"Glory" The autumn aster, those lavender ones, and the dark-blooming sedum are beginning to bloom in the rainy earth with the remote intensity of a dream. These things take over. I am a glorifier, not very high up on the vocational chart, and I glorify everything I see, everything I can think of. I want ordinary men and women, brushing their teeth, to feel the ocean in their mouth. I am going to glorify the sink with toothpaste spat in it. I am going to say it's a stretch of beach where the foam rolls back and leaves little shells. Ordinary people with a fear of worldly things, illness, pain, accidents, poverty, of dark, of being alone, of misfortune. The fears of everyday life. People who quietly and secretly bear their dread, who do not speak freely of it to others. People who have difficulty separating themselves from the world around them, like a spider hanging off the spike of a spider mum, in an inland autumn, away from the sea, away from that most unfortunate nation where people are butterballs dying of meat and drink. I want to glorify the even tinier spiders in the belly of the spider and in the closed knot of the mum's corolla, so this is likely to go on into winter. Didn't I say we were speaking of autumn with the remote intensity of a dream? The deckle edge of a cloud: blood seeping through a bandage. Three bleached beech leaves hanging on a twig. A pair of ruined mushrooms. The incumbent snow. The very air. The imported light. All autumn struggling to be gay, as people do in the midst of their woe. I met a psychic who told me my position in the universe but could not find the candy she hid from her grandkids. The ordinary fear of losing one's mind. You rinse the sink, walk out into the October sunshine, and look for it by beginning to think. That's when I saw the autumn aster, the sedum blooming in a purple field. The psychic said I must see the word glory emblazoned on my chest. Secretly I was hoping for a better word. I would have chosen for myself an ordinary one like orchid or paw. Something that would have no meaning in the astral realm. One doesn't want to glorify everything. What might I actually say when confronted with the view from K2? I'm not sure I would say anything. What's your opinion? You're a man with a corona in your mouth, a woman with a cottonball in her purse, what's your conception of the world? --Mary Ruefle
"The Passing of Time" My mother has been dead six months when my father remembers, as if for the first time, that she is dead and pads out across the deck to lower the flag to half-mast. Seeing that it already hangs midway on the pole (snapping at the wind, collapsed in damp heat, as if it were her hair) he is startled and asks Who died? I say Mother and after a while he says Ah! then let it fly a little longer. --Mary Ruefle
"Furtherness" An oak coffin covered with vines carried on moss in a farm cart
A dusty coffin in a yellow wagon with bright red wheels going down the painted road
A glass coffin stifled by roses
Raining, and in the film version an unknown god stood at a distance watching, got in his car and left
The little black urn before a spray of orchids in the alcove
They laid a bunch of violets at her throat closed the white coffin carried it out the rear door through buttercups down to the grave
The musicians are drunk and play loudly, stumbling down the street
Six men with sore arms
The family in a rowboat: the coffin inhabiting the mind
Or ashes streaming like a scarf from the convertible
Or, the chorus breaks out in excelsis
Or, the soloist sang like a dilated eye
Stunning din of a sob
Salt pork on a wound
Is it ordure to speak of the widow's grief?
Who drags herself back through a field so thick with vetch it gives a purple tint over two or three acres You could run through them for hours but one thing is certain from her face she does not want you to
Furthermore, there are pies on the table waiting --Mary Ruefle
"Dedication" You whom I could not save Listen to me. Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another. I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words. I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.
What strengthened me, for you was lethal. You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one, Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty; Blind force with accomplished shape.
Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge Going into white fog. Here is a broken city; And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave When I am talking with you.
What is poetry which does not save Nations or people? A connivance with official lies, A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, Readings for sophomore girls. That I wanted good poetry without knowing it, That I discovered, late, its salutary aim, In this and only this I find salvation.
They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more. --Czesław Miłosz
"Is/Not" Love is not a profession genteel or otherwise
sex is not dentistry the slick filling of aches and cavities
you are not my doctor you are not my cure,
nobody has that power, you are merely a fellow/traveller
Give up this medical concern, buttoned, attentive,
permit yourself anger and permit me mine
which needs neither your approval nor your suprise
which does not need to be made legal which is not against a disease
but agaist you, which does not need to be understood
or washed or cauterized, which needs instead
to be said and said. Permit me the present tense. --Margaret Atwood
"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." --Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"
"I sometimes think that people's hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what's at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while." --Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
"Radio Thin Air"
Keep the radio on softly
so it sounds like two people in the next
room, maybe
your parents, speaking calmly about something
important--a lack
of cash, the broken
cellar pump. Marconi believed
we are wrapped in voices, that waves
never die, merely space themselves
farther & farther apart,
passing through the ether he imagined
floating the planets. But wander
into the kitchen & no one
will be there, the tiny red eye of the radio, songs
that crawl through walls,
voices pulled from air. Marconi
wanted to locate the last song
the band on the deck of the Titanic played,
what Jesus said
on the cross, he kept dialing
the frequency, staring across the Atlantic,
his ear to the water,
there, can you hear it?
"The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink." --T. S. Eliot
"self-exam (my body is a cage)" Do this: take two fingers, place them on the spot behind your ear, either
ear, the spot where your skull drops off
into that valley of muscle & nerve--that is the muscle that holds up
the skull, that turns the dumb bone this way & that, that nods your face up &
down when you think you get it--press deeper, touch the little bundle of
nerves buried there, buried in the gristle--the nerves that make you blink
when the light bewilders you, that make your tongue slide in & out when you think you're in
love, when you think you need a drink, touch that spot as if you have an itch, close your eyes &
listen, please, close your eyes—can you hear it? We think our souls live
in boxes, we think someone sits behind our eyes, lording in his little throne, steering the fork to
the mouth, the mouth to the tit, we think hungry children live in our bellies & run out with their
empty bowls as the food rains down, we sometimes think we are those
hungry children, we think we can think anything & it won't
matter, we think we can think cut out her tongue, & then ask her to sing. --Nick Flynn
"You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that?
And I said, Where do I put it down?" --Anne Carson, "The Glass Essay"
"raving: i" Once I wrote a poem larger than any man, even Jesus. So tall the furrow of hair couldn't be tousled, feet large as lakes. I titled it Personification so it would live, Godzilla in parenthesis so it would kill.
There was blood. Testicles lay in the streets like confetti post-parade. I was glad: Diana after Actaeon's own salivating pack consumed him-- limb by limb licked, tendons trailing.
