dark
strangled at dawn.

Happiness. I try to hoist it
on my narrow shoulders again—
a knapsack heavy with gold coins.
I stumble around the house,
bump into things.
Only Midas himself
would understand.

Going There

2011-04-26T18:31:00.001-07:00

by Jack Gilbert

Of course it was a disaster.
That 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.

1972

2011-01-29T22:30:00.000-08:00

by Lex Runciman

The chaplain sat at his desk. Have we met?
No. But you want me to support your conscientious
Objection -- you want me to write a letter. Yes.
Let me ask some questions. Could you kill someone --
An intruder to save yourself? No. What about
To save your mother or wife from rape? Yes.
Save a sister or daughter? Yes.

Where are you from? Oregon.
Do you love your country? Yes.
Would you serve the United States? Yes.
Would you kill its sworn enemies? No.
You would kill an intruder to save your family? Yes.
But not an enemy of the United States? No.

Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic, Quaker --
Do you practice any religion? No.
Believe in God? I don't understand the question.
You're afraid. Yes. You're afraid of battle. Yes.
Of letting others down? Yes. And these
Are your conscientious objections? Yes, no.
When ordered by a superior officer, would you kill?
I don't know, no, I would have to decide.
Wouldn't it be too late for that? Yes,
It would be too late.

You're a coward: you're a coward
And you want me to help get you off the hook.
I looked at him. Are you afraid? Yes.
You say you love your country? Yes.
You could kill to save your family? Yes, yes.
Then why are you here -- what are you afraid of?
Loyalties and confusions, I should have said.
Infinities, the worth of a day.

For Hunter

2011-01-10T20:57:00.000-08:00

by Ansley Clark

Hunter is back home, alone, in that house,
in the middle of the black murmer,
           black woods.
On those arctic autumn eveings he listens
to the dishwasher hum, smoky creakings
of the wood stove, strange rustlings of the creek,
to the steady ceaseless drip of rootless northern rain
asking him to take its hand and follow.
           He listens to silence.
The last of us home, he will be last of us to leave,
to scatter, to throw himself outward,
as we have already done.

On nights like these I roam,
wayward, against the town's distant lights,
and the country is huge--lengthy sky ablaze--
broad, burning ocean of wandering earth under unfamiliar
trees,
             and on nights like these,
the world's immensity is coppery, too bright,
prods a dull, familiar ache.

I don't know how anyone lives
in this world of light and dark, of leaving,
          of the human heart,
which is not a whole entity but scattered
in a thousand flaming pieces across the cracking earth.
I only know the memory of rain and woods
           and silence,
constantly knotting me
to you.

A Thousand Birds

2010-12-24T15:23:00.000-08:00

by Hilda Morley

A thousand birds—they flew out of

your mouth at your dying,

as you said

they would

& bewildered me:

They bewilder me still.

Nearly 48 months have passed & the beating

of those wings has haunted, filled

this room

where I

sit now writing, the room

where you died:

a clattering

of wings has passed through these walls.

Something has stopped.

Something

is unable to go any farther.

The wings are

still now

& I rock from

side to side

with the faintest

movement barely perceptible because I cannot

breathe in this stillness

& must set that power

moving,

those enormous wings

flying again

The Silent Country

2010-12-11T23:29:00.000-08:00

by me.

       Friend,
I have known blinding, coppery mornings
heavy and aching with the weight
of coming hours, months, decades --
                        the endless erosion
of things we once knew, of places we know now.
Guaranteed nothing but this moment's exhale.

I have known silent afternoons
of sitting shoulder to shoulder
with you in sepia tinted coffee shops,
holding hot mugs between our hands and
                        staring through windows
with eyes hungry for wonder -- searching
for color -- as though it were not
sitting right next to us, rubbing
shoulders with us, dressed
in living sinews and blood red heart.

But, friend, I have also known mornings
of slow, unfolding blue --
the lingering dawn its own silent country.
And I have known moments in that country;
moments of standing arm in arm
with you, cradled by the frame
of an open window, breathing deeply
the damp, sharp air.
Guaranteed nothing but this sky,
pregnant with surprise
                        and coming rain.

Revenant

2010-11-19T23:07:00.001-08:00

by Christian Wiman

She loved the fevered air, the green delirium
in the leaves as a late wind whipped and quickened —
a storm cloud glut with color like a plum.
Nothing could keep her from the fields then,
from waiting braced alone in the breaking heat
while lightning flared and disappeared around her,
thunder rattling the windows. I remember
the stories I heard my relatives repeat
of how spirits spoke through her clearest words,
her sudden eloquent confusion, trapped eyes,
the storms she loved because they were not hers:
her white face under the unburdening skies
upturned to feel the burn that never came:
that furious insight and the end of pain.

The Funeral

2010-11-10T17:25:00.000-08:00

by Christian Wiman

It happens in a freakish early spring,
some little nameless place well off the highway.
From where we're standing we can't be seen.
How we've come to be here's hard to say.
It's lovely, though, the handcarved coffin, the hole
beneath like a shadow standing its ground;
the flowers, formality, and not one soul
missing, as if this town were less a town
than an excuse for funerals; this mute crowd
with its out-of-fashion suits and useless shoes,
the solemnity with which each head is bowed
as one by one, and row by row, they lose
themselves to a keen indigenous grief
that binds them cry to cry and tear to tear,
until its binding is its own relief.
To hear their prayer would be to come too near.
We're glad for it, though, glad for the heaven they hold —
we know they hold — like light behind their eyes,
and by their consolation are consoled
if consolation's what this feeling is
of having something in us jolted awake
like children half-rousing in a fast, dark car,
hearing the tires drone, the dashboard shake,
until it doesn't matter where they are.
And lovely, too, the singing when it starts,
out-of-time, hopelessly out-of-tune,
yet strong, encompassing, as if it came from hearts
that knew as well as loss what loss would be soon —
a stab inside of every dawn at first,
then a scent, maybe, a story someone tells,
and each day a little less, a little more lost,
until finally some dusk they find themselves
standing like strangers at their own dead pain,
without confusion, though, without bitterness,
as if within remembrance itself they sang
that to forget is also to be blessed.
It's over. A whir of gears, a pulley's creak:
the coffin clunks awkwardly into the earth.
Now there's some final ritual thing they speak.
And though it's cost us time it seems well worth
the loss, as like a huge black flower they peel
open from this death so different from our own,
though we can't say exactly what we feel,
and though it's way too late to make it home.

Lament

2010-11-01T22:47:00.000-07:00

by Arthur Sze

Let me pick
olives in the moonlight.
Let me ride
a pale green horse.
Let me taste the autumn fires.
Or else,
let me die in a war.

& then afterward

2010-10-29T17:54:00.000-07:00

by Nate Pritts

(i)

I woke to early sun:
burning of fire, & then afterward.

We kept reaching
through the long night.

(ii)

Afterward,

the small deceptions
we allow ourselves:
a sickness, unchecked.
Like this:

(iii)

& first sunlight.
Snow continues.
I could never close my eyes to light.

But there was no light
& you looked like night.

(iv)

There must be a pattern,

snow slow-dropping in wet clusters
through the wooden arms
of empty trees.

(v)

Sun fingering its way
through branches

I’d hung my life on.
We don’t matter a bit; realization
forces our eyes closed—

(vi)

A sickness, unchecked, like this.
I’d hung my life on

burning of fire, & then afterward.

(vii)

Our arms together
we searched for patterns

& sunlight.

(viii)

Our arms laced together,
pointing together
over wind-tossed grasses.

Us: waist deep in night blue.

(ix)

There was no light.
You pointed.

(x)

Sun overhead,
you pointed
to the wind-tossed grasses.
This is a memory now.

(xi)

Together in that first sun,
so vivid:
there must be a pattern

I’d hung my life on.

(xii)

Snow dropped in clusters,
staggered & jagged.

We don’t matter a bit.

(xiii)

Reflected in lake water:
all these things I’ll forget.

