Not from Cincinnati

Refugio's Hair

2012-01-26T15:55:00.000-05:00

In the old days of our family,
My grandmother was a young woman
Whose hair was as long as the river.
She lived with her sisters on the ranch
La Calera--The Land of the Lime--
And her days were happy.
But her uncle Carlos lived there too,
Carlos whose soul had the edge of a knife.
One day, to teach her to ride a horse,
He made her climb on the fastest one,
Bareback, and sit there
As he held its long face in his arms.
And then he did the unspeakable deed
For which he would always be remembered:
He called for the handsome baby Pirrín
And he placed the child in her arms.
With that picture of a Madonna on horseback
He slapped the shank of the horse's rear leg.
The horse did what a horse must,
Racing full toward the bright horizon.
But first he ran under the álamo trees
To rid his back of this unfair weight:
This woman full of tears
And this baby full of love.
When they reached the trees and went under,
Her hair, which had trailed her,
Equal in its magnificence to the tail of the horse,
That hair rose up and flew into the branches
As if it were a thousand arms,
All of them trying to save her.
The horse ran off and left her,
The baby still in her arms,
The two of them hanging from her hair.
The baby looked only at her
And did not cry, so steady was her cradle.
Her sisters came running to save them.
But the hair would not let go.
From its fear it held on and had to be cut,
All of it, from her head.
From that day on, my grandmother
Wore her hair short like a scream,
But it was long like a river in her sleep.

--Alberto Ríos

Ghazal

2012-01-26T01:51:00.000-05:00

What dream was lost when the fox's cry broke into the dark
calling his mate across the field, and woke me to the dark?

No one speaks the language anymore, those who escaped
blamed hunger or weather when they spoke of the dark.

One summer, we traveled from country to country.
High on the mountain, village men stoked fires in the dark.

Only a thin pane between us and the frozen world—
the cold carries the smell of wood smoke in the dark.

Remember Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark,"
smashing the lights, making a deadly joke of the dark?

What faith we have in sleep, trusting our bodies will wake
while night fills our vacancies—shadow-strokes in the dark.

"Time hurries by and we're here and we're gone," warns the song.
Someone used to whisper Michelle and hold me in the dark.

--Michelle Gillett

Colin Hay-Waiting for My Real Life to Begin

2012-01-26T01:29:00.000-05:00

A Winter Night

2012-01-23T01:26:00.000-05:00

The storm puts its mouth to the house
and blows to get a tone.
I toss and turn, my closed eyes
reading the storm's text.

The child's eyes grow wide in the dark
and the storm howls for him.
Both love the swinging lamps;
both are halfway towards speech.

The storm has the hands and wings of a child.
Far away, travellers run for cover.
The house feels its own constellation of nails
holding the walls together.

The night is calm in our rooms,
where the echoes of all footsteps rest
like sunken leaves in a pond,
but the night outside is wild.

A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid
the storm will blow us empty.

--Tomas Transtromer
translated by Robin Robertson

Etta Jones-I've Got Dreams to Remember

2012-01-20T22:18:00.000-05:00

Leonard Cohen

2012-01-17T02:06:00.001-05:00

Swans Among The Mallards

2012-01-16T02:14:00.000-05:00

No sudden blow upon the still air,

nor is she helpless in the swollen

inlet where they court

under overhanging willows,

necks braided like snakes.

Nothing unusual

in the way he mounts her,

no great beating of wings

as she sinks beneath his weight,

she knows enough to keep her head above water.

The tide turns, they drift among mallards,

bowing and swaying like a couple

of scholars debating

the pure forms of love.

--Geri Rosenzweig

* * *

2012-01-16T00:20:00.001-05:00

Лёгкой жизни я просил у Бога:
Посмотри, как мрачно всё кругом.
Бог ответил: — Пожди немного,
Ты ещё попросишь о другом.

Вот уже кончается дорога,
С каждым годом тоньше жизни нить.
Лёгкой жизни я просил у Бога,
Лёгкой смерти надо бы просить.

--I. Tkhorzhevsky

Overheard

2012-01-15T01:12:00.000-05:00

It's a beautiful day
the small man said from behind me
and I could tell he had a slight limp
from the rasp of his boot against the sidewalk
and I was slow to look at him
because I've learned to close my ears
against the voices of passersby, which is easier than closing
them to my own mind,
and although he said it I did not hear it
until he said it a second or third time
but he did, he said It's a beautiful day and something
in the way he pointed to the sun unfolding
between two oaks overhanging a basketball court
on 10th Street made me, too
catch hold of that light, opening my hands
to the dream of the soon blooming
and never did he say forget the crick in your neck
nor your bloody dreams; he did not say forget
the multiple shades of your mother's heartbreak,
nor the father in your city
kneeling over his bloody child,
nor the five species of bird this second become memory,
no, he said only, It's a beautiful day,
this tiny man
limping past me
with upturned palms
shaking his head
in disbelief.

--Ross Gay

Night Air

2012-01-10T12:12:00.000-05:00

"If God is Art, then what do we make
of Jasper Johns?" One never knows
what sort of question a patient will pose,

or how exactly one should answer.
Outside the window, snow on snow
began to answer the ground below

with nothing more than foolish questions.
We were no different. I asked again:
"Professor, have we eased the pain?"

Eventually, he’d answer me with:
"Tell me, young man, whom do you love?"
"E," I’d say, "None of the Above,"

and laugh for lack of something more
to add. For days he had played that game,
and day after day I avoided your name

by instinct. I never told him how
we often wear each other’s clothes—
we aren’t what many presuppose.

Call it an act of omission, my love.
Tonight, while walking to the car,
I said your name to the evening star,

clearly pronouncing the syllables
to see your name dissipate
in the air, evaporate.