I rode the shoulder of my poem, wanting to see their faces, none specific, all malevolent, calling out last moments in ridiculous language--love, affection, Tender, one screamed. Not loudly enough and too late.
I wore red paint, salvaging neither plated breast, nor firm mouth. Not once was I tender. I wanted them wasted--him, him, him, him, him --CM Burroughs
"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game." --Toni Morrison
"I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart." --Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
"Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be." --Alice Walker
"Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air." --Gwendolyn Brooks
"The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison." --Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself." --Audre Lorde, "Eye to Eye"
"The bed was warm and ordinary and perfect, and it had been such a long, long day. Probably the longest day of my life. I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there." --Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home
"Night and Sleep" At the time of night-prayer, as the sun slides down, the route the senses walk on closes, the route to the invisible opens. The angel of sleep then gathers and drives along the spirits; just as the mountain keeper gathers his sheep on a slope. And what amazing sights he offers to the descending sheep! Cities with sparkling streets, hyacinth gardens, emerald pastures! The spirit sees astounding beings, turtles turned to men, men turned to angels, when sleep erases the banal. I think one could say the spirit goes back to its old home: it no longer remembers where it lives, and loses its fatigue. It carries around in life so many griefs and loads and trembles under their weight; but now they are gone, and it is all well. --Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks and Robert Bly
"An Appendix to the Vision of Peace" Don't stop after beating the swords Into ploughshares, don't stop! Go on beating And make musical instruments out of them. Whoever wants to make war again Will have to turn them into ploughshares first. --Yehuda Amichai, translated by Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt
"The Task Never Completed" No task is ever completed, only abandoned or pressed into use. Tinkering can be a form of prayer.
Twenty-six botched worlds preceded Genesis we are told in ancient commentary, and ha-Shem said not only, of this particular attempt, It is good, but muttered, if only it will hold.
Incomplete, becoming, the world was given to us to fix, to complete and we've almost worn it out.
My house was hastily built, on the cheap. Leaks, rotting sills, the floor a relief map of Idaho.
Whenever I get some money, I stove up, repair, add on, replace. This improvisation permits me to squat here on the land that owns me.
We evolve through mistakes, wrong genes, imitation gone wild.
Each night sleep unravels me into wool, then into sheep and wolf. Walls and fire pass through me. I birth stones.
Every dawn I stumble from the roaring vat of dreams and make myself up remembering and forgetting by halves.
Every dawn I choose to take a knife to the world's flank or a sewing kit, rough improvisation, but a start. --Marge Piercy
"To the extent that it is possible you must live in the world today as you wish everyone to live in the world to come. That can be your contribution. Otherwise, the world you want will never be formed. Why? Because you are waiting for others to do what you are not doing; and they are waiting for you, and so on." --Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar
"[Faith] means that, from the very roots of our being, we should always be prepared to live with this mystery as one being lives with another. Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery." --Martin Buber
"On the Death of a Parent" Move to the front of the line a voice says, and suddenly there is nobody left standing between you and the world, to take the first blows on their shoulders. This is the place in books where part one ends, and part two begins, and there is no part three. The slate is wiped not clean but like a canvas painted over in white so that a whole new landscape must be started, bits of the old still showing underneath-- those colors sadness lends to a certain hour of evening. Now the line of light at the horizon is the hinge between earth and heaven, only visible a few moments as the sun drops its rusted padlock into place. --Linda Pastan
"Every October it becomes important, no, necessary to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded by leaves turning...You'll be driving along depressed when suddenly a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably won't last. But for a moment the whole world comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives--red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermillion, gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations of burning. You're on fire. Your eyes are on fire.
"It won't last, you don't want it to last. You can't stand any more. But you don't want it to stop. It's what you've come for. It's what you'll come back for. It won't stay with you, but you'll remember that it felt like nothing else you've felt or something you've felt that also didn't last." --Lloyd Schwartz
"A Short History of Judaic Thought in the Twentieth Century" The rabbis wrote: although it is forbidden to touch a dying person, nevertheless, if the house catches fire he must be removed from the house.
Barbaric! I say, and whom may I touch then, aren't we all dying?
You smile your old negotiator's smile and ask: but aren't all our houses burning? --Linda Pastan
"Problems in relationships begin when you think you know everything about the other person. Every person is a universe unto themselves. How can we believe we can grasp the universe? No matter how well you think you know someone, there are deeper levels you have not tapped. It's important to keep investing time in getting to understand the people we love the most. There's always more to find." --Yehuda Berg
"I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul." --Henry Miller
"The Art of Blessing the Day" This is the blessing for rain after drought: Come down, wash the air so it shimmers, a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon. Let the parched leaves suckle and swell. Enter my skin, wash me for the little chrysalis of sleep rocked in your plashing. In the morning the world is peeled to shining.
This is the blessing for sun after long rain: Now everything shakes itself free and rises. The trees are bright as pushcart ices. Every last lily opens its satin thighs. The bees dance and roll in pollen and the cardinal at the top of the pine sings at full throttle, fountaining.
This is the blessing for a ripe peach: This is luck made round. Frost can nip the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop, a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus, the burrowing worm that coils in rot can blemish it and wind crush it on the ground. Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.
This is the blessing for the first garden tomato: Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store sells in January, those red things with the savor of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name. How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm, warm as the flank of a cow in the sun. You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.
This is the blessing for a political victory: Although I shall not forget that things work in increments and epicycles and sometime leaps that half the time fall back down, let's not relinquish dancing while the music fits into our hips and bounces our heels. We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.
The blessing for the return of a favorite cat, the blessing for love returned, for friends' return, for money received unexpected, the blessing for the rising of the bread, the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.
But the discipline of blessings is to taste each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet and the salty, and be glad for what does not hurt. The art is in compressing attention to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit, its savor, its aroma and its use.
Attention is love, what we must give children, mothers, fathers, pets, our friends, the news, the woes of others. What we want to change we curse and then pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can with eyes and hands and tongue. If you can't bless it, get ready to make it new. --Marge Piercy
"Bath 5" If it's one drink, it will be two. Wisteria tangling around your wrists. Here is where you buried your
father. Here is where you buried your brother. Here is where they will bury you, when the
time comes. No wonder you drink yourself down toward the earth. Home is where the shovels lie.
Earth and earth and earth. Stones crowd your sleep. Granite and salt, sand giving birth to
the fortress where even your lovers sigh. Silent underfoot. You dream yourself toward them.
You are foxfire, you are phosphorescent. Your mouth like whiskey. Your eyes like whiskey.