(xiv)

Our arms together

but we keep reaching
over the wind-tossed grasses.

(xv)

Black smoke curling:

the importance
of night-blue field grass,

(xvi)

the importance of.

The stars are close; we try to hold together.

(xvii)

All this ends
but until then:

burning of fire, & then afterward.
The stars are close; we try to hold.
Such distance between the fallen!

(xviii)

Burning of fire, & then afterward.

You pointed.

(xix)

Grasses silently fold,
a sickness, unchecked, reaching. Like this.

Wooden arms of trees
long since emptied.

(xx)

This ends in darkness,
& all the stars within reach,
& other constellations.

The Hours

2010-10-17T18:19:00.001-07:00

by Stephen Dunn

Worst was to live by somebody else's time,
the hours scheduled for him, smudged
with clarity and motives not his own.

He preferred the enigmas of early morning

and the neither-here-nor-thereness of dusk,
which gave the half-life he lived an atmosphere.
He liked watching it collect itself,
impossible to tell if it descended or rose.

He didn't care for noon's bustle and blare.
And evenings couldn't be trusted, he felt,
so dependent were they on other people.

Even evenings alone were measured
by who wasn't there. Desire & Need,
how they sat down with him,
helped like untrained helpers
arrange the hours that followed.
Evening was their time.

He remembered, of course, the lovely hours --
the body's sudden holidays, prolonged fiestas
of the mind. He rewound and rewound.

Mine

2010-10-15T22:29:00.000-07:00

by Shail D. Patel

Pain trains an undisciplined mind.
I will end yours if you end mine.

Little feet, little feet are playing
Hopscotch among the landmines.

Hope has worked miracles before.
If yours didn't, how can mine?

I could have learned to welcome night,
If only you had been mine.

How dare you put words in God's mouth,
Shail? Why not. He put ashes in mine.

I Am Learning To Abandon the World

2010-10-06T13:19:00.000-07:00

by Linda Pastan

I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.

Betrothed

2010-10-04T21:02:00.000-07:00

by Jack Gilbert

You hear yourself walking on the snow.
You hear the absence of the birds.
A stillness so complete, you hear
the whispering inside of you. Alone
morning after morning, and even more
at night. They say we are born alone,
to live and die alone. But they are wrong.
We get to be alone by time, by luck,
or by misadventure. When I hit the log
frozen in the woodpile to break it free,
it makes a sound of perfect inhumanity,
which goes pure all through the valley,
like a crow calling unexpectedly
at the darker end of twilight that awakens
me in the middle of a life. The black
and white of me mated with this indifferent
winter landscape. I think of the moon
coming in a little while to find the white
among these colorless pines.

Gift Horses

2010-09-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

by Jack Gilbert

He lives in the barrens, in dying neighborhoods
and negligible countries. None with an address.
But still the Devil finds him. Kills the wife
or spoils the marriage. Publishes each place
and makes it popular, makes it better, makes it
unusable. Brings news of friends, all defeated,
most sick or sad without reasons. Shows him
photographs of the beautiful women in old movies
whose luminous faces sixteen feet tall looked out
at the boy in the dark where he grew his heart.
Brings pictures of what they look like now.
Says how lively they are, and brave despite their age.
Taking away everything. For the Devil is commissioned
to harm, to keelhaul us with loss, with knowledge
of how all things splendid are disfigured by small
and small. Yet he allows us to eat roast goat
on the mountain above Parakia. Lets us stumble
for the first time, unprepared, onto the buildings
of Palladio in the moonlight. Maybe because he is not
good at his job. I believe he loves us against
his will. Because of the women and how the men
struggle to hear inside them. Because we construe
something important from trees and locomotives,
smell weeds on a hot July afternoon and are augmented.

Late Poem to My Father

2010-09-13T16:38:00.000-07:00

by Sharon Olds

Suddenly I thought of you
as a child in that house, the unlit rooms
and the hot fireplace with the man in front of it,
silent. You moved through the heavy air
in your physical beauty, a boy of seven,
helpless, smart, there were things the man
did near you, and he was your father,
the mold by which you were made. Down in the
cellar, the barrels of sweet apples,
picked at their peak from the tree, rotted and
rotted, and past the cellar door
the creek ran and ran, and something was
not given to you, or something was
taken from you that you were born with, so that
even at 30 and 40 you set the
oily medicine to your lips
every night, the poison to help you
drop down unconscious. I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me. When I love you now,
I like to think I am giving my love
directly to that boy in the fiery room,
as if it could reach him in time.

Sabbaths 2000: V

2010-09-12T22:18:00.000-07:00

by Wendell Berry

I know for a while again
the health of self-forgetfulness,
looking out at the sky through
a notch in the valley side,
the black woods wintry on
the hills, small clouds at sunset
passing across. And I know
that this is one of the thresholds
between Earth and Heaven,
from which even I may step
forth from my self and be free.

Love Letter

2010-08-20T20:30:00.000-07:00

by Melissa Stein

I don’t know when the boys
began to walk away with parts of myself
in their sticky hands; when loving
became a process of subtraction. Or why,
having given up what seems so much,
I’m willing to lose even more — erasing
all this body’s known, relearning it with you.

What They Mean

2010-08-08T20:00:00.000-07:00

by me

I wish to use words
like javelins, like jagged
glass, like teeth. Like salt
and tree branches and the
hands of infants. Like oceans
and birdsong and cement. I want
to cup each word in my palms,
a tiny arsenal, and launch them
like bullets at passersby
so they know the sting, the throb,
the awe and the glory, the
beauty that feels like
pain, the quiet and the
rest. The meaning.
I want them all to know
the meaning like they know
the morning fog, like they know
that stretch of blacktop highway,
like they know the outline
of clouds against the sky.

A Greeting of Books

2010-08-05T21:28:00.000-07:00

by Lex Runciman

Importunate, mild, ineffable, unknown and clear,
Each at home, the most composed of guests --
Books lean at you. From their rooms of utterance,
They proclaim all manner of human invitation.

Keeping what the endlessly old world gives
To the endlessly arriving now, they would inquire:
They wish to know your questions --
The ones asleep and those awake.

They ask what you assume obvious, hence sure.
What in your breathing the day's air announces.
What and whom you would wish and claim and keep.
Read: their answers are their answers.

But yours are this week's, inchoate, unuttered -- not yet.
A library's quiet is their answers waiting on yours.
And in their diffident, ever-curious chorus,
They encourage you: understand the dense and airy,

Consequential and not, dry and wet --
The water on your tongue. Understand the night
And all its stories. Listen, speak all,
And understand the day.

Insomnia, BBC World Service

2010-08-04T11:19:00.000-07:00

by Lex Runciman

Because I could not sleep, I listened.
A woman's undulant voice spoke of her rape
three years past, a tactic of war,
the child of that afternoon asleep in her arms
until its crying interrupts the translator's English.
What happened to your husband?
They made him watch, then killed him.

Mark Twain said, "the world owes you
nothing -- it was here first."
But he had not heard this woman
singing to her waking boy.

After Her Death

2010-07-18T22:28:00.000-07:00

by Mary Oliver

I am trying to find the lesson
for tomorrow. Matthew something.
Which lectionary? I have not
forgotten the Way, but, a little,
the way to the Way. The trees keep whispering
peace, peace, and the birds
in the shallows are full of the
bodies of small fish and are
content. They open their wings
so easily, and fly. So. It is still
possible.

I open the book
which the strange, difficult, beautiful church
has given me. To Matthew. Anywhere.

Olives, Bread, Honey and Salt

2010-07-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

by Melissa Stein

The lanes are littered with the bodies of bees.
A torrent took them, swarming in branches
just as the white buds loosened their hearts
of pale yellow powder. Each body is a lover:
the one with skin blank as pages; the one
so moved by the pulse ticking in your throat;
the one who took your lips in his teeth
and wouldn’t let go; the one who turned
from you and lay there like a carcass. If we were
made to be whole, we wouldn’t be so lost
to each offering of tenderness and a story.
Therefore our greatest longing is our home.
There is always the one bee that circles and circles,
twitching its sodden wings.