Only the night air carries your words
up to the dead (the ancients wrote):
I watched them rise, become remote.

--C. Dale Young

Flight

2012-01-09T21:31:00.000-05:00

for K.

Like a glum cricket
the refrigerator is singing
and just as I am convinced

that it is the only noise
in the building, a pot falls
in 2B. The neighbors on

both sides of me suddenly
realize that they have not
made love to their wives

since 1947. The racket
multiplies. The man downhall
is teaching his dog to fly.

The fish are disgusted
and beat their heads blue
against the cold aquarium. I too

lose control and consider
the dust huddled in the corner
a threat to my endurance.

Were you here, we would not
tolerate mongrels in the air,
nor the conspiracies of dust.

We would drive all night,
your head tilted on my shoulder.
At dawn, I would nudge you

with my anxious fingers and say,
Already we are in Idaho.

--James Tate

Human Beauty

2012-01-09T21:27:00.000-05:00

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.

--Albert Goldbarth

The Day Beauty Divorced Meaning

2012-01-09T21:24:00.000-05:00

Their friends looked shocked—said not
possible, said how sad. The trees carried on
with their treeish lives—stately except when
they shed their silly dandruff of birds. And
the ocean did what oceans mostly do—
suspended almost everything, dropped one
small ship, or two. The day beauty divorced
meaning, someone picked a flower, a fight,
a flight. Someone got on a boat.
A closet lost its suitcases. Someone
was snowed in, someone else on. The sun
went down and all it was, was night.

--Leslie Harrison

Never Mind

2012-01-08T21:51:00.000-05:00

that guests no longer come unannounced
or that the photo album contains pictures
of much younger people than we remember being

never mind that swallows etch Sanskrit
on the wrinkled sky

it's November
and the present is emptying its wine
into our glasses

never mind that we're not touching now

because our shadows are holding hands
in the dark behind our backs

--Denver Butson

Ahihi Bay

2012-01-06T18:05:00.002-05:00

—for Beverly

So far this morning has been cool and gray
but as she walks backward into the sea,
adjusting her snorkel and mask, sunlight
appears over Haleakala's cone
to show the water all around her blue.
Teardrop butterfly and unicornfish
wait for her, saddle wrasse and leatherback,
yellow tang and spotted puffer. She sinks
into the surf and drifts above antler
coral and long-spined urchins where a green
sea turtle swam beside her yesterday.
The breeze dies down. From where I stand
on black lava outcroppings she is still,
though I know her arms and legs are moving
in the world of reef triggerfish and fire
dartfish. She rises and falls as the waves
seem to pass through her, turning her almost
imperceptibly toward the horizon.

--Floyd Skloot

Villanelle on a Line from Macbeth

2012-01-06T02:58:00.002-05:00

Stay, imperfect speaker, tell me more.
I don’t want the house, I want its ruins,
cracked panes, grandfather clock, paper-like door.

I want the vines that engulfed exterior walls,
petrified forests of books and manuscripts,
dust-filled afternoons that opened like doors

Onto Hesse’s wind-silvered fields, onto myths
surging up out of the earth. I want the man to say,
“Stay, imperfect speaker, tell me more,”

as he did at the end of every long conversation,
saying “imperfect” and meaning “unfinished,”
saying it always as I moved toward the door,

as I say it now, again and over and again,
I want the words to rebuild the house in shambles:
stay, imperfect speaker, tell me more.

I know: if I went back, there would be nothing
or worse: a new house, pristine, immaculate,
even the vine-filled library gone. I left and shut the door.
Imperfect memory, please, stay, tell me more.

--Michael Davis

Son of a Preacher Man

2012-01-06T02:27:00.000-05:00

Fragments for the End of the Year

2012-01-02T20:16:00.000-05:00

On average, odd years have been the best for me.

I’m at a point where everyone I meet looks like a version
of someone I already know.

Without fail, fall makes me nostalgic for things I’ve never experienced.

The sky is molting. I don’t know
if this is global warming or if the atmosphere is reconfiguring
itself to accommodate all the new bright suffering.

I am struck by an overwhelming need to go to Iceland.

Despite all awful variables, we are still full of ideas
as possible as unsexed fruit.

I was terribly sorry to be the one to explain to the first graders
the connection between the sunset and pollution.

On Venus you and I are not even a year old.

Then there were two skies.
The one we fly through and the one
we bury ourselves in.

I appreciate my wide beveled spatula which fulfills
the moment I realized I would grow up and own such things.

I am glad I do not yet want sexy bathroom accessories.
Such things.

In the story we were together every time.

On his wedding day, the stone in his chest
not fully melted but enough.

Sometimes I feel like there are birds flying out of me.

--Jennifer K. Sweeney

Band Aid-Do They Know It's Christmas

2011-12-25T13:38:00.000-05:00

B.Marley and The Wailers-White Christmas

2011-12-25T01:14:00.001-05:00

Queen-Thank God It's Christmas

2011-12-25T00:57:00.000-05:00

John Lennon-Happy Christmas War Is Over

2011-12-24T20:26:00.000-05:00

2011-12-24T02:58:00.003-05:00

How could I have come so far?
(And always on such dark trails!)
I must have traveled by the light
Shining from the faces of all those I have loved.

--Thomas McGrath

How It Adds Up

2011-12-23T00:37:00.002-05:00

There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean.
And the day I quit the job my father got me.
And the day I stood outside a door,
and listened to my girlfriend making love
to someone obviously not me, inside,

and I felt strange because I didn’t care.

There was the morning I was born,
and the year I was a loser,
and the night I was the winner of the prize
for which the audience applauded.

