February 2012
30 posts
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You Write Many Poems About Death - Charles...
yes, and here’s another one and later it might even end up in one of my books. and the book will be sitting on a shelf waiting for you long after I am gone. think of that: in a sense I will be speaking again just for you. and remember this: the page you are looking at now, I once typed the words with care with you in mind under a yellow light with the radio on. If you think about death...
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Love’s not the way to treat a friend - Richard...
Love’s not the way to treat a friend. I wouldn’t wish that on you. I don’t want to see your eyes forgotten on a rainy day, lost in the endless purse of those who can remember nothing. Love’s not the way to treat a friend. I don’t want to see you end up that way with your body being poured like wounded marble into the architecture of those who make bridges out of crippled birds. Love’s not the...
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Jane Austen and John Lennon in Heaven - Ashley...
They call each other ‘J.’ John picks red, red roses in Mansfield Park and brings them to Jane. She explains instant karma to him. In heaven Jane wears her hair short, sports fringed bellbottoms and teashades. John has meat on his bones now; prefers black slacks and button ups, a trucker hat from Abbey Road. They take long drives and often sing songs. He says they’ll remain lovers. Until the end....
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I taste a liquor never brewed - Emily Dickinson
I taste a liquor never brewed From Tankards scooped in Pearl Not all the Vats upon the Rhine Yield such an Alcohol! Inebriate of Air — am I — And Debauchee of Dew Reeling — thro endless summer days — From inns of Molten Blue When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee Out of the Foxglove’s door When Butterflies — renounce their “drams” —...
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Miss Lala at the Cirque Fernando - Benis White
Don’t go, of course, is the definitive feeling. Like a star on a
tree of gasps, we remember what is highest. What is furthest
from our hands. Past the row of windows, a rope draws her up
by her teeth, toward the curved orange ceiling with her head
back. Her gift is to stay attached (if she speaks she will fall),
to cleave in her mouth what is pulling away.
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The Coming of Light - Mark Strand
Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
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Arriving - Marge Piercy
People often labor to attain what turns out to be an entrance to a small closet or a deep pit or sorrow like a toothache of the brain. I wanted you. I fought you for yourself, I wrestled to open you, I hung on. I sat on my love as on the lid of a chest holding a hungry bear. You were what I wanted: you still are. Now my wanting feeds on success and grows, a cowbird chick in a warbler’s nest,...
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Flood - Eliza Griswold
I woke to a voice within the room. perhaps. The room itself: “You’re wasting this life expecting disappointment.” I packed my bag in the night and peered in its leather belly to count the essentials. Nothing is essential. To the east, the flood has begun. Men call to each other on the water for the comfort of voices. Love surprises us. It ends.
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How to Tell a Story - Shira Erlichman
There is a way of telling stories. A red pen. A teacher to move it. Instead you have hands, and a Light inside you, and Bones. Instead you have ideas, which ricochet, and an anger that won’t sit still, and dogs from outside which come to die in the quiet spots inside of you. And, deliberately, you have noise. You have rape, and cities, the noise of the dumb, and of the very rape of the earth, an...
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In Praise of Remoteness - Paul Celan
In the wellspring of your eyes live the fish-nets of the labyrinth-sea. In the wellspring of your eyes the ocean keeps its promise. Here I, a heart that lingered among men, cast off my clothes and the luster of a vow: Blacker in black, I am nuder. Only when faithless am I true. I am you when I am I. In the wellspring of your eyes I drift and dream about prey. A net snared a net: we separate...
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The Wait - Richard Brautigan
It seemed like years before I picked a bouquet of kisses off her mouth and put them into a dawn-colored vase in my heart. But the wait was worth it. Because I was in love.
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Crying - Galway Kinnell
Crying only a little bit
is no use. You must cry
until your pillow is soaked!
Then you can get up and laugh.
Then you can jump in the shower
and splash-splash-splash!
Then you can throw open your window
and, “Ha ha! ha ha!”
And if people say, “Hey,
what’s going on up there?”
“Ha ha!” sing back, “Happiness
was hiding in the last tear!
I wept it! Ha...
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How Am I Doing, Really? - Jane Yolen
You do not want me to answer that, for it would mean peeling back my skin splitting open my chest bones, revealing a heart that still beats though it is half the size it once was. It would mean sawing off the top of my skull and shaking out pieces of my brain which hardly functions right, left are memories, the latest ones first, like daguerreotypes nestled in a velvet lining, you dead on the...
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What Need or Duty - Susan L. Helwig
What need or duty makes me leave our warm bed with you put on cold 4 a.m. clothes heat coffee, fill the flask don more clothes boots, mitts, muffler, toque scarcely feel a farewell embrace stand and watch, shovel ready as you smash down the lane catching in drift after drift backing up and trying again backing up and trying again finally clearing the last windrow turning onto the main...
January 2012
21 posts
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A Marriage - R.S. Thomas
We met under a shower of bird-notes. Fifty years passed, love’s moment in a world in servitude to time. She was young; I kissed with my eyes closed and opened them on her wrinkles. ‘Come,’ said death, choosing her as his partner for the last dance. And she, who in life had done everything with a bird’s grace, opened her bill now for the shedding of one sigh no heavier than...
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Real Estate - Richard Brautigan
I have emotions that are like newspapers that read themselves. I go for days at a time trapped in the want ads. I feel as if I am an ad for the sale of a haunted house: 18 rooms $37,000 I’m yours ghosts and all. Tokyo June 2, 1976
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Happiness - Mike White
fills half a room
no one around to lift the thing
all those parts
after a while you give up
even dusting
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This Deepening Takes Place Again - Emily Kendal...
What if everything were revealed: where I was last night. You, etc. The rain is coming down like salad. My sister’s hair reminds me of my sister so much I can’t stop looking. Who am I to have arms? On the plane one short dream: a baby so small it wasn’t even human, just a bouquet of light with wise cellular eyes. If losing me is the worst thing to happen, your life is still a...
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Anyway - Richard Siken
He was pointing at the moon but I was looking at his hand.
He was dead anyway, a ghost. I’m surprised
I saw his hand at all. The moon, of course, is always
there—day moon, but it’s still there; behind the clouds but
it’s still there. I like seeing things: a hand, the moon, ice
in a highball glass. The moon? It’s free, it doesn’t
cost you anything so go ahead and look....
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When You Go - Edwin Morgan
When you go, if you go, and I should want to die, there’s nothing I’d be saved by more than the time you fell asleep in my arms in a trust so gentle I let the darkening room drink up the evening, till rest, or the new rain lightly roused you awake. I asked if you heard the rain in your dream and half dreaming still you only said, I love you.
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Billy the Kid - Jack Spicer
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Goodnight Moon - Ivan Granger
Beloved, tell me — Why do you come only when I orphan my ambitions? Why do you show only when all hope has fled? Why, Honeyed Moon, will you meet me only on my funeral bed? And, tell me — Why won’t the dead stay dead?
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Echoing Light - W.S. Merwin
When I was beginning to read I imagined that bridges had something to do with birds and with what seemed to be cages but I knew that they were not cages it must have been autumn with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires and those orange places on fire in the pictures and now indeed it is autumn the clear days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing over dry grass that yesterday...
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Alone - Walter de la Mare
The abode of the nightingale is bare, Flowered frost congeals in the gelid air, The fox howls from his frozen lair: Alas, my loved one is gone, I am alone: It is winter. Once the pink cast a winy smell, The wild bee hung in the hyacinth bell, Light in effulgence of beauty fell: I am alone: It is winter. My candle a silent fire doth shed, Starry Orion hunts o’erhead; Come moth, come shadow,...