Grief is Not Chronologically Correct

2010-07-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

by me.

II.
This is what you’re not seeing:

I come home and inhabit windows
facing the northeast because I know
that’s where you’d be if
the divide between us
was less opaque and my eyes
were something better, walking always
and exclusively in the light-flooded
places,
creating rare cracks
in the world where
warmth touches skin and
breathing is a little easier.

The house is cold
in your absence. I stare
through windows with shades
half-drawn, arms
half-wrapped around me
and I try to think
of things I could tell you,
try to imagine your voice
in reply.

V.
You loved the light.
I remember a Thursday
morning, waking up to shadows
you cast on the bed. Facing the
window, back
to me, peering at
cedar trees full of gray jays
chorusing the sun. Your
frame filled it up, and now
I remember the world as an effort
to see around you,
your silhouette filling my vision.

III.
This is what you’re not seeing:

Memories like distant clouds
threatening storms: you stand
on a beach, behind you
the sea-lined horizon of the
5AM sky. You carry
fishing pole, tackle, sandals
you can’t bring yourself
to wear. I know I should
be in this memory,
except you fill it
so completely and warmly.
I like this view of the world
just fine.

We are at the shore
and before you cast off
you take fistfuls of sand
and put them in your pockets.
This, you say, is worth
something, fools the fish.
They’ll come to what they know.
Even in that murky
darkness, there’s always sand
down there, making space
for light, the fish’ll come
to what they know.

Do you know
what a pearl is? his memory
asks me. Sand
surrounding itself in light,
lacquered sand, he
laughs, nothing but
lacquered sand. The fish’ll be drawn
to these kernels of light.

I.
I inhabit windows facing
the northeast because I know
that’s where you’d be, and my
pockets are full of sand, weighting
me to the world
where light still comes
without you.
And thinking of you, I try
to wrap myself in it, become
like these granules of sand
awaiting their pearldom.

O my pa-pa

2010-06-28T23:03:00.001-07:00

by Bob Hicok

Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.
They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs
and wives. We thought they didn't read our stuff,
whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,
or those that end, and he was silent as a carp,
or those with middles which, if you think
of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch
of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights
in the woods, they've read every word and noticed
that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex
and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello
from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs
is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like
"My Yellow Sheet Lad" and "Given Your Mother's Taste
for Vodka, I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Mine."
They're not trying to make the poems better
so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook
or electrocution, as a group
they overcome their individual senilities,
their complete distaste for language, how cloying
it is, how like tears it can be, and remember
every mention of their long hours at the office
or how tired they were when they came home,
when they were dragged through the door
by their shadows. I don't know why it's so hard
to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,
not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball
of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man
with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence
was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,
the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees,
that they're the most intricate version of standing up,
who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know
that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.
A bomb. A bomb that'll go off soon for him, for me,
and I notice in our fathers' poems a reciprocal dwelling
on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared
as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted
the rocket cars, as if running away from them
to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers
wasn't fast enough, and it turns out they did
start to say something, to form the words hey
or stay, but we'd turned into a door full of sun,
into the burning leave, and were gone
before it came to them that it was all right
to shout, that they should have knocked us down
with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified
by the distance men need in their love.

Praying

2010-06-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

by Mary Oliver

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Why He Doesn't Keep a Journal

2010-05-24T00:02:00.000-07:00

by Christian Wiman

In the dream he burns his journals one by one
because the fire is fading, because the fire is there.
The first is full of days
he doesn’t remember, a sudden furious blaze
scorching his hair and driving him back.
Impressive, but brief.
The second’s better, himself at twenty turning into flames
that at the time he’d tried to be,
a decade later, and dazed
less by loss than by what he’s simply given away:
cities, friendships flickering as he says their names
with what could be joy, could be grief.
By the third he’s learned
to hold a moment as it goes, to lean into this burn
while the flames toss
and taunt the darkness, which recedes, and waits, and gathers,
and rushes back in like a wave.
Now the loss is truly loss.
By the fourth there’s not one page he doesn’t hear,
not one word he doesn’t bear
as it adds its vanishing to that roar
with its own tiny cry that could be pain, could be praise.
Ash of childhood, ash of accomplishment,
love in the air like ash,
on and on and on,
everything’s in them and everything’s gone.
Now the fire once again begins to die.
In the dream this must not happen.
In the dream he knows why.
There’s just one more,
completely blank, its cover black,
which he’s never had a reason for
but always thought he might need,
carrying it around the world to pack and unpack
a thousand times in a thousand rooms
like a little portable grave.
Was it something in this one book that would not suffer words,
or something in himself no word would save?
No time, no time. He throws it in,
and what happens next happens again and again,
a thousand times in a thousand ways:
he looks dead into the fire that feeds on nothing,
and nothing stays.

Here I Am, Lord

2010-05-12T12:40:00.000-07:00

by Michael Chitwood

The ribbed black of the umbrella
is an argument for the existence of God,

that little shelter
we carry with us

and may forget
beside a chair

in a committee meeting
we did not especially want to attend.

What a beautiful word, umbrella.
A shade to be opened.

Like a bat’s wing, scalloped.
It shivers.

A drum head
beaten by the silver sticks

of rain
and I do not have mine

and so the rain showers me.

Elm

2010-05-08T13:10:00.000-07:00

by Sylvia Plath

For Ruth Fainlight

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Wild Geese

2010-04-28T22:22:00.000-07:00

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do no have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Vespers

2010-04-27T16:58:00.000-07:00

by Louise Glück

In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.

Sunday Morning

2010-04-23T18:18:00.000-07:00

by Wallace Stevens

                               I
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

                               II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

                               III
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

                               IV
She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophesy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

                               V
She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

                               VI
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

                               VII
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

                               VIII
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Mortal Shower

2010-04-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

by Bob Hicok

I met my butt in a Pittsburgh
hotel room. My face
still looks like my face
but not my butt, my hair

no longer resembles an ad
for Jell-O pudding, people thought
it was chocolate pudding for years,
so thick

and rich. There was fog
in the bathroom and then not fog,
I faced my face
and then not my face, the mirror

staring at my ass
winked at the mirror
staring at my face

and the future was defined
as an effort
to use the word sag in my resume.
Have sagged, will

sag, am looking for a position
in which to maximize my sagging
potential. I once cared
what went on back there, about

the extent of grip and rise, just
as some birds crave
the reddest plumage, and I propositioned
mirrors, watched women’s eyes
follow, turned in shop windows
to see if my pants
fit their purpose. Then love

and car payments, love and the sofa
needs to be moved, love and her grandmother
dies, my grandmother
dies, love
and she comes home and I’m thrilled
by her coat and voice
and the brown habit of her eyes. She

likes my ass and lies
about its travels, how it’s lost
focus, and there are wattles
to come, please God
if dentures
only partials, may Depends

be cheap in bulk and the earth
generous with its telepathy, I’m

in Pittsburgh tonight
and with her,
mirrors don’t scare me,
room service is a gas
because she’s alive, I’m a giant,
a tight-assed
titan because she’s alive
and says

come home, the Honda needs
new brakes, a robin flew
into the window today
but shook it off, just
dizzy, stunned
by reflection.

Anniversary Again

2010-04-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

by Lex Runciman

             His eyes are closed.
But the intelligence of his fingertips
             leads them to her skin
asleep in the morning.
             He traces her temple, the soft indent there,
warm where blood pulses. He finds the line
             where hairs thicken and sweep back
(his fingers know the texture there by heart),
             eyebrow and forehead and hers.
She sleeps and sleeps, an even breathing
             in the lightless hour
before dawn, before intention or mistake,
             nothing unsaid or heard or said.
He believes in fingers, touch,
             life of the skin, life of the body.
He believes in privilege,
             this proximity granted by promise,
believes unthinking touch, simple tenderness,
             graces all it touches, ageless
and incorruptible in the sleeping world.
             He reaches to touch her face, or she
to touch his, or he to touch his,
             or she to touch hers--the human motion.
Thirty years for us September 11, 2001.