Then there was someone else I met,
whose face and voice I can’t forget,
and the memory of her
is like a jail I’m trapped inside,

or maybe she is something I just use
to hold my real life at a distance.

Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower
plucked from a river of lava
and held aloft on a tightrope
strung between two scrawny trees
above a canyon
in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it—,

And when you do, you will keep looking for it
everywhere, for years,
while right behind you,
the footprints you are leaving

will look like notes
of a crazy song.

--Tony Hoagland

Fork with Two Tines Pushed Together

2011-12-21T14:58:00.000-05:00

It's fast and cool as running water, the way we forget
the names of friends with whom we talked and talked
the long drives up and down the coast.

I say I love and I love and I love. However, the window
will not close. However, the hawk searches
for its nest after a storm. However, the discarded
nail longs to hide its nakedness inside the tire.

Somewhere in Cleveland or Tempe, a pillow
still smells like M_____'s hair.
In a bus station, a child is staring
at L____'s rabbit tattoo. I've bartered everything
to keep from doing my soul's paperwork.

(...)

Forgetfulness means to be full
of forgetting, like a glass

overflowing with cool water, though I'd always
thought of it as the empty pocket

where the hand finds
nothing: no keys, no ticket, no change.

One night, riding the train home from the city,
will I see a familiar face across from me? How many times
will I ask Is it you? before I realize
it's my own reflection in the window?

--Nick Lantz

Bullet-Relapse

2011-12-20T01:13:00.002-05:00

Rolling Stones-Can't You Hear Me Knockin'

2011-12-19T18:22:00.002-05:00

Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms

2011-12-15T15:48:00.000-05:00

The River

2011-12-09T13:09:00.000-05:00

I felt both pleasure and a shiver
as we undressed on the slippery bank
and then plunged into the wild river.

I waded in; she entered as a diver.
Watching her pale flanks slice the dark
I felt both pleasure and a shiver.

Was this a source of the lake we sought, giver
of itself to that vast, blue expanse?
We’d learn by plunging into the wild river

and letting the current take us wherever
it willed. I had that yielding to thank
for how I felt both pleasure and a shiver.

But what she felt and saw I’ll never
know: separate bodies taking the same risk
by plunging together into the wild river.

Later, past the rapids, we paused to consider
if chance or destiny had brought us here;
whether it was more than pleasure and a shiver
we’d found by plunging into the wild river.

--Gregory Orr

Project for a Fainting

2011-12-06T11:40:00.002-05:00

Oh, yes, the rain is sorry. Unfemale, of course, the rain is
with her painted face still plain and with such pixel you’d never see

it in the pure freckling, the lacquer of her. The world
is lighter with her recklessness, a handkerchief so wet it is clear.

To you. My withered place, this frumpy home (nearer
to the body than to evening) miserable beloved. I lie tender

and devout with insomnia, perfect on the center pillow past
midnight, sick with the thought of another year

of waking, solved and happy, it has never been this way! Believe
strangers who say the end is close for what could be closer?

You are my stranger and see how we have closed. On both ends.
Night wets me all night, blind, carried.

And watermarks. The plough of the rough on the slick,
love, a tendency toward fever. To break. To soil.

Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die.
It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would.

I have loved the slaking of your forgetters, your indifferent
hands on my loosening. Through a thousand panes of glass

not all transparent, and the temperature.
I felt that. What you say is not less than that.

--Brenda Shaughnessy

New Endymion

2011-12-04T02:08:00.000-05:00

She visits still too much, dressed in aromas
of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost
knowing she’s close, me not getting younger
or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate
I’m broad awake: her witchy presence waits
for me to jump into her arms, but then she’s just
an incoherent ache in sleep’s freaked scenes.
I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wrists
vaporing nooses around my head and feet
and genitals, conjuring my drab hair
into a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks.
She makes me nervous, but what would I do
without her? So long as I can’t have her,
I want her and this alarming manic frequency.
Then again, who wants to wake to change,
its pulped, smelly suit of meat, drawing flies?
My night-watch hot girl, moon-maiden, mom,
let me get just one night’s sleep without regret,
released from your foxy ticklish fondlings,
your latest smell of windblown fresh-cut grass.

--W. S. Di Piero

Card 19: The Sun

2011-11-28T09:48:00.000-05:00

When you show yourself to the woman
you love, you don’t know your fear

is not fear, itself. You have never been good,
but now you are so good,

who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skin
that bathes the world for you,

or her face, captured like a she-lion
in your own flesh?

This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring
upon ring of wedding, the kind

that doesn’t clink upon contact, the kind
with no contract,

the kind in which the gold is only (only!) light.
Cloud covers and lifts,

and sleep and night and soon enough, love’s
big fire laughs at a terrible burn,

but only (only!) because pain absorbs excess
joy and you shouldn’t flaunt

your treasures in front of all day’s eyes.

--Brenda Shaughnessy

The Raveonettes-Red Tan

2011-11-27T00:13:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the World Ends Here

2011-11-24T08:49:00.001-05:00

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

--Joy Harjo

Journey-Stay Awhile

2011-11-23T16:43:00.001-05:00

Artificial Horizon

2011-11-22T12:08:00.000-05:00

Thirty-five hundred feet above the earth, I said goodbye
to the heartland with its musk of animals and alfalfa,

to the Coralville Reservoir and its wounded
peregrine falcon with the dusky blue feathers,

to the lattice of pastures interlaced like Celtic spirals,
full of pink-snouted spotted pigs and overflowing corncribs,

to the cemetery with its black angel and tombstones
engraved with contemporary memento mori--

Garfield the cat, a pack of Marlboros, a Corvette--
instead of death's heads and winged cherubs.