You baptize yourself in sorrow, again and again. You baptize yourself with bourbon and brandy.
You swim downward, fast salmon, heedless, handsome, death is in you, it has captured your ear. You have your
father's jaw, your brother's chin. When you were born they bathed your small body with their fears.
Each scar they'd earned became manifest on your skin. Their love aches like a badly set bone. When the river takes
you, it will be no new baptism. Just that same, ancient sacrifice. Just that rush, that rushing, and then you are gone. --Jen Silverman
"Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?" --Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
"My Mother Contemplating Her Gun" One boyfriend said to keep the bullets
locked in a different room. Another urged
clean it or it could explode. Larry
thought I should keep it loaded under my bed,
you never know.
I bought it when I didn't feel safe. The barrel is oily,
reflective, the steel
pure, pulled from a hole in West Virginia. It
could have been cast into anything, nails along the carpenter's lip, the ladder
to balance the train. Look at this, one bullet,
how almost nothing it is--
saltpeter sulphur lead Hell
burns sulphur, a smell like this.
safety & hammer, barrel & grip
I don't know what I believe.
I remember the woods behind my father's house horses beside the quarry
stolen cars lost in the deepest wells, the water below an ink waiting to fill me.
Outside a towel hangs from a cold line a sheet of iron in the sky
roses painted on it, blue roses.
Tomorrow it will still be there. --Nick Flynn
"Flood" The earth smells like whatever drifts past-- a moment ago, black apples, now
sheep, legs turned to the sky, as if the world had been turned over & it was me hanging underwater. I've moved upstairs. Next it'll be
the attic, then out onto the roof. In grade school I heard clouds could weigh three tons & I wondered
why they didn't all just fall to the ground. Lately
I study rain, each drop shaped like a comet, ten million of them, as if a galaxy
had exploded above us. The water now waits to re-enter heaven, waits in my
kitchen, fattening phonebooks, bleeding family photographs. Yesterday the river broke its banks & flooded the cemetery, washing away
topsoil, collapsing tombstones. It lifted
the caskets from their graves, left someone's mother in a tree, delivered a stillborn
to the wrong family. Ten strangers floated into the parking lot & lined their caskets up
as though anxious for the ruined market to open. I filled sandbags, bought another pump, read a manual on lifesaving--the trick:
"Dear Prisoner," I too love. Faces. Hands. The circumference Of the oaks. I confess. To nothing You could use. In a court of law. I found. That sickly sweet ambrosia of hope. Unmendable Seine of sadness. Experience taken away. From you. I would open. The mystery Of your birth. To you. I know. We can Change. Knowing. Full well. Knowing.
It is not enough.
Poetry Time Space Death I thought. I could write. An exculpatory note. I cannot. Yes, it is bitter. Every bit of it, bitter. The course taken by blood. All thinking Deceives us. Lead (kindly) light. Notwithstanding this grave. Your garden. This cell. Your dwelling. Who is unaccountably free. --C. D. Wright, excerpt from One Big Self: An Investigation
"Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live." --Jean Cocteau
"I have suspected many a time that meaning is really something added to verse. I know for a fact that we feel the beauty of a poem before we even begin to think of a meaning." --Jorge Luis Borges
"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape." --William S. Burroughs
"George Orwell got it backward.
"Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted.
"He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled.
"And this being fed is worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world." --Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
"He thinks I suffer from depression. But I'm just quiet. Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves." --Simon Van Booy
"There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy." --James Joyce, "A Little Cloud"
"You Were My Death" You were my death: you I could hold when all fell away from me. --Paul Celan
"More Than Halfway" I've turned on lights all over the house, but nothing can save me from this darkness.
I've stepped onto the front porch to see the stars perforating the milky black clouds
and the moon staring coldly through the trees, but this negative I'm carrying inside me.
Where is the boy who memorized constellations? What is the textbook that so consoled him?
I'm now more than halfway to the grave, but I'm not half the man I meant to become.
To what fractured deity can I pray? I'm willing to pay the night with interest,
though the night wants nothing but itself. What did I mean to say to darkness?
Death is a zero hollowed out of my chest. God is an absence whispering in the leaves. --Edward Hirsch
"Meadow Turf" Goldenrod, strawberry leaf, small bristling aster, all, Loosestrife, knife-bladed grasses, lacing their roots, lacing The life of the meadow into a deep embrace Far underground, and all their shoots, wet at the base With shining dew, dry-crested with sun, Springing out of a mould years old; Leaves, living and dead, whose stealing Odors on the cold bright air shed healing-- Oh, heart, here is your healing, here among The fragrant living and dead. --Janet Lewis
"Poem with Two Endings" Say "death" and the whole room freezes-- even the couches stop moving, even the lamps. Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.
Say the word continuously, and things begin to go forward. Your life takes on the jerky texture of an old film strip.
Continue saying it, hold it moment after moment inside the mouth, it becomes another syllable. A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.
Death is voracious, it swallows all the living. Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead. neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled, each swallows and swallows the world.
The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.
(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?) --Jane Hirshfield
"In Sixth Grade Mrs. Walker" slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision. How to choose
persimmons. This is precision. Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted. Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one will be fragrant. How to eat: put the knife away, lay down newspaper. Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat. Chew the skin, suck it, and swallow. Now, eat the meat of the fruit, so sweet, all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white. In the yard, dewy and shivering with crickets, we lie naked, face-up, face-down. I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten. Naked: I've forgotten. Ni, wo: you and me. I part her legs, remember to tell her she is beautiful as the moon.
Other words that got me into trouble were fight and fright, wren and yarn. Fight was what I did when I was frightened, Fright was what I felt when I was fighting. Wrens are small, plain birds, yarn is what one knits with. Wrens are soft as yarn. My mother made birds out of yarn. I loved to watch her tie the stuff; a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class and cut it up so everyone could taste a Chinese apple. Knowing it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn't eat but watched the other faces.
My mother said every persimmon has a sun inside, something golden, glowing, warm as my face.
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper, forgotten and not yet ripe. I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill, where each morning a cardinal sang, The sun, the sun.
Finally understanding he was going blind, my father sat up all one night waiting for a song, a ghost. I gave him the persimmons, swelled, heavy as sadness, and sweet as love.
This year, in the muddy lighting of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking for something I lost. My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs, black cane between his knees, hand over hand, gripping the handle. He's so happy that I've come home. I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question. All gone, he answers.
Under some blankets, I find a box. Inside the box I find three scrolls. I sit beside him and untie three paintings by my father: Hibiscus leaf and a white flower. Two cats preening. Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.