The Blue Robe

2010-04-11T22:20:00.001-07:00

by Wendell Berry

How joyful to be together, alone
as when we first were joined
in our little house by the river
long ago, except that now we know

each other, as we did not then;
and now instead of two stories fumbling
to meet, we belong to one story
that the two, joining, made. And now

we touch each other with the tenderness
of mortals, who know themselves:
how joyful to feel the heart quake

at the sight of a grandmother,
old friend in the morning light,
beautiful in her blue robe!

"What Do Women Want?"

2010-03-07T18:09:00.000-08:00

by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

A Brief for the Defense

2010-02-27T16:08:00.000-08:00

by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sounds of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

After the Last Words

2010-02-14T13:51:00.000-08:00

by Scott Cairns

By now I'm dead. Make what you will of that.
But granted you are alive, you will need
to be making something more as well. Prayers
have been made, for instance, but (trust me)

the dead are oblivious to such sessions.
Settle instead for food, nice meals (thick soup):
invite your friends. Make lively conversation
among steaming bowls, lifting heavy spoons.

If there is bread (there really should be bread),
tear it coarsely and hand each guest his share
for intinction in the soup. Something to say?
Say it now. Let the napkins fall and stay.

Kiss each guest when time comes for leaving.
They may be embarrassed, caught without wit
or custom. (See them shifting from foot to
foot at the open door?) Could be you will

repeat your farewells a time or two more
than seems fit. But had you not embraced them
at such common departures prayers will
fall as dry crumbs, nor will they comfort you.

Lucifer's Epistle to the Fallen

2010-02-03T19:06:00.000-08:00

by Scott Cairns

Lucifer, Son of the Morning, Pretty Boy,
Rose Colored Satan of Your Dreams, Good as Gold,
you know, God of this World, Shadow in the Tree.

Gorgeous like you don't know! Me, Sweet Snake, jeweled
like your momma's throat, her trembling wrist. Tender
as my kiss! Angel of Darkness! Angel

of Light! Listen, you might try telling me
your troubles; I promise to do what I can.
Which is plenty. Understand, I can kill

anyone. And if I want, I can pick
a dead man up and make him walk. I can
make him dance. Any dance. Angels don't

get in my way; they know too much.
God, I love theater! But listen, I know
the sorry world He walks you through.

Him! Showboat with the Heavy Thumbs! Pretender
at Creation! Maker of Possibilities!
Please! I know why you keep walking--you're skittish

as sheep, and life isn't easy. Besides,
the truth is bent to keep you dumb to death.
Imagine! The ignorance you're dressed in!

The way you wear it! And His foot tickling
your neck. Don't miss my meaning; I know none
of this is your doing. The game is fixed.

Dishonest, if you ask me. So ask. God
knows how I love you! My Beauty, My Most
Serious Feelings are for you, My Heart turns

upon your happiness, your ultimate
wisdom, the worlds we will share. Me, Lucifer.
How can such a word carry fear? Lucifer,

like love, like song, a lovely music lifting
to the spinning stars! And you, my cooing
pigeons, my darlings, my tender lambs, come, ask

anything, and it will be added to your
account. Nothing will be beyond us; nothing
dares touch my imagining.

Memory

2010-01-28T14:12:00.000-08:00

by James Tate

A little bookstore used to call to me.
Eagerly I would go to it
hungry for the news
and the sure friendship.
It never failed to provide me
with whatever I needed.
Bookstore with a donkey in its heart,
bookstore full of clouds and
sometimes lightning, showers.
Books just in from Australia,
books by madmen and giants.
Toucans would alight on my stovepipe hat
and solve mysteries with a few chosen words.
Picasso would appear in a kimono
requesting a discount, and then
laugh at his own joke.
Little bookstore with its belly
full of wisdom and confetti,
with eyebrows of wildflowers--
and customers from Denmark and Japan,
New York and California, psychics
and lawyers, clergymen and hitchhikers,
the wan, the strong, the crazy,
all needing books, needing directions,
needing a friend, or a place to sit down.
But then one day the shelves began to empty
and a hush fell over the store.
No new books arrived.
When the dying was done,
only a fragile, tattered thing remained,
and I haven't the heart to name it.

Why Are Your Poems So Dark?

2010-01-25T23:44:00.000-08:00

by Linda Pastan

Isn't the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn't the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn't banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
"Why are you sad so often?"

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

Morning Poem

2010-01-14T16:17:00.000-08:00

by Mary Oliver

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches--
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead--
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging--

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted--

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

The Ark Upon His Shoulders

2010-01-07T15:51:00.000-08:00

by Forrest Gander

My husband did all this.                 We used to live
in a rambling kind of house      with gossipy verandas.
Then he bought a stove, an iron stove      with a reservoir to it.
He always insisted it was bad luck      to come in that door
and go out the other. It's bad luck      to pay back salt
if you borrow it.         To the day he died
he smelled        pulled up from the dirt. He worked
the Norfolk Southern forty years        walking on top
of freight trains. I've seen him       up there
and the wind just blowing--       you could see the wind
blowing his clothes.
                    Our second house                           he built it.
Cut me a yard broom      from dogwood bushes,
tied in three places. Hogs      squealed under the floorboards
in winter--you could see one      through the cracks.
He had something he said      to hush them.
Come up the porch steps      arms full of lightwood.
In those days      we drank good old cool water
out of the well--cool and    put some syrup in it
and stir it up      and drink it right along
with our dinner. The summers were      so hot you saw
little devils      twizzling out in front of you.
He called them      lazy jacks. It was the heat.
Listen at that bird,      he'd say. It's telling us,
Love one another. He caught      a ride back
from town with seeds and a hoop      of greasy cheese and crackers and
sardines and light      bread. He carried that umbrella
over me and I          would have his hat walking to church.
We lost the first one.        The midwife came late, she used dirt-
dauber tea for my pains.        He tried telling me
it wasn't any death owl, it was     a ordinary hoot owl outside
the house. But I tied a knot     in my sheet
so it wouldn't quiver.        I was in such trouble,
he petted me a lot. Three days       labor he attended me
how a dragonfly hovers       over water in the clear sun.
The next year we had a beautiful        girl baby, Ruthie.
Ruthie, after my mother.      Towards the end,
he was a bit thick-listed.        I never yelled though, he read my lips.
When the katydid      chirps, I miss him
saying there'll be forty days until frost.        Ones who were in trouble
they always       sought him out. Listen
at that bird, he'd say.
The things he knew        how to do he did them.

Famous

2010-01-05T17:57:00.000-08:00

by Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Incarnation

2009-12-06T23:43:00.000-08:00

by me.

I.
I become present to the world
in night, in quiet, in sleep.
Boundless as the dark,
I am heavy-handed with authority
granted by unknowledge and
uncertainty. I own my fullness
in dreams and half-remembered
hallelujahs.

II.
I am born anew with
every orbit, from purpose
into purpose, cells and
parameters and hopes ardently
shattered and remade countless
times over, as simply
as a child’s puzzle, as
quickly as a blink.

III.
I make worlds between
four walls, shadows moving
in learned rotations, every hour
a new space. Only to be conquered
by sunlight dripping through
half-open blinds, searing
all things into permanence,
stiltedness, quite known and certain.

Flash

2009-11-17T18:57:00.000-08:00

(by me.)

For my grandmother.

You are a worn photograph
creased lightly in the middle,
corners dog-eared, sepia-tinted
with age and memory. Your smile
is already yours, close-lipped,
ironic, rife with the particular strain
of wisdom only born of hard times,
though you are only seventeen.

Were it not for that smile you
would look your age,
dark eyes speaking—more than
your mouth could—of an untold
hope. Or is that just
the flash of the camera
reflected in your pupils?

The Country of Marriage

2009-11-07T14:39:00.001-08:00

by Wendell Berry

1.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs,
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

2.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth’s empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.