We flew farther--saw the golden dome of the Maharishi
levitating and the barges on the Mississippi marking twain.

And hard by my hip, my pilot star, your long fingers
controlled the ailerons, practicing skid and slip,

Touch and go, bank and stall, keeping a steady hand
as we flew beyond the bounds of the artificial horizon.

--Sue Standing

The Unquarried Blue of Those Depths Is All But Blinding

2011-11-22T01:05:00.000-05:00

for John Fogleman

There are some things we just don’t talk about—

Not even in the morning, when we’re waking,

When your calloused fingers tentatively walk

The slope of my waist:

How love’s a rust-worn boat,

Abandoned at the dock—and who could doubt

Waves lick their teeth, eyeing its hull? We’re taking

Our wreckage as a promise, so we don’t talk.

We wet the tired oars, tide drawing us out.

We understand there’s nothing to be said.

Both of us know the dangers of this sea,

Warned by the tide-worn driftwood of our pasts—.

But we’ve already strayed from the harbor. We thread

A slow wake though the water—then silently,

We start to row, and will for as long as this lasts.

--Ashley Anna McHugh

Embodies [excerpt]

2011-11-21T10:49:00.002-05:00

Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms, twelve
blossoms on three different
branches, which for us, personally, means none this coming spring or perhaps none on
just those branches on which
just now
lands, suddenly, a grey-gold migratory bird—still here?—crisping,
multiplying the wrong
air, shifting branches with small
hops, then stilling—very still—breathing into this oxygen which also pockets my
looking hard, just
that, takes it in, also my
thinking which I try to seal off,
my humanity, I was not a mistake is what my humanity thinks, I cannot
go somewhere
else than this body, the afterwards of each of these instants is just
another instant, breathe, breathe,
my cells reach out, I multiply on the face of
the earth, on the
mud—I can see my prints on the sweet bluish mud—where I was just
standing and reaching to see if
those really were blossoms, I thought perhaps paper
from wind, & the sadness in
me is that of forced parting, as when I loved a personal
love, which now seems unthinkable, & I look at
the gate, how open it is,
in it the very fact of God as
invention seems to sit, fast, as in its saddle, so comfortable—& where
does the road out of it
go—& are those torn wires hanging from the limbs—& the voice I heard once ...

--Jorie Graham

As at the Far Edge of Circling

2011-11-21T01:27:00.000-05:00

As at the far edge of circling the country,
facing suddenly the other ocean,
the boundless edge of what I had wanted
to know, I stepped
into my answers’ shadow ocean,

the tightening curl of the corners
of outdated old paperbacks, breakers,
a crumble surf of tiny dry triangles around
my ankles sinking in my stand

taken that the horizon written
by the spin of my compass is that this is
is not enough a point to turn around on,

is like a skin that falls short of edge
as a rug, that covers a no longer
natural spot, no longer existent
to live on from, the map of my person
come to the end of, but not done.

That country crossed was what I could imagine,
and that little spit of answer is the shadow—
not the ocean which casts it— that I step next
into to be cleansed of question.

But not of seeking …it as
if simplified for the seeking,
come to its end at this body.

--Ed Roberson

Of What is Real

2011-11-21T00:04:00.000-05:00

I like to lie with you wordless
on black cloud rooft beach
in late june 5 o’clock tempest
on clump weed bed with sand
fitting your contours like tailor made

and I like to wash my summer brown face
in north cold hudson rapids
with octagon soap
knees niched in steamy rocks
where last night’s frog stared
at our buddhist sleep

but most of all I like to see
the morning happen . . .

I like to go down vertical mountains
where lanny goshkitch
meditated
crashing poplars
sap sticky arms flailing
as thermosed green tea
anoints sneakers
and blood soakt brow I taste and love
myself a split second

and I like to feel my own full scrotum
as I horizon the whole crisp linen earth
in my beatitude waiting miguel-like
in maskt fantasy for christ-like
you—
whoever you are

but most of all I like to see
the morning happen . . .

I like to look at books howl
haikus of the seasons
of the mind
that I might know the knowing
and the simplest to think of all of us
taking turns at catching each other
in the rye

and I like to taste cold absinthe
on hot hung sunday mornings
discussing orgies symposiums
and sounds with hoary headed poets
in upstairs jazz club
in Japan

but most of all I like to see
the morning happen when k and ike still sleep
and only the denver night riders hum contrasts
to orient jazzy feather beasts
in the dewy garden of real earth
where I can sink my naked feet
cool

--Richard Tagett

Convergences

2011-11-18T16:00:00.001-05:00

At sixteen he dismisses his mother with contempt.
She hears with dread the repulsive wave’s approach
and her fifty-year-old body smothers under water.

An old man loses half his weight, as if by stealth,
but finds in his shed his great-grandfather’s knobbly cane,
and hobbles toward youth beside the pond’s swart water.

She listens to the dun-colored whippoorwill’s
three-beat before dawn, and again when dusk
enters the cornfield parched and wanting water.

He imagines but cannot bring himself to believe
that the dead woman enters his house disguised
or that the young rabbi made vin rouge from water.

Within the poem he and she—hot, cold, and luke—
converge into flesh of vowels and consonant bones
or into uncanny affection of earth for water.

--Donald Hall

Eyes Only

2011-11-16T00:05:00.000-05:00

Dear lost sharer
of silences,
I would send a letter
the way the tree sends messages
in leaves,
or the sky in exclamations
of pure cloud.

Therefore I write
in this blue
ink, color
of secret veins
and arteries.
It is morning here.
Already the postman walks

the innocent streets,
dangerous as Aeolus
with his bag of winds,
or Hermes, the messenger,
god of sleep and dreams
who traces my image
upon this stamp.