He raises both hands to touch the cloth, asks, Which is this?
This is persimmons, Father.
Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk, the strength, the tense precision in the wrist. I painted them hundreds of times eyes closed. These I painted blind. Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight. --Li-Young Lee
"Things My Son Should Know after I've Died" I was young once. I dug holes near a canal and almost drowned. I filled notebooks with words as carefully as a hunter loads his shotgun. I had a father also, and I came second to an addiction. I spent a summer swallowing seeds and nothing ever grew in my stomach. Every woman I kissed, I kissed as if I loved her. My left and right hands were rivals. After I hit puberty, I was kicked out of my parents' house at least twice a year. No matter when you receive this there was music playing now. Your grandfather isn't my father. I chose to do something with my life that I knew I could fail at. I spent my whole life walking and hid such colorful wings --Brian Trimboli
"Portage" We carry the dead in our hands. There is no other way.
The dead are not carried in our memories. They died in another age, long before this moment. We shape them from the wounds they left on the inanimate, ourselves, as falling water will turn stone into a bowl.
There is no room in our hearts for the dead, though we often imagine that there is, or wish it to be so, to preserve them in our warmth, our sweet darkness, where their fists might beat at the soft contours of our love. And though we might like to think that they would call out to us, they could never do so, being there. They would never dare to speak, lest their mouths, our names, fill quietly with blood.
We carry the dead in our hands as we might carry water--with a careful, reverential tread. There is no other way.
How easily, how easily their faces spill. --John Glenday
"Autumn Perspective" Now, moving in, cartons on the floor, the radio playing to bare walls, picture hooks left stranded in the unsoiled squares where paintings were, and something reminding us this is like all other moving days; finding the dirty ends of someone else’s life, hair fallen in the sink, a peach pit, and burned-out matches in the corner; things not preserved, yet never swept away like fragments of disturbing dreams we stumble on all day... in ordering our lives, we will discard them, scrub clean the floorboards of this our home lest refuse from the lives we did not lead become, in some strange, frightening way, our own.
And we have plans that will not tolerate our fears--a year laid out like rooms in a new house–the dusty wine glasses rinsed off, the vases filled, and bookshelves sagging with heavy winter books. Seeing the room always as it will be, we are content to dust and wait. We will return here from the dark and silent streets, arms full of books and food, anxious as we always are in winter, and looking for the Good Life we have made.
I see myself then: tense, solemn, in high-heeled shoes that pinch, not basking in the light of goals fulfilled, but looking back to now and seeing a lazy, sunburned, sandaled girl in a bare room, full of promise and feeling envious.
Now we plan, postponing, pushing our lives forward into the future--as if, when the room contains us and all our treasured junk we will have filled whatever gap it is that makes us wander, discontented from ourselves.
The room will not change: a rug, or armchair, or new coat of paint won’t make much difference; our eyes are fickle but we remain the same beneath our suntans, pale, frightened, dreaming ourselves backward and forward in time, dreaming our dreaming selves.
I look forward and see myself looking back. --Erica Jong
"Death Is Only an Old Door" Death is only an old door Set in a garden wall. On gentle hinges it gives, at dusk, When the thrushes call. Along the lintel are green leaves, Beyond the light lies still; Very willing and weary feet Go over that sill. There is nothing to trouble any heart; Nothing to hurt at all. Death is only a quiet door In an old wall. --Nancy Byrd Turner
"Lebensweisheitspielerei" Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls In the afternoon. The proud and the strong Have departed.
Those that are left are the unaccomplished, The finally human, Natives of a dwindled sphere.
Their indigence is an indigence That is an indigence of the light, A stellar pallor that hangs on the threads.
Little by little, the poverty Of autumnal space becomes A look, a few words spoken.
Each person completely touches us With what he is and as he is, In the stale grandeur of annihilation. --Wallace Stevens
"The Lightkeeper" A night without ships. Foghorns called into walled cloud, and you still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks, darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward. Through wild gorse and sea wrack, through heather and torn wool you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life: the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost, there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow-wick lamps, whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide, the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook. You say to me stay awake, be like the lensmaker who died with his lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you. In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond, seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out for a long time. Also when fireflies opened and closed in the pines, and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this. That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships. --Carolyn Forché
"somewhere i have never traveled" somewhere i have never traveled, 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 colour 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 --e. e. cummings
"Where I Live" Up the street, past the house with the Persian-tiled driveway, the private dental practice, the heavy brambled roses, the hairdresser is falling in love with the day's final customer. The chip seller is all aching feet. The greengrocer is daydreaming of summer: eggplant and avocado, his wife's cool, slender hands.
Turn right at the corner with the scaffolding, and count four windows on your left. Here, by the hydrangeas still unsure what shade of purple to turn, is my front door. The lock is fairly old. The trick is to push the key to the uppermost corner of the lock cylinder, until the grooves align. There you go.