3.

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

4.

How many times have I come to you out of my head
with joy, if ever a man was,
for to approach you I have given up the light
and all directions. I come to you
lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes
into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend

slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace
in you, when I arrive at last.

5.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are—
that puts it in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen time and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

6.

What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

7.

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in this ground, as I
have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all
beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself
again and again, and satisfy—and this poem,
no more mine than any man’s who has loved a woman.

Crocodiles

2009-10-14T12:50:00.000-07:00

by Dominic Rieniets

Part the river with me before
the crocodiles return.
The sneezing powder we blew in their noses
when they clawed themselves onto our
vanishing bank is washing off in their
retreating death-rolls. Embraced and
emboldened by the muddy river's bed,
their gnashing, thrashing teeth will return
as an invitation to witness how empty
their stomachs are not.

The river needs crossing and I have never
in all my life, even in my childhood, ever
wanted to swim with a crocodile.

So, part the river with me before
the hippopotami return. Put away the
hippopotamus repellent conch.
They're coming back angry and they're
coming back for keeps. They won't be
startled away this time from their
stomping, fromping grounds and
I don't want to be fodder for their feet.

I have only ever sometimes, maybe dreamt
of riding a hippo, but today is
not the time for dreaming.

Part the murky depths with me before
the manatees arrive and we will walk across.
They're not much danger here, but they
like to munch on your hair as you walk
across the river. It's really more of a nuisance
than a threat to our state of being; all the same
we might as well avoid them with the rest.
I can't afford your ferry on the river Styx,
but I will see you crossed before what
dreams may come leave me for
the better place you own.

Under a Certain Little Star

2009-09-29T23:08:00.000-07:00

by Wislawa Szymborska

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken.
Don't be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own.
May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker.
My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second.
My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first.
Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss.
My apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes.
Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water.
And you, O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage,
staring, motionless, always at the same spot,
absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed.
My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs.
My apologies to large questions for small answers.
Truth, do not pay me too much attention.
Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me.
Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil.
Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere.
My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman.
I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me,
since I am my own obstacle.
Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words,
and then labor to make them light.

For My Grandmother

2009-09-20T17:55:00.000-07:00

by me.

Tense the lips, just so,
and receive the smoke into your lungs
as a gift, that small, un-hoped-for
zest with your morning oxygen.
Hold it there,
just a moment.
Delight in that burn
at the roof of the mouth
and leisurely, through the nostrils,

release.

Even when you've taken your last drag
and the ash is ground into dirt,
you can breathe that musk
in your jacket,
on your fingers, its secret
residue in your mouth, near the soul,
to be savored when everything else
fails.

This is something you know.
A thing familiar in the midst of the life
Made unrecognizable to yourself.
You sometimes can’t help but
think of the things you meant to do,
failed to do, did
with a sense of obligation rather
than passion. You sacrificed yourself
on the bier of duty and didn’t even
do it gracefully, didn’t even know why.

But this is something you know.
The moment flame is released
from metal and plastic catch, and sweet
acrid aroma lifts from containment in
white paper, you move
in a space made fluid by instinct.

You can, for that moment,
forget a life so easily fit
into the six by four inch picture frame
sitting at your desk.

Agoraphobia

2009-09-18T00:05:00.000-07:00

by Linda Pastan

"Yesterday the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the marketplace,
Hooting and shrieking."

—William Shakespeare

1.

Imagine waking
to a scene of snow so new
not even memories
of other snow
can mar its silken
surface. What other innocence
is quite like this,
and who can blame me
for refusing
to violate such whiteness
with the booted cruelty
of tracks?

2.

Though I cannot leave this house,
I have memorized the view
from every window—
23 framed landscapes, containing
each nuance of weather and light.
And I know the measure
of every room, not as a prisoner
pacing a cell
but as the embryo knows
the walls of the womb, free
to swim as its body tells it, to nudge
the softly fleshed walls,
dreading only the moment
of contraction when it will be forced
into the gaudy world.

3.

Sometimes I travel as far
as the last stone
of the path, but
every step,
as in the children's story,
pricks that tender place
on the bottom of the foot,
and like an ebbing tide with all
the obsession of the moon behind it,
I am dragged back.

4.

I have noticed in windy fall
how leaves are torn from the trees,
each leaf waving goodbye to the oak
or the poplar that housed it;
how the moon, pinned
to the very center of the window,
is like a moth wanting only to break in.
What I mean is this house
follows all the laws of lintel and ridgepole,
obeys the commandments of broom
and of needle, custom and grace.
It is not fear that holds me here but passion
and the uncrossable moat of moonlight
outside the bolted doors.

Prompt

2009-09-11T12:48:00.000-07:00

by me

Say "prompt" and the whole room groans.
Squeaking chairs under
fidgeting limbs, rustling
clothes atop sweating
skin, and the whirring,
stuttering hiccough of the mind.

It seeks to court creativity
and instead flirts with stock responses,
bats its eyes at end rhyme and free verse,
concocts a mighty stick with which to beat
the horse-corpse known as cliché.

It seeks desperately for that shining letter,
the word that says, that demonstrates, that--
when all else fails-- at least
breathes. But poke the body with the mighty stick
and all it does is twitch.

So say "prompt" again, please, just once more,
and though I may only birth another horse-corpse,
a shell of a once-meaning,
I will this time make it stand--
on wobbly legs, yes, and unsure--
but stand and not twitch.

My response to a prompt posed in my poetry class. I'm not so good with the prompts. I'm working on it.

This Was Once A Love Poem

2009-09-05T15:34:00.001-07:00

by Jane Hirshfield

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

It spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them--one, then another--
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

Rebus

2009-09-03T17:23:00.000-07:00

by Jane Hirshfield

You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus--slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life--
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or a cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

Our Parents

2009-08-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Dunn

Our parents died at least twice,
the second time when we forgot their stories,
or couldn't imagine how often they craved love,
or felt useless, or yearned for some justice
in this world. In their graves, our parents' need
for us is pure, they're lost without us.
Their honeymoon in Havana does or does not
exist. That late August in the Catskills--
we can decide to make them happy.

What is the past if not unfinished work,
swampy, fecund, seductively revisable?
One of us has spent his life developing respect
for the weakness of words, the other for what
must be held on to; there may be a chance for us.

We try to say what happened in that first house
where we were, like most children, the only
needy people on earth. We remember
what we were forbidden, who got the biggest slice.
Our parents, meanwhile, must have wanted something
back from us. We know what it is, don't we?
We've been alive long enough.

Empathy

2009-08-15T21:10:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Dunn

Once in a small rented room, awaiting
a night call from a distant time zone,
I understood you could feel so futureless
you'd want to get a mermaid

tattooed on your biceps. Company
forever. Flex and she'd dance.
The phone never rang, except for those
phantom rings, which I almost answered.

I was in D.C., on leave from the army.
It was a woman, of course, who didn't call.
Or, as we said back then, a girl.
It's anybody's story.

But I think for me it was the beginning
of empathy, not a large empathy
like the deeply selfless might have,
more like a leaning, like being able

to imagine a life for a spider, a maker's
life, or just some aliveness
in its wide abdomen and delicate spinnerets
so you take it outside in two paper cups

instead of stepping on it.
The next day she called, and it was final.
I remember going to the zoo
and staring a long time

at the hippopotamus, its enormous weight
and mass, it's strange appearance
of tranquility.
And then the sleek, indignant cats.

Then I went back to Fort Jackson.
I had a calendar taped inside my locker,
and I'd circle days for which I
had no plans, no even hopes--

big circles, so someone might ask.
It was between wars. Only the sergeants
and a few rawboned farm boys
took learning how to kill seriously.

We had to traverse the horizontal ladder,
rung after rung, to pass
into mess hall. Always the weak-handed,
the weak-armed, couldn't make it.

I looked for those who didn't laugh
at those of us who fell.
In the barracks, after drills,
the quiet fellowship of the fallen.