In public buildings
letters are weighed
and sorted like meat;
in railway stations
huge sacks of mail
are hidden like robbers' booty
behind freight-car doors.

And in another city
the conjurer
will hold a fan of letters
before your outstretched hand—
"Pick any card. . . "
You must tear the envelope
as you would tear bread.

Only then dark rivers
of ink will thaw
and flow
under all the bridges
we have failed
to build
between us.

--Linda Pastan

Perishable, It Said

2011-11-14T00:40:00.000-05:00

Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
and below, in different ink,
the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.

I found myself looking:
now at the back of each hand,
now inside the knees,
now turning over each foot to look at the sole.

Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,
then at the arguing jays.

Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.
Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,
hunger, sorrow, fears—
these too would certainly vanish, without knowing when.

How suddenly then
the strange happiness took me,
like a man with strong hands and strong mouth,
inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings.

--Jane Hirshfield

The Lost Hotels of Paris

2011-11-09T18:11:00.001-05:00

The Lord gives everything and charges
by taking it back. What a bargain.
Like being young for a while. We are
allowed to visit the hearts of women,
go into their bodies so we feel
no longer alone. We are permitted
romantic love with its bounty and half-life
of two years. It is right to mourn
for the small hotels of Paris that used to be
when we used to be. My mansard looking
down on Notre Dame every morning is gone,
and me listening to the bell at night.
Venice is no more. The best Greek islands
have drowned in acceleration. But it’s the having
not the keeping that is the treasure.
Ginsberg came into my house one afternoon
and said he was giving up poetry
because it told lies, that language distorts.
I agreed, but asked what we have
that gets its right even that much.
We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see the memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough.

--Jack Gilbert

Sometimes I Am Startled Out of Myself

2011-11-08T23:38:00.000-05:00

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

--Barbara Crooker

Be Near Me

2011-11-03T15:04:00.000-04:00

Be near me now,
My tormenter, my love, be near me—
At this hour when night comes down,
When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comes
With the balm of musk in its hands, its diamond lancets,
When it comes with cries of lamentation,
with laughter with songs;
Its blue-gray anklets of pain clinking with every step.
At this hour when hearts, deep in their hiding places,
Have begun to hope once more, when they start their vigil
For hands still enfolded in sleeves;
When wine being poured makes the sound
of inconsolable children
who, though you try with all your heart,
cannot be soothed.
When whatever you want to do cannot be done,
When nothing is of any use;
—At this hour when night comes down,
When night comes, dragging its long face,
dressed in mourning,
Be with me,
My tormenter, my love, be near me.

--Faiz Ahmed Faiz
translated by Naomi Lazard

Decemberists-Calamity Song

2011-11-02T14:28:00.002-04:00

Vespertina Cognitio

2011-10-26T11:31:00.001-04:00

Overhead, pelicans glide in threes—
their shadows across the sand
dark thoughts crossing the mind.

Beyond the fringe of coast, shrimpers
hoist their nets, weighing the harvest
against the day's losses. Light waning,

concentration is a lone gull
circling what's thrown back. Debris
weights the trawl like stones.

All day, this dredging—beneath the tug
of waves—rhythm of what goes out,
comes back, comes back, comes back.

--Natasha Trethewey

Nights On The Peninsula

2011-10-25T01:22:00.002-04:00

We could not separate ourselves from our endless making.
We were always fabricating time, God, paradise,
the bell-shaped lupines, the rough-grained elm
and smooth beech. We made the night sky from a rusty hinge,
the sea from a sigh and a bead of sweat. We made love
long before dawn. We constantly modified each other,
adding a leer to the other's face, or a smirk, even in sleep.
What kind of a tool-maker invents eternity and exile
and makes them race, like a child with the index and middle finger?
Even in dreams we bore the burden of waking, we called it suffering.
Even in a trance we had maps and blueprints. In the deepest dream
we received the gift of death—it rained on that peninsula.
The wind passed like a sponge over the gambrel roofs.
The leaves showed a blank side, veined like a cresting wave.
We were almost home, we thought. We had never seen this world
but we sensed it, like a cat's breath against our wrists:
we were married, the bees loved us, the ocean might relent,
the child muttered over a handful of dust and spit.

--D. Nurkse

Ophelia to the Court

2011-10-24T16:56:00.000-04:00

My shoes are unpolished, my words smudged.
I come to you undressed (the lord, he whispers
Smut; that man, he whispers such). I bend
My thoughts, I submit, but a bird
Keeps flying from my mind, it slippers
My feet and sings—barren world,
I have been a little minx in it, not at all
Domestic, not at all clean, not at all blinking
At my lies. First he thought he had a wife, then
(of course) he thought he had a whore. All
I wanted (if I may speak for myself) was: more.
If only one of you had said, I hold
Your craven breaking soul, I see the pieces,
I feel them in my hands, idle silver, idle gold...
You see I cannot speak without telling what I am.
I disobey the death you gave me, love.
If you must be, then be not with me.

--Meghan O'Rourke

I Belong There

2011-10-24T16:55:00.000-04:00

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird's sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to
her mother.
And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.
To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.