My flat's the one on the right on the first floor corridor. Some afternoons, sunlight lets itself into the kitchen when I'm not looking: splashes all over the clean white bowls on the drying rack, slides into every last crevice, almost convinces me I'm home. --Camilla Chen
"Sensationalism" In Josef Koudelka's photograph, untitled & with no date Given to help us with history, a man wearing Dark clothes is squatting, his right hand raised slightly, As if in explanation, & because he is talking, Seriously now, to a horse that would be white except For its markings--the darkness around its eyes, muzzle Legs & tail, by which it is, technically, a gray, or a dapple gray, With a streak of pure white like heavy cream on its rump. There is a wall behind them both, which, like most walls, has No ideas, & nothing to make us feel comfortable... After a while, because I know so little, & Because the muted sunlight on the wall will not change, I begin to believe that the man's wife and children Were shot & thrown into a ditch a week before this picture Was taken, that this is still Czechoslovakia, & that there is The beginning of spring in the air. That is why The man is talking, & as clearly as he can, to a horse. He is trying to explain these things, While the horse, gray as those days at the end Of winter, when days seem lost in thought, is, after all, Only a horse. No doubt the man knows people he could talk to: The bars are open by now, but he has chosen To confide in this gelding, as he once did to his own small Children, who could not, finally, understand him any better. This afternoon, in the middle of his life & in the middle Of this war, a man is trying to stay sane. To stay sane he must keep talking to a horse, its blinders On & a rough snaffle bit still in its mouth, wearing
Away the corners of its mouth, with one ear cocked forward to listen, While the other ear tilts backward slightly, inattentive, As if suddenly catching a music behind it. Of course, I have to admit I have made all of this up, & that It could be wrong to make up anything. Perhaps the man is perfectly Happy. Perhaps Koudelka arranged all of this And then took the picture as a way of saying Good-bye to everyone who saw it, & perhaps Josef Koudelka was Only two years old when the Nazis invaded Prague. I do not wish to interfere, Reader, with your solitude-- So different from my own. In fact, I would take back everything I've said here, if that would make you feel any better, Unless even that retraction would amount to a milder way Of interfering; & a way by which you might suspect me Of some subtlety. Or mistake me for someone else, someone Not disinterested enough in what you might think Of this. Of the photograph. Of me. Once, I was in love with a woman, & when I looked at her My face altered & took on the shape of her face, Made thin by alcohol, sorrowing, brave. And though There was a kind of pain in her face, I felt no pain When this happened to mine, when the bones Of my own face seemed to change. But even this Did not do us any good, &, one day, She went mad, waking in tears she mistook for blood, And feeling little else except for this concern about bleeding
Without pain. I drove her to the hospital, & then, After a few days, she told me she had another lover...So, Walking up the street where it had been raining earlier, Past the darkening glass of each shop window to the hotel, I felt a sensation of peace flood my body, as if to cleanse it, And thought it was because I had been told the truth...But, you see, Even that happiness became a lie, & even that was taken From me, finally, as all lies are...Later, I realized that maybe I felt strong that night only Because she was sick, for other reasons, & in that place. And so began my long convalescence, & simple adulthood. I never felt that way again, when I looked at anyone else; I never felt my face change into any other face. It is a difficult thing to do, & so maybe It is just as well. That man, for instance. He was a saboteur. He ended up talking to a horse, & hearing, on the street Outside that alley, the Nazis celebrating, singing, even. If he went mad beside that wall, I think his last question Was whether they shot his wife and children before they threw him Into the ditch, or after. For some reason, it mattered once, If only to him. And before he turned into paper. --Larry Levis
"Twenty-Pound Stone" It nests in the hollow of my pelvis, I carry it with both hands, as if offering my stomach, as if it were pulling me forward.
At night the sun leaks from it, it turns cold. I sleep with it beside my head, I breathe for it.
Sometimes I dream of hammers.
I am hammering it back into the sand, the sand we melt into glass, the glass we blow into bottles.
This stone is fifteen green bottles with nothing inside.
It never bleeds, it never heals, it is a soup can left on the back shelf, the label worn off.
It is the corner of a house, the beginning of a wall.
At night it changes shape, it lies on one side, casting jagged shadows.
It brightens where my tongue touches it.
Richard's eyes were this color, a pale fruit, honeydew.
When I swing it over my head I swear it could lift me.
If I jump from a bridge it would drag me down, the current couldn't carry us, it has no lungs, no pockets of air.
If I could walk it to the center of a frozen pond & leave it, in the spring it would be gone. --Nick Flynn
"The poet's job is to develop an ear, not a voice." --James Hoch
"To Imitate the Sun" To imitate the sun is to let the light become dream-architect, image-maker working in the dark to shape maps tracing the spirit's journey forward to its beginnings of infinite simplicity. --Brendan Kennelly
"You Asked How (formerly Even Now She Is Turning, Saying Everything I Always Wanted Her to Say)" At the end there were straws in her glove compartment, I'd split them open to taste the familiar bitter residue, near the end I ate all her Percodans, hungry to know how far they could take me. A bottle of red wine each night moved her along as she wrote, I feel too much, again and again.
You asked how and I said, Suicide, and you asked how and I said, An overdose, and then she shot herself, and your eyes filled with wonder, so I added, In the chest, so you wouldn't think her face was gone, and it mattered, somehow, that you knew this...
Every year I'm eight years old and the world is no longer safe. Our phone becomes unlisted, our mail is kept in a box at the post office, and my mother tells me always leave a light on so it seems someone is home. She finds a cop for her next boyfriend, his hair greasy, pushed back with his fingers. He lets me play with his service revolver while they kiss on the couch. Cars slowly fill the windows, and I aim, making the noise with my mouth, in case it's them, and when his back is hunched over her I aim between his shoulder blades, silently, in case it's him. --Nick Flynn
"A Few Reasons to Oppose the War" because wind soughs in the branches of trees like blood sighing through veins
because in each country there are songs huddled like wet-feathered birds
because even though the news has nothing new to say and keeps on saying it NO still fights its way into the world
because for every bomb that is readied a baby nestles into her mother latches onto a nipple beaded with milk
because the tulips have waited all winter in the cold dark earth
because each morning the wildflowers outside my window raise their yellow faces to the sun
because we are all so helplessly in love with the light --Lisa Suhair Majaj
"Sunday" So that's life, then: things as they are? --Wallace Stevens
Once there was music that could tear your heart open and heal it before you took another breath. That was what art could do. Kings and princes, bishops and popes all knew this, as they knew how to get what they wanted and keep what they had. Mostly what happens to people doesn't happen by chance. You spend your life in the mud, you eat the same thin soup each night, and then on Sunday a thousand angels start to sing. The walls are ablaze with suffering and forgiveness. And you think this is what you'll see when you die. When you yearn, this is what you yearn for. Or something like it, the version you've been told you can afford. They were smart to keep belief and understanding at a distance, go for the big effects, everything you get when you're through with this world, the one you got stuck with--potatoes and soup, the morning and the afternoon, the afternoon and the evening, things as they are. --Lawrence Raab
"Across a Great Wilderness without You" The deer come out in the evening. God bless them for not judging me, I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe and make strange noises at them-- language, if language can be a kind of crying. The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow, each bullet hole suffused with moon, like the platinum thread beyond them where the river runs the length of the valley. That's where the fish are. Tomorrow I'll scoop them from the pockets of graveled stone beneath the bank, their bodies desperately alive when I hold them in my hands, the way prayers become more hopeless when uttered aloud. The phone's disconnected. Just as well, I've got nothing to tell you: I won't go inside where the bats dip and swarm over my bed. It's the sound of them shouldering against each other that terrifies me, as if it might hurt to brush across another being's living flesh. But I carry a gun now. I've cut down a tree. You wouldn't recognize me in town-- my hands lost in my pockets, two disabused tools I've retired from their life of touching you. --Keetje Kuipers
"Ask Me" Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say. --William Stafford
"On the Edge" After your mother dies, you will learn to live on the edge of life, to brace yourself like she did, one hand on the dashboard, the other gripping your purse while you drive through the stop sign, shoulders tense, eyes clamped shut, waiting for the collision that doesn't come. You will learn to stay up all night knowing she's gone, watching the morning open like an origami swan, the sky a widening path, a question you can’t answer. In prison, women make tattoos from cigarette ash and shampoo. It’s what they have. Imagine the fish, gray scales and black whiskers, growing slowly up her back, its lips kissing her neck. Imagine the letters of her daughter’s name a black chain around her wrist. What is the distance between this moment and the last? The last visit and the next? I want my mother back. I want to hunt her down like the perfect gift, the one you search for from store to store until your feet ache, delirious with her scent. This is the baggage of your life, a sign of your faith, this staying awake past exhaustion, this needle in your throat. --Dorianne Laux
"A Myth of Innocence" One summer she goes into the field as usual stopping for a bit at the pool where she often looks at herself, to see if she detects any changes. She sees the same person, the horrible mantle of daughterliness still clinging to her.