For an Album

2009-07-14T00:32:00.000-07:00

by Adrienne Rich

Our story isn't a file of photographs
faces laughing under green leaves
or snowlit doorways, on the verge of driving
away, our story is not about women
victoriously perched on the one
sunny day of the conference,
nor lovers displaying love.

Our story is of moments
when even slow motion moved too fast
for the shutter of the camera:
words that blew our lives apart, like so,
eyes that cut and caught each other,
mime of the operating room
where gas and knives quote each other
moments before the telephone
starts ringing: our story is
how still we stood,
how fast.

A Confession

2009-07-05T01:58:00.000-07:00

by C.S. Lewis

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening--any evening--would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;*
In vain. I simply wasn't able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.

Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain** on a cocktail-shaker's nose;
Waterfalls don't remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I've never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone--
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops' brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.

Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d'estaminet.***
I'm like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things... peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran,
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.

* - This is referring to T.S. Eliot's famous poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", in which Prufrock compares the sunset to an etherized patient.

** - Inflammatory swelling or sore caused by exposure to severe cold.

*** - I had to look this one up. It's referencing a poem by Jules Leforgue, and as for it's meaning... I found this quite helpful.

Like Men

2009-06-27T02:53:00.000-07:00

by Lex Runciman

Though I knew them in homes and work,
In argument and quiet, and loved them,
They were inarticulate and they liked to hit.
Born to absorb punishment like men,
Born to dish it out--even as little boys
They were sex-driven, the losers and the winners.
For five or six generations (which was longer
Than they could remember), they worked hard
To become cogs, gears, the grease or the machine
At salary, hourly, or piece rates.
If lucky, they bullied others; if not, they went surly
And in their perversity never missed a day.
They spent long hours learning numb,
Learning repetition, learning boredom.
They were befuddled by the idea of beauty
Until they saw it, until they were seized by it,
Weak-kneed by it, mute and sheepish
And then probably angry. They used women,
Children, dogs as they were used, and the nameless
Remorse they felt drove them to rage, to drink
Or bowl or shoot birds they loved to see flying.
They could be smart about any number of constructions
Including faucets and all the ball sports but tennis.
They could even know what they wanted for others,
What they worked and worked for, though emotion
Embarrassed them: they sent cards
Or bought freezers as surprises.
The paycheck--never enough--was proof
Of love, that word they could not quite
Get in their mouths. They saved
For education for their children, who
If successful, they did not understand, who
Thinking of them, wished them ease
And thanksgiving, and thought pity.

Original Sin

2009-06-16T15:10:00.000-07:00

by Wendell Berry

Well, anyhow, it preserves us from the pride
of thinking we invented sin ourselves
by our originality, that famous modern power.
In fact, we have it from the beginning
of the world by the errors of being born,
being young, being old, causing pain
to ourselves, to others, to the world, to God
by ignorance, by knowledge, by intention,
by accident. Something is bad the matter
here, informing us of itself, handing down
its old instruction. We know it
when we see it, don't we? Innocence
would never recognize it. We need it
too, for without it we would not know
forgiveness, goodness, gratitude,
that fund of grace by which alone we live.

Where To Sit

2009-06-12T20:32:00.000-07:00

by Kathleen Kilcup

And so I sit on this damp bench,
on an island of arching bushes,
and quivering buds,
humming and dangling in the rain,
and all around the edges
stretch war-torn arms
of asphalt,
a dead army of imprisoned pebbles,
then up above,
windows suffocating in their frames,
and up above,
sooty roofs,
then all those gauzy clouds,
and twirling wind,
and I think of the lips of orchids
and oceans,
don't lash themselves,
like we do when we splinter
into parts that love,
and parts that don't know how,
and parts that roll in the mud
because it's easier to stay dirty,
and how we say that is like the animals,
how we say that people don't sit in the mud.

The Silence

2009-05-25T18:21:00.000-07:00

by Wendell Berry

Though the air is full of singing
my head is loud
with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich
with fruit, my tongue
hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden
I cannot stand beside it
mute, but must say

"It is golden," while the leaves
stir and fall with a sound
that is not a name.

It is in the silence
that my hope is, and my aim.
A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing
sounds men's silence
like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.

Poem

2009-05-20T00:40:00.000-07:00

by Wendell Berry

Willing to die,
you give up
your will, keep still
until, moved
by what moves
all else, you move.

After a first book

2009-05-10T19:29:00.000-07:00

by Audre Lorde

Paper is neither kind nor cruel
only white in its neutrality
and I have for reality now
the brown bar of my arm
moving in broken rhythms
across this dead place.

All the poems I have ever written
are historical reviews of a now absorbed country
a small judgement
hawking and coughing them up
I have ejected them not unlike children
now my throat is clear
perhaps I shall speak again.

All the poems I have ever written
make a small book
the shedding of my past in patched conceits
moulted like snake skin, a book of leavings
now
I can do anything I wish
I can love them or hate them
use them for comfort or warmth
tissues or decoration
dolls or Japanese baskets
blankets or spells;
I can use them for magic
lanterns or music
advice or small council
for napkins or past-times or
disposable diapers
I can make fire from them
or kindling
songs or paper chains

Or fold them all into a paper fan
with which to cool my husband’s dinner.

Granules

2009-05-07T00:38:00.000-07:00

(by me)

Here it comes;
questions loiter
in the space between
the asking and the telling,
halting speech and worthwhile listening.

In that place,
rubbed raw of surety,
even the question in question
is not safe from the rape of doubt.

Why this question, God, and not another?
Why a mockery of faith waving the banner
of truth like a head on a pike, a
sheepskin nailed to a cross?

Why, why,
why the uncertainty
of shaking, finite limbs upon a rock
seeming invisible? If I can't trust rock
(once so solid and sure)...

then what?

Is there a
before-world, a behind-world? Foundation beneath
the flaking skin of containment
in a body made of eyes
and ears and fingers questing?
Well? Is there?

Oh before, before, my kingdom for a before…

Before the question, before the rhyme
and the mime of self-assurance in the
drifting lives of drones in the hive
who, unknowing, lost all hope
for soul’s thrive.

Before the dead languages and their children.
Before the need for tongues and lungs and
exhalation of air to lend consequence
to an old knowledge, quiet and sure.

Before the age of man’s rage and his
construction of the cage of hate and
self-reliance.

Before, before, my soul cries for before…

Is this worth the answering, God,
worth the hearing?
And has any of it ever meant
a thing beyond the air I breathe
in my immediate need for a life
lived in increments and greed?

(And has any of it ever meant a thing?)

So it is
God, finally spoken.
My questions fall
              slowly
                         and in
            eulogy
to the ocean's floor,
granules of sand awaiting their pearldom.

Rooming houses are old women

2009-05-06T23:49:00.000-07:00

by Audre Lorde

Rooming houses are old women
rocking dark windows into their whens
waiting incomplete circles
rocking
rent office to stoop to
community bathrooms to gas rings
city issued with a twice-a-month check
the young men next door with their loud midnight parties
and fishy rings left in the bathtub
no longer arouse them
from midnight to mealtime no stops inbetween
light breaking to pass through jumbled up windows
and who was it who married the widow that Buzzie’s son messed with?

To Welfare and insult from the slow shuffle
from dayswork to shopping bags heavy with leftovers

Rooming houses
are old women waiting
searching
through their darkening windows
the end or beginning of agony
old women seen through half –ajar doors
hoping
they are not waiting
but being
an entrance to somewhere
unknown and desired
and not new.

