That Now Are Wild And Do Not Remember

by David Ferry 

Where did you go to, when you went away? 

It is as if you step by step were going 

Someplace elsewhere into some other range

Of speaking, that I had no gift for speaking, 

Knowing nothing of the language of that place

To which you went with naked foot at night 

Into the wilderness there elsewhere in the bed, 

Elsewhere somewhere in the house beyond my seeking. 

I have been so dislanguaged by what happened 

I cannot speak the words that somewhere you 

Maybe were speaking to others where you went.

Maybe they talk together where they are, 

Restlessly wandering, along the shore,

Waiting for a way to cross the river. 

The Thrift Shop Dresses

by Frannie Lindsay

 

I slid the white louvers shut so I could stand in your closet

a little while among the throng of flowered dresses

you hadn’t worn in years, and touch the creases

on each of their sleeves that smelled of forgiveness

and even though you would still be alive a few more days

I knew they were ready to let themselves be

packed into liquor store boxes simply

because you had asked that of them,

and dropped at the door of the Salvation Army

without having noticed me

wrapping my arms around so many at once

that one slipped a big padded shoulder off of its hanger

as if to return the embrace.

Leaves of Grass: An Excerpt

by Walt Whitman 

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? ... I do not know what it is any more
        than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff
         woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
        and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child... the produced babe of the
       vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
         receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Language Lessons

by Alexandra Teague 

 

The carpet in the kindergarten room

was alphabet blocks; all of us fidgeting

on bright, primary letters. On the shelf

sat that week's inflatable sound. The th

was shaped like a tooth. We sang

about brushing up and down, practiced

exhaling while touching our tongues

to our teeth. Next week, a puffy U

like an upside-down umbrella; the rest

of the alphabet deflated. Some days,

we saw parents through the windows

to the hallway sky. Look, a fat lady,

a boy beside me giggled. Until then

I'd only known my mother as beautiful.

Somebody Trying

by Denise Levertov

‘That creep Tolstoy,’ she sobbed.

‘He. . . He. . . couldn’t even. . .’

Something about his brother dying.

The serfs’ punishments

have not ceased to suppurate on their backs.

Woodlots. People. Someone crying

under the yellow

autumn birchgrove drove him

wild: A new set of resolves:

When gambling, that almost obsolete fever,

or three days with the gypsies

sparked him into pure ego, he could,

just the same, write home, ‘Sell them.’

It’s true. ‘Still,’ (someone who loved her said,

cold and firm while she dissolved,

hypocrite, in self disgust, lectrice)

‘Still, he kept on. He wrote

all that he wrote; and seems to have understood

better than most of us:

to be human isn’t easy. It’s not

easy to be a serf or a master and learn

that art. It takes nerve. Bastard. Fink.

Yet the grief

trudging behind his funeral, he earned.’

Sunday

by Maxine Clair

there were times she would play the piano
she would throw back her head and her wavy black hair would
                                                  dangle
she would strike the chords and move on the piano stool
                                                   and sing
Lord Jesus can I have a talk with you
Lord Jesus won't be long till I'll be through
and tears would be streaming down puffy rust cheeks
if there is no God there ought to be
the way she played and cried

To My children, Fearing for Them

by Wendell Berry

Terrors are to come. The Earth
is poisoned with narrow lives.
I think of you. What you will

live through, or perish by, eats
at my heart. What have I done? I
need better answers than there are

to the pain of coming to see
what was done in blindness,
loving what I cannot save. Nor,

your eyes turning toward me,
can I wish your lives unmade
though the pain of them is on me.

Settling

by me

(This is a restructured and renamed version of Dust.)  

           Grief gongs like the alarm clock going off the morning after her death. Presses its hand against your stomach when you realize you have woken up. It was not a dream. Tastes like morning mouth and whiskey, slick grit across your teeth. Settles its residue in your room, like musk, like dust: 90% comprised of dead skin.
           Some mornings you marvel at your own fat fingers, their spring and coil, the blue curving veins. Some days your body starts running for no reason other than motion, shifting muscle a joy newly discovered, and some evenings it forgets to be warm-blooded, curling inward, inward, like paper set to flames.
           After she was found hanging in her bedroom, your body rattled and heaved until you did not recognize its shape. That night the white bone of the moon rose above the distant hills, settling in its unbounded stillness, and your body yearned forward, outward, falling into it like a promise, and settling.

I Hate

by C.K. Williams

I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound,

not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling,

keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise

as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird;

not as remembrance, grief for so many gone,

nor either that other tangle of recall, regret   

for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions,

petrified roots too deep to ever excise;

a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh   

of delight in astonishing being, of being in being,

with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what,

not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love;

not even war, fuck war, sighing for war,

sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease;

more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note,   

sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us,   

echo of love we had, have, for world, for our world,

on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge,

mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise,

cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment,

din from which every emotion henceforth emerges,

and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides:

sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue,   

of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.

I Remember Galileo

by Gerald Stern

I remember Galileo describing the mind
as a piece of paper blown around by the wind,
and I loved the sight of it sticking to a tree
or jumping into the back seat of a car,
and for years I watched paper leap through my cities;
but yesterday I saw the mind was a squirrel caught crossing
route 80 between the wheels of a giant truck,
dancing back and forth like a thin leaf,
or a frightened string, for only two seconds living
on the white concrete before he got away,
his life shortened by all that terror, his head
jerking, his yellow teeth ground down to dust.

It was the speed of the squirrel and his lowness to the ground,
his great purpose and the alertness of his dancing,
that showed me the difference between him and paper.
Paper will do in theory, when there is time
to sit back in a metal chair and study shadows;
but for this life I need a squirrel,
his clawed feet spread, his whole soul quivering,
the hot wind rushing through his hair,
the loud noise shaking him from head to tail.
   O philosophical mind, O mind of paper, I need a squirrel
finishing his wild dash across the highway,
rushing up his green ungoverned hillside.

Song

by Muriel Rukeyser

The world is full of loss; bring, wind, my love,
       my home is where we make our meeting-place,
       and love whatever I shall touch and read
       within that face.

Lift, wind, my exile from my eyes;
        peace to look, life to listen and confess,
        freedom to find to find to find
        that nakedness.

There

by Ursula K. Le Guin

He planted the elms, the eucalyptus,
the little cypress, and watered them
in the long dusk of summer,
so that in the dry land
twilight was a sound of water. Years ago.
The amaryllis stick their stiff
trumpets still blowing blasts of bright pink
up through the wild oats,
unwatered, uncounted, undaunted.
        Do you see: there where his absence
stands by each tree waiting for nightfall,
where shadows are his being gone, there
where grey pines that no one planted
grow tall and die, and grain that no one sowed
whitens the August hills with wild ripeness,
and an old house stands empty,
there
the averted face of absence
turns. There silence returns answer. There
the years can go uncounted, seeing
evening rise like water through the leaves,
and as ever over the highest elm Vega
like a wild white poppy, opening.
       In the country of pain
truly there only rises
(a white star, a white flower,
an old standpipe running water
to the roots of trees
in a dry land)
the small spring of peace.