The sun seems, in the water, very close. That's my uncle spying again, she thinks-- everything in nature is in some way her relative. I am never alone, she thinks, turning the thought into a prayer. Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.
No one understands anymore how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers. Also that he embraced her, right there, with her uncle watching. She remembers sunlight flashing on his bare arms.
This is the last moment she remembers clearly. Then the dark god bore her away.
She also remembers, less clearly, the chilling insight that from this moment she couldn't live without him again.
The girl who disappears from the pool will never return. A woman will return, looking for the girl she was.
She stands by the pool saying, from time to time, I was abducted, but it sounds wrong to her, nothing like what she felt. Then she says, I was not abducted. Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted to escape my body. Even, sometimes, I willed this. But ignorance
cannot will knowledge. Ignorance wills something imagined, which it believes exists.
All the different nouns-- she says them in rotation. Death, husband, god, stranger. Everything sounds so simple, so conventional. I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.
She can't remember herself as that person but she keeps thinking the pool will remember and explain to her the meaning of her prayer so she can understand whether it was answered or not. --Louise Glück
"Asking for Directions" We could have been mistaken for a married couple riding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago that last time we were together. I remember looking out the window and praising the beauty of the ordinary: the in-between places, the world with its back turned to us, the small neglected stations of our history. I slept across your chest and stomach without asking permission because they were the last hours. There was a smell to the sheepskin lining of your new Chinese vest that I didn't recognize. I felt it deliberately. I woke early and asked you to come with me for coffee. You said, sleep more, and I said we only had one hour and you came. We didn't say much after that. In the station, you took your things and handed me the vest, then left as we had planned. So you would have ten minutes to meet your family and leave. I stood by the seat dazed by exhaustion and the absoluteness of the end, so still I was aware of myself breathing. I put on the vest and my coat, got my bag and, turning, saw you through the dirty window standing outside looking up at me. We looked at each other without any expression at all. Invisible, unnoticed, still. That moment is what I will tell of as proof that you loved me permanently. After that I was a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker which direction to walk to find a taxi. --Linda Gregg
"The Way Things Are" No, the candle is not crying, it can not feel pain. Even telescopes, like the rest of us, grow bored. Bubblegum will not make the hair soft and shiny. The duller the imagination, the faster the car, I am your father and that is the way things are.
When the sky is looking the other way, do not enter the forest. No, the wind is not caused by the rushing of clouds. An excuse is as good a reason as any. A lighthouse, launched, will not go far, I am your father and that is the way things are.
No, old people do not walk slowly because they have plenty of time. Gardening books when buried will not flower. Though lightly worn, a crown may leave a scar, I am your father and that is the way things are.
No, the red woolly hat has not been put on the railing to keep it warm. When one glove is missing, both are lost. Today's craft fair is tomorrow's boot sale. The guitarist weeps gently, not the guitar I am your father and that is the way things are.
Pebbles work best without batteries. The deckchair will fail as a unit of currency. Even though your shadow is shortening it does not mean you are growing smaller. Moonbeams sadly, will not survive in a jar, I am your father and that is the way things are.
For centuries the bullet remained quietly confident that the gun would be invented. A drowning surrealist will not appreciate the concrete lifebelt. No guarantee my last goodbye is an au revoir, I am your father and that is the way things are.
Do not become a prison officer unless you know what you're letting someone else in for. The thrill of being a shower curtain will soon pall. No trusting hand awaits a falling star I am your father, and I am sorry but this is the way things are. --Robert McGough
"Sequestered Writing" Horses were turned loose in the child's sorrow. Black and roan, cantering through snow. The way light fills the hand with light, November with graves, infancy with white. White. Given lilacs, lilacs disappear. Then low voices rising in walls. The way they withdrew from the child's body and spoke as if it were not there.
What ghost comes to the bedside whispering You? -- With its no one without its I -- A dwarf ghost? A closet of empty clothes? Ours was a ghost who stole household goods. Nothing anyone would miss. Supper plates. Apples. Barbed wire behind the house.
At the end of the hall, it sleepwalks into a mirror wearing mother's robe. A bedsheet lifts from the bed and hovers. Face with no face. Come here. The bookcase knows, and also the darkness of books. Long passages into, Endless histories toward, sleeping pages about. Why else toss gloves into a grave?
A language that once sent ravens through firs. The open world from which it came. Words holding the scent of an asylum fifty years. It is fifty years, then. The child hears from within: Come here and know, below And unbeknownst to us, what these fields had been. --Carolyn Forché
"The Not-so-good Earth" For a while there we had 25-inch Chinese peasant families famishing in comfort on the 25-inch screen and even Uncle Billy whose eyesight's going fast by hunching up real close to the convex glass could just about make them out – the riot scene in the capital city for example he saw that better than anything, using the contrast knob to bring them up dark – all those screaming faces and bodies going under the horses' hooves – he did a terrific job on that bit, not so successful though on the quieter parts where they're just starving away digging for roots in the not-so-good earth cooking up a mess of old clay and coming out with all those Confucian analects to everybody's considerable satisfaction (if I remember rightly Grandmother dies with naturally a suspenseful break in the action for a full symphony orchestra plug for Craven A neat as a whistle probably damn glad to be quit of the whole gang with their marvellous patience.) We never did find out how it finished up... Dad at this stage tripped over the main lead in the dark hauling the whole set down smack on its inscrutable face, wiping out in a blue flash and curlicue of smoke 6 million Chinese without a trace... --Bruce Dawe
"Beyond Harm" A week after my father died suddenly I understood his fondness for me was safe--nothing could touch it. In that last year, his face would sometimes brighten when I would enter the room, and his wife said that once, when he was half asleep, he smiled when she said my name. He respected my spunk – when they tied me to the chair, that time they were tying up someone he respected, and when he did not speak, for weeks, I was one of the beings to whom he was not speaking, someone with a place in his life. The last week he even said it, once, by mistake. I walked into his room 'How are you' and he said 'I love you too.' From then on, I had that word to lose. Right up to the last moment, I could make some mistake, offend him, and with one of his old mouths of disgust he could re-skew my life. I did not think of it much, I was helping to take care of him, wiping his face and watching him. But then, a while after he died, I suddenly thought, with amazement, he will always love me now, and I laughed--he was dead, dead! --Sharon Olds
"Hell" The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing's slave.