Long-Term Memory

2009-05-05T17:23:00.000-07:00

by James Tate

I was sitting in the park feeding pigeons
when a man came over to me and scrutinized my
face right up close. "There's a statue of you
over there," he said. "You should be dead. What
did you do to deserve a statue?" "I've never seen
a statue of me," I said. "There can't be a statue
of me. I've never done anything to deserve a
statue. And I'm definitely not dead." "Well,
go look for yourself. It's you alright, there's
no mistaking that," he said. I got up and walked
over where it was. It was me alright. I looked
like I was gazing off into the distance, or the
future, like those statues of pioneers. It didn't
have my name on it or anything, but it was me.
A lady came up to me and said, "You're looking at
your own statue. Isn't that against the law, or
something?" "It should be," I said, "but this is
my first offense. Maybe they'll let me off light."
"It's against nature, too," she said, "and bad
manners, I think." "I couldn't agree with you
more," I said. "I'm walking away right now, sorry."
I went back to my bench. The man was sitting there.
"Maybe you're a war hero. Maybe you died in the
war," he said. "Never been a soldier," I said.
"Maybe you founded this town three hundred years
ago," he said. "Well, if I did, I don't remember
it now," I said. "That's a long time ago," he
said, "you coulda forgot." I went back to feeding
the pigeons. Oh, yes, founding the town. It was
coming back to me now. It was on a Wednesday.
A light rain, my horse slowed...

James Tate was recently recommended to me, and I have to say, he is rather refreshing (and odd, and amusing, and surreal). It's nice to have something completely different to turn to when I'm tired of the same-old-same-old.

~~He is really weird, though.~~

Married

2009-05-03T19:47:00.000-07:00

by Jack Gilbert

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after the Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

2009-05-02T13:54:00.000-07:00

by 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.

Rain

2009-04-30T19:58:00.000-07:00

(by me)

Arm-in-arm they walked
Beneath a pink umbrella
A blush against the sky.

The Thought of Something Else

2009-04-29T16:04:00.000-07:00

by Wendell Berry

1.
A spring wind blowing
the smell of the ground
through the intersections of traffic,
the mind turns, seeks a new
nativity--another place,
simpler, less weighted
by what has already been.

Another place!
it's enough to grieve me--
that old dream of going,
and becoming a better man
just by getting up and going
to a better place.

2.
The mystery. The old
unaccountable unfolding.
The iron trees in the park
suddenly remember forests.
It becomes possible to think of going

3.
--a place where thought can take its shape
as quietly in the mind
as water in a pitcher,
or a man can be
safely without thought
--see the day begin
and lean back,
a simple wakefulness filling
perfectly
the spaces among the leaves.

On Being Human

2009-04-26T18:54:00.000-07:00

by C.S. Lewis

Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence
Behold the Forms of nature. They discern
Unerringly the Archtypes, all the verities
Which mortals lack or indirectly learn.
Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying,
Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear,
High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal
Huge Principles appear.

The Tree-ness of the tree they know -- the meaning of
Arboreal life, how from earth's salty lap
The solar beam uplifts it, all the holiness
Enacted by leaves' fall and rising sap;
But never an angel knows the knife-edged severance
Of sun from shadow where the trees begin,
The blessed cool at every pore caressing us
-- An angel has no skin

They see the Form of Air; but mortals breathing it
Drink the whole summer down into the breast.
They lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing
Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.
The tremor on the rippled pool of memory
That from each smell in widening circles goes,
The pleasure and the pang -- can angels measure it?
An angel has no nose.

The nourishing of life, and how it flourishes
On death, and why, they utterly know; but not
The hill-born, earthy spring, the dark cold billberries
The ripe peach from the southern wall still hot,
Full-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate
Half-lyric lamb, a new loaf's billowy curves,
Nor porridge, nor the tingling taste of oranges --
An angel has no nerves.

Far richer they! I know the senses' witchery
Guards us, like air, from heavens too big to see;
Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be.
Yet here, within this tiny, charm'd interior,
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares
With living men some secrets in privacy
Forever ours, not theirs.

Can't you just feel this poem? Smell it, taste it, hear it? Lewis' poetry is always so marvelously tactile. I adore this poem.

i carry your heart

2009-04-26T13:08:00.000-07:00

by e.e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Some Further Words

2008-12-13T06:56:00.000-08:00

Wendell Berry is my literary idol. If there was ever a writer whose poetic voice so resonates with my own, it’s Berry. This is the poetry I’ve always sought to write, the poetry that’s in my heart and in my head, just waiting to be articulated.

He’s a pretty awesome novelist, too. Hannah Coulter? One of my favorite books.

But this post is about Wendell Berry’s poetry -- because it mirrors the words I’ve always wanted to say, and because I’ve never found anyone who said them so well.

(My favorite lines will be italicized. If single words are italicized, the stress was originally written by Berry. If it’s an entire line, then that’s just me emphasizing.)

How To Be A Poet
(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill – more of each
than you have – inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensional life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Words

What is one to make of a life given
to putting things into words,
saying them, writing them down?
Is there a world beyond words?
There is. But don’t start, don’t
go on about the tree unqualified,
standing in light that shines
to time’s end beyond its summoning
name. Don’t praise the speechless
starlight, the unspeakable dawn.
Just stop.

Well, we can stop
for awhile, if we try hard enough,
if we are lucky. We can sit still,
keep silent, let the phoebe, the sycamore,
the river, the stone call themselves
by whatever they call themselves, their own
sounds, their own silence, and thus
may know for a moment the nearness
of the world, its vastness,
its vast variousness, far and near,
which only silence knows. And then
we must call all things by name
out of the silence again to be with us,
or die of namelessness.

Some Further Words

Let me be plain with you, dear reader.
I am an old-fashioned man. I like
the world of nature despite its mortal
dangers. I like the domestic world
of humans, so long as it pays its debts
to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.
I like the promise of Heaven. My purpose
is a language that can pay just thanks
and honor for those gifts, a tongue
set free from fashionable lies.

Neither this world nor any of its places
is an “environment.” And a house
for sale is not a “home.” Economics
is not “science,” nor “information” knowledge.
A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool
in a public office is not a “leader.”
A rich thief is a thief. And the ghost
of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer,
returns in the night to say again:
“Let me tell you something, boy.
An intellectual whore is a whore.”

The world is babbled to pieces after
the divorce of things from their names.
Ceaseless preparation for war
is not peace. Health is not procured
by sale of medication, or purity
by the addition of poison. Science
at the bidding of the corporations
is knowledge reduced to merchandise;
it is a whoredom of the mind,
and so is the art that calls this “progress.”
So is the cowardice that calls it “inevitable.”

I think the issues of “identity” mostly
are poppycock. We are what we have done,
which includes our promises, includes
our hopes, but promises first. I know
a “fetus” is a human child.
I loved my children from the time
they were conceived, having loved
their mother, who loved them
from the time they were conceived
and before. Who are we to say
the world did not begin in love?

I would like to die in love as I was born,
and as myself, of life impoverished, go
into the love all flesh begins
and ends in. I don’t like machines,
which are neither mortal nor immortal,
though I am constrained to use them.
(Thus the age perfects its clench.)
Some day they will be gone, and that
will be a glad and a holy day.
I mean the dire machines that run
by burning the world’s body and
its breath. When I see an airplane
fuming through the once-pure sky
or a vehicle of the outer space
with its little inner space
imitating a star at night, I say,
“Get out of there!” as I would speak
to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.

When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, “Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!” I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing.
The body’s life is its own, untouched
by the little clockwork of explanation.
I approve of death, when it comes in time
to the old. I don’t want to live
on mortal terms forever, or survive
an hour as a cooling stew of pieces
of other people. I don’t believe that life
or knowledge can be given by machines.
The machine economy has set afire
the household of the human soul,
and all creatures are burning within it.

“Intellectual property” names
the deed by which the mind is bought
and sold, the world enslaved. We
who do not own ourselves, being free,
own by theft what belongs to God,
to the living world, and equally
to us all. Or how can we own a part
of what we only can possess entirely?
“The laborer is worthy of his hire,”
but he cannot own what he knows,
which must be freely told, or labor
dies with the laborer. The farmer
is worthy of the harvest made
in time, but he must leave the light
by which he planted, grew, and reaped,
the seed immortal in mortality,
freely to the time to come. The land
too he keeps by giving it up,
as the thinker receives and gives a thought,
as the singer sings in the common air.