--Mahmoud Darwish
translated by Carolyn Forché and Munir Akash

Jack Johnson-Home

2011-10-17T14:31:00.001-04:00

From Out the Cave

2011-10-17T10:00:00.000-04:00

When you have been

at war with yourself

for so many years that

you have forgotten why,

when you have been driving

for hours and only

gradually begin to realize

that you have lost the way,

when you have cut

hastily into the fabric,

when you have signed

papers in distraction,

when it has been centuries

since you watched the sun set

or the rain fall, and the clouds,

drifting overhead, pass as flat

as anything on a postcard;

when, in the midst of these

everyday nightmares, you

understand that you could

wake up,

you could turn

and go back

to the last thing you

remember doing

with your whole heart:

that passionate kiss,

the brilliant drop of love

rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,

then you wake,

you stumble from your cave,

blinking in the sun,

naming every shadow

as it slips.

--Joyce Sutphen

At the Equinox

2011-10-13T13:53:00.000-04:00

The tide ebbs and reveals orange and purple sea stars.
I have no theory of radiance,

but after rain evaporates
off pine needles, the needles glisten.

In the courtyard, we spot the rising shell of a moon,
and, at the equinox, bathe in its gleam.

Using all the tides of starlight,
we find
vicissitude is our charm.

On the mud flats off Homer,
I catch the tremor when waves start to slide back in;

and, from Roanoke, you carry
the leafing jade smoke of willows.

Looping out into the world, we thread
and return. The lapping waves

cover an expanse of mussels clustered on rocks;
and, giving shape to what is unspoken,

forsythia buds and blooms in our arms.

--Arthur Sze

from Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus

2011-10-09T23:53:00.000-04:00

ii Gloria

Praise the wet snow
falling early.
Praise the shadow
my neighor's chimney casts on the tile roof
even this gray October day that should, they say,
have been golden.
Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney's shadow.
Praise
god or the gods, the unknown,
that which imagined us, which stays
our hand,
our murderous hand,
and gives us
still,
in the shadow of death,
our daily life,
and the dream still
of goodwill, of peace on earth.
Praise
flow and change, night and
the pulse of day.

--Denise Levertov

L.Anderson-Strange Angels

2011-10-05T17:04:00.001-04:00

Autumn Movement

2011-10-04T00:25:00.000-04:00

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman,
the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things
come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go,
not one lasts.

--Carl Sandburg

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy

2011-09-23T19:01:00.000-04:00

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

--Jack Spicer

One Republic-Good Life

2011-09-23T10:09:00.002-04:00

Up they soar

2011-09-22T11:28:00.000-04:00

I

Up they soar, the planet's butterflies,
pigments from the warm body of the earth,
cinnabar, ochre, phosphor yellow, gold
a swarm of basic elements aloft.

Is this flickering of wings only a shoal
of light particles, a quirk of perception?
Is it the dreamed summer hour of my childhood
shattered as by lightning lost in time?

No, this is the angel of light, who can paint
himself as dark mnemosyne Apollo,
as copper, hawkmoth, swallowtail.

I see them with my blurred understanding
as feathers in the coverlet of haze
in Brajcino Valley's noon-hot air.

---Inger Christensen
translated by Susanna Nied

Chuang Tzu and the First Noble Truth

2011-09-09T02:24:00.000-04:00

As Chuang Tzu would say
when some good Confucian talked
about righteousness
and virtue, "Not quite there yet,
eh?" knowing that words can say

only so much, that
behind the words are more words,
and more behind those.
What the old man understood
is that each word names, and by

naming, it divides:
this from that and on and on.
But the Tao is one.
What is good is good for whom?
Do dogs have Buddha nature?

Say yes or say no,
and Buddha nature is gone.
The practice refines
itself. All the words I've loved
so many years? Going, gone.

Buddha nature, Tao,
the practice of poetry-
going, going, gone.
Present mind and future mind
lie beyond what is contained.

What mind do we bring
to the poem or to bed?
Stuck in samsara,
dreaming of truth and virtue,
just who is that butterfly,

just who is that man
who says again with a grin
and shake of the head,
"Struggle and judgment and pain-
still not quite there yet, eh?"

--Sam Hamill

* * *

2011-09-09T02:21:00.000-04:00

There is a word from the time of the cathedrals: agape, an expression of intense spiritual affinity with the mystery that is "to be sharing life with another life". Agape is love, and it can mean "the love of another for the sake of God". More broadly and essentially it is a humble impassioned embrace of something outside the self, in the name of that which we refer to as God, but which also includes the self and is God. We are clearly indebted as a species to the play of our intelligence; we trust our future to it; but we do not know whether intelligence is this desire to embrace and be embraced in the pattern that both theologians and physicists call God. Whether intelligence, in other words, is love.

--Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (London: Picador, 1986)

Heaven

2011-09-06T14:30:00.002-04:00

It will be the past
and we'll live there together.

Not as it was to live
but as it is remembered.

It will be the past.
We'll all go back together.

Everyone we ever loved,
and lost, and must remember.

It will be the past.
And it will last forever.

--Patrick Phillips

Leonard Cohen-Anthem

2011-09-01T23:34:00.006-04:00

A Dog Has Died

2011-08-21T09:52:00.003-04:00

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.

--Pablo Neruda
translated By Alfred Yankauer

A Dog's Life

2011-08-20T18:52:00.004-04:00

A stay of execution: one last day,
your day, old Everydog, then, as they say,
or as we say (a new trick to avoid
finalities implicit in destroyed),
you have to be put down, or put to sleep—
the very dog who, once, would fight to keep
from putting down, despite our shouts, a shoe
until he gnawed it to the sole, and who
would sit up, through our sleepless nights, to bark
away some menace looming in the dark.

Can you pick up the sense of all this talk?
Or do you still just listen for a walk,
or else, the ultimate reward, a car?—
My God, tomorrow's ride . . . Well, here we are,
right now. You stare at me and wag your tail.
I stare back, dog-like, big and dumb. Words fail.
No more commands, ignore my monologue,
go wander off. Good dog. You're a good dog.
And you could never master, anyway,
the execution, as it were, of Stay

--Daniel Groves

Back Yard

2011-08-19T14:15:00.000-04:00

Shine on, O moon of summer.
Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,
All silver under your rain tonight.