Hell is that. Hell is that, others, having a job, and not having a job. Hell is thinking continually of those who were truly great.
Hell is the moment you realize that you were ignorant of the fact, when it was true, that you were not yet ruined by desire.
The kind of music I want to continue hearing after I am dead is the kind that makes me think I will be capable of hearing it then.
There is music in Hell. Wind of desolation! It blows past the egg-eyed statues. The canopic jars are full of secrets.
The wind blows through me. I open my mouth to speak.
I recite the list of people I have copulated with. It does not take long. I say the names of my imaginary children. I call out four-syllable words beginning with B. This is how I stay alive.
Beelzebub. Brachiosaur. Bubble-headed. I don't know how I stay alive. What I do know is that there is a light, far above us, that goes out when we die,
and that in Hell there is a gray tulip that grows without any sun. It reminds me of everything I failed at,
and I water it carefully. It is all I have to remind me of you. --Sarah Manguso
"A Footnote to History" For ten centuries they sent no word
though I often heard through seashells
ships whispering for help.
I stuffed my pockets with the sounds of wrecks.
I still can't decipher scripts of storms
as I leaf through the river's waves. --Agha Shahid Ali
"Sudden" If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper might have used the word massive, as if a mountain range had opened inside her, but instead
it used the word suddenly, a light coming on
in an empty room. The telephone
fell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeating something happened, something awful
a sunday, dusky. If it had been
terminal, we could have cradled her as she grew smaller, wiped her mouth,
said good-bye. But it was sudden,
how overnight we could be orphaned & the world became a bell we'd crawl inside & the ringing all we'd eat. --Nick Flynn
"A Bitterness" I believe you did not have a happy life. I believe you were cheated. I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery. I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression. I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling. I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger. I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all. I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as your bitterness. I believe you lay down at last none the wiser and unassuaged. Oh, cold and dreamless under wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of the hillsides. --Mary Oliver
"Blue Willow: Persephone Falling" "Depression is hidden knowledge." --James Hillman
You think it will never happen again. Then one day in November it does, the narrow, dusty boards of the trapdoor you fell through twenty years before cracking apart, a black grin opening its toothless mouth, darkness seeping out to fill the dead cornfields rattling around you. That sound's back in your head again-- like angry bees or static or rubber bands breaking. And beneath it a distant hum you remember being scared was voices till the doctor explained it was your own brain, working overtime to understand its disordered signals.
And meanwhile, every sadness on NPR is yours-- from the African country where 30% of the childbearing women have AIDS, to the Appalachian mother who sells her great-grandmother's Blue Willow china for fifty bucks to feed her kids, to your own mother, who dies again every autumn, something wrong when she didn't come home for Thanksgiving the way she promised, the torn-sheet dinner napkins you'd embroidered--"M" for "Mommy"--with ordinary thread, wrapped in tin foil under the bed, melancholy's blue index finger pressed into your forehead, choosing you for its team. Where it seems you must play for life,
whether you want to or not. Though that's not what you're thinking as you hurtle through the night, jittery as the rabbit you swerve to avoid, your head filled with chattering fog, a glass door sliding shut between you and the world, that feeling of being outside yourself so loud you don't seem real. Though you are. As you maneuver the car carefully through the dark, remembering how you willed yourself to live this way for two years, synapses flashing like emergency lights you thought you'd never see again.
But here they are, the medication you've ratcheted down for a year necessary after all, the biochemical net too small, the darkness you've pushed away for twenty years with what your doctor calls one hand tied behind you suddenly back. As you remember setting out your mother's Blue Willow on the table every night as a child--blue people in blue houses under blue trees--each plate a story you can walk into, where everything is fine. If it weren't so dark inside and you weren't so scared. If you could only think how to get there, and what treasure you are supposed to find when you do. --Alison Townsend
"Breaking Up" I fell out of love: that's our story's dull ending, as flat as life is, as dull as the grave. Excuse me--I'll break off the string of this love song and smash the guitar. We have nothing to save.
The puppy is puzzled. Our furry small monster can't decide why we complicate simple things so-- he whines at your door and I let him enter, when he scratches at my door, you always go.
Dog, sentimental dog, you'll surely go crazy, running from one to the other like this-- too young to conceive of an ancient idea: it's ended, done with, over, kaput. Finis.
Get sentimental and we end up by playing the old melodrama, "Salvation of Love." "Forgiveness," we whisper, and hope for an echo; but nothing returns from the silence above.
Better save love at the very beginning, avoiding all passionate "nevers," "forevers;" we ought to have heard what the train wheels were shouting, "Do not make promises!" Promises are levers.
We should have made note of the broken branches, we should have looked up at the smokey sky, warning the witless pretensions of lovers-- the greater the hope is, the greater the lie.
True kindness in love means staying quite sober, weighing each link of the chain you must bear. Don't promise her heaven--suggest half an acre; not "unto death," but at least to next year.
And don't keep declaring, "I love you, I love you." That little phrase leads a durable life-- when remembered again in some loveless hereafter, it can sting like a hornet or stab like a knife.
So--our little dog in all his confusion turns and returns from door to door. I won't say "forgive me" because I have left you; I ask pardon for one thing: I loved you before. --Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"Root" I think she has roots in the soles of her feet and when she walks she plants herself into the earth and lets the earth take hold of her. I think if you listened close enough for long enough you could just make out the sound of those roots in those soles lifting through the soil sighing in the sunlight and digging their way back into the darkness with each and every step.
I've met people who are fire, all flame and spark and the promise of combustion. Without fail and without doubt I've been burned and boiled and left with nothing but the residue of the ash they left behind on my skin. I've felt the breezes of people who are wind, airy and light and always drifting. They cool the soul and for a moment you close your eyes and feel their breath across your face but always, always, open them sometime or another to their absence. They always, always, blow away and you're left with tousled hair and the numbness where they rested.