I don’t believe that “scientific genius”
in its naïve assertions of power
is equal either to nature or
to human culture. Its thoughtless invasions
of the nuclei of atoms and cells
and this world’s every habitation
have not brought us to the light
but sent us wandering further through
the dark. Nor do I believe
“artistic genius” is the possession
of any artist. No one has made
the art by which one makes the works
of art. Each one who speaks speaks
as a convocation. We live as councils
of ghosts. It is not “human genius”
that makes us human, but an old love,
an old intelligence of the heart
we gather to us from the world,
from the creatures, from the angels
of inspiration, from the dead –
an intelligence merely nonexistent
to those who do not have it, but
to those who have it more dear than life.

And just as tenderly to be known
are the affections that make a woman and a man,
their household, and their homeland one.
These too, though known, cannot be told
to those who do not know them, and fewer
of us learn them, year by year,
loves that are leaving the world
like the colors of extinct birds,
like the songs of a dead language.

Think of the genius of the animals,
every one truly what it is:
gnat, fox, minnow, swallow, each made
of light and luminous within itself.
They know (better than we do) how
to live in the places where they live.
And so I would like to be a true
human being, dear reader – a choice
not altogether possible now.

But this is what I’m for, the side
I’m on. And this is what you should
expect of me, as I expect it of myself,
though for realization we may wait
a thousand or a million years.

From Sabbaths 1998

II

This is the time you’d like to stay.
Not a leaf stirs. There is no sound.
The fireflies lift light from the ground.
You’ve shed the vanities of when
And how and why, for now. And then
The phone rings. You are called away.

From Sabbaths 2001

III

Ask the world to reveal its quietude –
not the silence of machines when they are still,
but the true quiet by which birdsongs,
trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms
become what they are, and are nothing else.

From Sabbaths 2003

IV

The little stream sings
in the crease of the hill.
It is the water of life. It knows
nothing of death, nothing.
And this is the morning
of Christ’s resurrection.
The tomb is empty. There is
no death. Death is our illusion,
our wish to belong only
to ourselves, which is our freedom
to kill one another.
From this sleep may we too
rise, as out of the dark grave.

X

But do the Lords of War in fact
hate the world? That would be easy
to bear, if so. If they hated
their children and the flowers
that grow in the warming light,
that would be easy to bear. For then
we could hate the haters
and be right. What is hard
is to imagine the Lords of War
may love the things that they destroy.

From Sabbaths 2004

IX

I mistook your white head for a flower
down there among the tall grasses
and flowers of the garden boarder.
And then I knew you, your years
upon you like a crown of glory.

What Do You Seek?

2008-10-23T14:47:00.000-07:00

(by me)

What do we seek to find
That we choose to cage ourselves
Within towering monsters
Of glass and beam, size and shape that
Splinter the sky
Like Babel?

Or when we traverse the air
Strapped between metal wings
Behind imitation beak
Nose pressed to measurements of barometric pressure
(The readings of our progress)
Where desire displaces instinct?

What do we seek to find?

When we lash sails to our backs
And harnesses to our skeletons
Clutch knotted twine between desperate fingers
Trail after a speeding water-bullet
(Oh, God, please…)
And pray for flight we know must end
In unforgiving water?

Or when we rein in gas and fire
To float leisurely at Wind’s mercy
And gaze up, out, down
Towards broken chains and broken law
And yell in the face of Newton
See? What goes up must not come down.

What do we seek?

Are we so enslaved by fear
Do our souls so cry
That we cannot stay aground
With limbs pressed to dirt
And eyes planted down?
The soil we till with expert hands
The rock we grind beneath our feet
They are master.

What do we seek but escape?

With grit between our teeth
Dust caked beneath fingernails
And earth infused in blood cells
We will return at its call.

For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Science-Fiction Cradlesong

2008-07-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

by C.S. Lewis

By and by Man will try
To get out into the sky,
Sailing far beyond the air
From Down and Here to Up and There.
Stars and sky, sky and stars
Make us feel the prison bars.

Suppose it done. Now we ride
Closed in steel, up there, outside;
Through our port-holes see the vast
Heaven-scape go rushing past.
Shall we? All that meets the eye
Is sky and stars, stars and sky.

Points of light with black between
Hang like a painted scene
Motionless, no nearer there
Than on Earth, everywhere
Equidistant from our ship.
Heaven has given us the slip.

Hush, be still. Outer space
Is a concept, not a place.
Try no more. Where we are
Never can be sky or star.
From prison, in a prison, we fly;
There's no way into the sky.

Death's Ode to the Living

2008-07-15T23:04:00.000-07:00

by Orual

You the living know not I,
Who lurks in time and ancient lore,
And wanders in when night is nigh
To fill my daily taxing chore.
You the living know not I,
Whose name the human soul abhors,
And steals away a final sigh
Despite the heart-sick soul's implore.

You the living know not I,
Whose darkest deed you dare to court,
To recklessness does heave a sigh
As fools deny what I purport
And you the living long deny
The verity that a life is short,
And at the end, you wonder why
Your views of death did so contort.

But to you the living, I consent to bow;
And this, however soft avowed--
Truth falls from my fatal lips,
I admire thee, thy joy eclipsed
By sorrow, never far to find
A smile survives my bitterest rime,
And not the same is said of me,
Separate from life--and eternity.

I don't even know what to say about this. The diction is so crisp and yet the rhythm is so fluid and subtle. The two play off each other well. I think the author did a great job with this sort of style, and with such a difficult theme.

A Different Neverland

2008-05-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

by Bethanye Satterwhite

What is this? he asked while holding my hand.
It is everything, my friend.
It is the road that finds that lost place
Where birds sing all through the year,
And the sun rises every seventh day.
Can I show you? I ask.
There is a question in his eyes
hold tight, my love
because falling is the most glorious thing of all.

I know this author personally, and I thought this poem needed to be commemorated. :)

Sonnet XVII

2008-04-08T23:28:00.000-07:00

by Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of 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 love 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.

The Path of Needles

2007-12-26T16:53:00.000-08:00

(by me)

Much has been done, much has been said,
All the things binding me here soon will be dead.
I’ve burnt every bridge, worn out every welcome,
I know not what will be the outcome.
My path has been set, I must follow my course,
Though I wage battle against an unseen force.
Unseen yet greatly felt, this force grows fierce,
Pushed to my knees, my will has been pierced.
This road I’ve chosen is long and dreary,
And I feel discouraged because my feet are weary.
Why did I come here, what looms ahead?
What is the purpose of this path I tread?
My fear is consuming, my heart plagued with doubt,
That I’ve fallen in a pit I can never climb out.
What if I falter, what if I fall?
“Easy,” you whisper, “when you cannot walk you crawl.”
“Do not be afraid, for I am here,
You only need ask and I will draw near.
I will lift you off your knees and your strength revive,
And lead you toward the errand for which you strive.
Navigation won’t be easy, for your path is filled with pain,
But don’t worry: I have come before and know the terrain.
Get on your feet, I won’t leave your side,
Get ready, it will be a bumpy ride.”

The Dreaming Tree

2007-12-24T15:08:00.000-08:00

by me

Thought cannot escape my boughs
Which guard against burdens born of dawn,
Whose light sears and shrivels dry
Thy soul sustaining mirage
Which, as the dew, drips from my blossoms high
Under light of an opposite kind.
Consciousness dare not trespass here,
Else it become ensnared in the web
Of my fingers, whose leaves like razors
Shred that which seeks to awaken thee,
My ward in sleep;
For even morning’s sweet light means nothing
But oppression under the shade of my branches.
My trunk, thick and tall, as a sentinel stands
Over those slumbering betwixt my roots.
Deep and old they are
Full of memories dreamt and felt,
And fallen to dust as putrid ash.
But dream on, my charges, dream.
I shall stand over thee ‘til morn
And cradle your light in jealous hands,
Safe from dawn’s burning scorn.
Only here may you safely weave
Your dreams and airy castles high.
Dream on, dream on,
For night is nigh.