An Italian boy is sending songs to you tonight from an accordion.
A Polish boy is out with his best girl; they marry next month;
tonight they are throwing you kisses.

An old man next door is dreaming over a sheen that sits in a
cherry tree in his back yard.

The clocks say I must go — I stay here sitting on the back porch drinking
white thoughts you rain down.

Shine on, O moon,
Shake out more and more silver changes.

----Carl Sandburg

from The Dreams of Chang

2011-08-18T15:41:00.002-04:00

"For, were all these Buddhas of yours more foolish than
you and I? And yet, just you listen to what they say
about this love of the universe and all things corporeal,
beginning with sunlight, with a wave, with the air, and
winding up with woman, with an infant, with the scent
of white acacia! Or else, -- do you know what sort of a
thing this Tao is, that has been thought up by nobody
else but you Chinamen? I know it but poorly myself,
brother, but then, everybody knows it poorly; but, as
far as it is possible to understand it, just what is it, after
all? The Abyss, our First Mother; She gives birth to all
things that exist in this universe, and She devours them
as well, and, devouring them, gives birth to them anew;
or, to put it in other words, It is the Path of all that ex-
ists, which nothing that exists may resist. But we resist
It every minute; every minute we want to turn to our
desire not only the soul of a beloved woman, let us say,
but even the entire universe as well! It is an eerie thing
to be living in this world, Chang," said the captain; "it's
a most pleasant thing, but still an eerie one, and espe-
cially for such as I! For I am too avid of happiness, and
all too often do I lose the way: dark and evil is this
Path, -- or is it entirely, entirely otherwise?"
And, after a silence, he added further:
"For after all, what is the main thing? When you
love somebody, there is no power on earth that can make
you believe that the one you love can possibly not love
you. And that is just where the devil comes in, Chang.
But how magnificent life is; my God, how magnificent!"

--Ivan Bunin
translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney

24th September 1945

2011-08-17T21:16:00.003-04:00

The best sea: has yet to be crossed.
The best child: has yet to grow up.
The best days: have yet to be lived;
and the best word I wanted to say to you
is the word I have not yet said.

--Nazim Hikmet

blessing the boats

2011-08-17T21:13:00.000-04:00

(at St. Mary's)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

--Lucille Clifton

To Paula in Late Spring

2011-08-17T21:10:00.003-04:00

Let me imagine that we will come again

when we want to and it will be spring

we will be no older than we ever were

the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud

through which the morning slowly comes to itself

and the ancient defenses against the dead

will be done with and left to the dead at last

the light will be as it is now in the garden

that we have made here these years together

of our long evenings and astonishment.

--W.S. Merwin

You Can't Have It All

2011-08-17T17:18:00.002-04:00

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.

--Barbara Ras

Springsteen-Devils & Dust

2011-08-17T13:56:00.003-04:00

As Usual

2011-08-12T10:29:00.001-04:00

After we have parted, the boats
Will continue to leave the harbor at dawn.
The salmon will struggle up to the pools,
one month following the other on the wall.

The magnolia will flower,
and the bee - the noble bee -
I saw one earlier on my walk -
will shoulder his way into the bud.

--Billy Collins

Monet Refuses the Operation

2011-08-11T10:37:00.000-04:00

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

--Lisel Mueller

One More Hymn to the Sun

2011-08-11T10:35:00.001-04:00

You know that like an ideal mother

she will never leave you,

though after a week of rain

you begin to worry

but you accept her brief absences,

her occasional closed doors

as the prerogative

of an eccentric lover . . .

You like the fact that her moods are an orderly version of yours,

arranged, like the needs of animals,

by seasons: her spring quirks,

her sexual summers,

her steadfast warmth in the fall;

you remember her face on Christmas Day,

blurred, and suffused with the weak smile

of a woman who has just given birth

The way she loves you, your whole body,

and still leaves enough space between you

to keep you from turning to cinders

before your time! . . .

She never gave up on you

though it took you billions of years

to learn the alphabet

and the shadow you cast on the ground

changed its shape again and again

- Lisel Mueller

Sometimes, When the Light

2011-08-11T10:31:00.001-04:00

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.

--Lisel Mueller

Palindrome

2011-08-11T10:27:00.000-04:00

There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in
imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which
time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the
other. . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own
time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.”
—Martin Gardner, in Scientific American

Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am
putting on. It is evening in the antiworld
where she lives. She is forty-five years away
from her death, the hole which spit her out
into pain, impossible at first, later easing,
going, gone. She has unlearned much by now.
Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,
her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,
she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his
shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,
but their ardor increases. Soon her second child
will be young enough to fight its way into her
body and change its life to monkey to frog to
tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to
nothing. She is making a list:
Things I will need in the past
lipstick
shampoo
transistor radio
Sergeant Pepper
acne cream
five-year diary with a lock
She is eager, having heard about adolescent love
and the freedom of children. She wants to read
Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster
without getting sick. I think of her as she will
be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the
mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,
her other to open a jar. By now our lives should
have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have
passed one another like going and coming trains,
with both of us looking the other way.

--Lisel Mueller

What The Dog Perhaps Hears

2011-08-11T10:25:00.001-04:00

If an inaudible whistle
blown between our lips
can send him home to us,
then silence is perhaps
the sound of spiders breathing
and roots mining the earth;
it may be asparagus heaving,
headfirst, into the light
and the long brown sound
of cracked cups, when it happens.
We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child in the house
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel of effort,
whether in autumn, when the trees
dry up their wells, there isn't a shudder
too high for us to hear.