I think I am the water and I think I always have been. I go my own way and somehow without knowing how, find my way through the cracks and crevices, the grooves and holes in the rocks that form around these fragile hearts.
I think she is the earth and has roots in her soles and leaves in her hair. She curls her toes into the sand and braces herself against the wind, defiant against the flames and holds tight to the world as it spins beneath her. We spin and only she can feel it.
I think she has roots and her roots need water and I am the water and always have been and know and hold the secrets to sinking beneath the soil and giving strength to the growth that's been waiting to come. Some people are fire and some are wind but we are water and earth and through the roots on her feet and the leaves in her hair she will drink me and absorb all I have ever been.
I can hear the sound of her footsteps now. --Tyler Knott Gregson
"The Grasshoppers' Silence" Listen to the story the prisoner's wife hears in the Bengali darkness: the one he'd told her about a grasshopper he'd caught in his sweep net at dusk and taken home in a glass jar with breathing holes punched in the lid.
"Why do boys catch insects?" she'd asked, and he'd answered: "Because they are lonely."
He told her the alarmed grasshopper fiddled, rubbing its leg against its belly. In Bangladesh, as in China, ancient violins have one string; and they sing in minor keys. "Why is their music so sad?" she asked him, even though she already knew the answer.
"Their music is sad because grasshoppers are sad."
In Bangladesh, unfaithful women are called "grasshoppers," because the adulteresses jump from leaf to leaf in monsoon swamps. "Don't ever leave me," her husband had ordered his captive insect, pulling off one of its legs before he made it a suit of rags.
"Did it ever sing after that?" she'd asked.
His wife was a curious woman who'd gazed past the Chittagong Hills to praise the sunrise, its clamorous golds and vermilions. "Don't you ever leave me," he'd said to her every time she opened a book or looked out the window, her eyes astonished as water lilies opening to the first light of dawn. And that one last time, "You left me," tearing out her eyes and leaving them both alone in the dark--her in a room without windows and him in the prison he'd made for himself, listening to the grasshoppers' silence. --Linda Rogers
"What was my childhood disease? Love, I suppose. I was susceptible to contracting great love, suffering the chills and delirium of that pox. But it seems I am safe now, unlikely to contract it again. The advantages of immunity are plain. People contort themselves around the terror of being alone, making any compromise against that. It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else." --Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
"The world was already acting strange millions of years ago.
"Water had its way with rock. Liquid beat solid. Ice is supposed to be obdurate, unyielding, but back then it rippled and flowed. The glacier rode the world, and the world let it change it, like a girl riding her lover and turning his prick to foam. Exactly the way it is today.
"The world was strange from day one. Let there be light, God said, and there was light. There is probably nothing more beautiful and implausible than the world, nothing that makes less sense, the gray bud of the willow, silky and soft, the silk-white throat of the cobra, the wish of nature or humans to subsume all living matter in fire and flood. I will hurt you, hurt you, hurt you, says the world, and then a meadow arches its back and golden pollen sprays forth.
"Everyone prefers to stick with the subject of people, but how shortsighted to leave out the question of how we got here and where we're going.
"At least four glaciers covered Varennes over the past three million years.
"And even then, how beautiful! Rock cased in ice, the sun extracting greens and blues. Though to say everything was more beautiful without people, before people--even to go so far as to imagine after people--is obscene." --Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place, pg. 12
"In the beginning the Murdocks weren't so much hungry for love as murderous for it, the one partner's wish to devour the other a wish to turn the infuriating recalcitrant other into food and, hence, into the self, going on the assumption so popular back at the time when Andrea and David fell in love that we are what we eat." --Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place, pg. 51
"The great nave of the church was alive with unspoken wishes; it is this way in all places of human habitation, some of the air thick, some of it thin, unspooling lightly or dark and clotted, a terrible mixture, so sweet and heartbroken that like all human wishing it could make you get down on the cold stone floor of a church (like Sally Edwards) and start crawling, as if we'd never actually got around to getting up on our hind legs in the first place, though getting up did no good, Sally thought, no good, no good at all." --Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place, pg. 253
"The No-Bamboo Tale" They did not find me between the joints of a bamboo reed on the hat of a mushroom, by the moonlight, from the split pit of a summer peach. And they might have done better to fish me from underneath a manhole, or unwrap me like an old hard stick of drugstore gum--but not this, either. Instead they did a terrible thing: came together and reproduced, birthed me like any other child into the commonest rotations of modern times. A genital baby--no moonbeam. No thunderclap.
Though somehow I remained certain I--like the ancients with all the power of conviction in my naked palms-- would return to the tacit revolutions of those centuries when single men might define the naming of years, believing in the transmogrification of a changeling orphanage! --Jaida Jones
"Frogless" The sore trees cast their leaves too early. Each twig pinching shut like a jabbed clam. Soon there will be a hot gauze of snow searing the roots.
Booze in the spring runoff, pure antifreeze; the stream worms drunk and burning. Tadpoles wrecked in the puddles.
Here comes an eel with a dead eye grown from its cheek. Would you cook it? You would if.
The people eat sick fish because there are no others. Then they get born wrong.
This is not sport, sir. This is not good weather. This is not blue and green.
This his home. Travel anywhere in a year, five years, and you'll end up here. --Margaret Atwood
"Cartoon Physics, part 2" Years ago, alone in her room, my mother cut a hole in the air
& vanished into it. The report hung & deafened, followed closely by an over-
whelming silence, a ringing in the ears. Today I take a piece of chalk
& sketch a door in a wall. By the rules of cartoon physics only I
can open this door. I want her to come with me, like in a dream of being dead,
the mansion filled with cots, one for everyone I've ever known. This desire
can be a cage, a dream that spills into waking, until I wander this city
as a rose-strewn funeral. Once upon a time, let's say, my mother stepped
inside herself & no one could follow. More than once
I traded on this, until it transmuted into a story, the transubstantiation of desire,
I'd recite it as if I'd never told anyone, & it felt that way,
because I'd try not to cry yet always would, & the listener
would always hold me. Upstairs the water channels off you, back
into the earth, or to the river, through pipes hidden deep in these walls. I told you the story
of first learning to write my own name, chalk scrawl across our garage door,
so that when my mother pulled it down I'd appear, like a movie. --Nick Flynn
okay
sleepy
content
jubilant