What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed.

--Lisel Mueller

The Blind Leading the Blind

2011-08-11T10:22:00.001-04:00

Take my hand. There are two of us in this cave.
The sound you hear is water; you will hear it forever.
The ground you walk on is rock. I have been here before.
People come here to be born, to discover, to kiss,
to dream, and to dig and to kill. Watch for the mud.
Summer blows in with scent of horses and roses;
fall with the sound of sound breaking; winter shoves
its empty sleeve down the dark of your throat.
You will learn toads from diamonds, the fist from palm,
love from the sweat of love, falling from flying.
There are a thousand turnoffs. I have been here before.
Once I fell off a precipice. Once I found gold.
Once I stumbled on murder, the thin parts of a girl.
Walk on, keep walking, there are axes above us.
Watch for the occasional bits and bubbles of light —
Birthdays for you, recognitions: yourself, another.
Watch for the mud. Listen for bells, for beggars.
Something with wings went crazy against my chest once.
There are two of us here. Touch me.

--Lisel Mueller

If Time Is An Engine

2011-08-11T10:19:00.003-04:00

There are sunflowers on the path where I go

and lacewings rising from the fields

With each step I take, I know more surely

that this is the way

If time is an engine, then it was created in a dream

If love is an engine, then the dreamer weeps

If memory is an engine, then it will carry the dream away

But there are sunflowers on the path where I go

and the dog is at my heel. There is a gate

and a meadow beyond. There is a stream

The sky is blue by day, blue in the evening

But I know the way of the hidden stars

and I'm still alive, I still know secrets

There is nothing I have left undone.

So my keys are on the table. You can sell my

clothes. Rust, rust is affecting the machinery

But I am not needed. The machines can be repaired

For if time is a cathedral, then I have lived in the cathedral

If love is a cathedral, then I have lived in splendor

If memory is a cathedral, then I remember everything

but now pass by. And there are sunflowers

on the path where I go. The dog is at my heel

There is a gate and a meadow beyond

There is a stream

--Eleanor Lerman

Jasmine-Rain

2011-07-30T01:08:00.002-04:00

Eagles-Take It To The Limit

2011-07-29T12:00:00.007-04:00

The Mystery of Meteors

2011-07-29T11:59:00.001-04:00

I am out before dawn, marching a small dog through a meager park

Boulevards angle away, newspapers fly around like blind white birds

Two days in a row I have not seen the meteors

though the radio news says they are overhead

Leonid's brimstones are barred by clouds; I cannot read

the signs in heaven, I cannot see night rendered into fire

And yet I do believe a net of glitter is above me

You would not think I still knew these things:

I get on the train, I buy the food, I sweep, discuss,

consider gloves or boots, and in the summer,

open windows, find beads to string with pearls

You would not think that I had survived

anything but the life you see me living now

In the darkness, the dog stops and sniffs the air

She has been alone, she has known danger,

and so now she watches for it always

and I agree, with the conviction of my mistakes.

But in the second part of my life, slowly, slowly,

I begin to counsel bravery. Slowly, slowly,

I begin to feel the planets turning, and I am turning

toward the crackling shower of their sparks

These are the mysteries I could not approach when I was younger:

the boulevards, the meteors, the deep desires that split the sky

Walking down the paths of the cold park

I remember myself, the one who can wait out anything

So I caution the dog to go silently, to bear with me

the burden of knowing what spins on and on above our heads

For this is our reward: Come Armageddon, come fire or flood,

come love, not love, millennia of portents--

there is a future in which the dog and I are laughing

Born into it, the mystery, I know we will be saved

--Eleanor Lerman

July-Dill & Cilantro

2011-07-25T13:21:00.004-04:00

from Wail of the Arab Beggars of the Casbah

2011-07-25T13:07:00.000-04:00

. . .

The hands of the poor people
of the Casbah
are long and thin and stretched like the roots
of potatoes.
The voice of the poor people
is frail,
they have round eyes
and ugly mugs,
like Pepe Le Moko's when he's sloshed on the Rue
du Regard one rainy
day
near the Grevin Museum.

Now a minute of silence. . .
two hours of minutes of silence
in memory of those dead of hunger
in memory of those dead from the cold
in memory of those dead of an overdose of sleep
in memory of those dead broke
and a stop-right-there; after you; no, you first; no, you
in memory as well
of the living dead, who are neither too dead nor too alive
but nonetheless are
living
for want of something better.

One day
I set about counting the poor people
in the streets of my Casbah
The beggars were enumerating their vermin:
fleas, lice, bedbugs with wrapping included.
There's only one sun for everybody,
for the Americans and for the Cannibals.

. . .

----Ishmael Ait Djafer
translated by Jack Hirschman

Quarantine

2011-07-25T12:52:00.000-04:00

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

--Evan Boland

Sachuest Beach Fog

2011-07-24T23:45:00.001-04:00

June-Andromeda & Dogwood

2011-07-24T20:08:00.009-04:00

David Byrne-Eno-Home

2011-07-24T13:06:00.000-04:00

July

2011-07-24T02:56:00.000-04:00

Temperature in the upper seventies, a bit of a breeze. Great
cumulus clouds pass slowly through the summer sky like
parade floats. And the slender grasses gather round you,
pressing forward, with exaggerated deference, whispering,
eager to catch a glimpse. It's your party after all. And it couldn't
be more perfect. Yet there's a nagging thought: you don't really
deserve all this attention, and that come October, there will be
a price to pay.

----Louis Jenkins

Guitar

2011-07-24T02:36:00.001-04:00

Beneath the full moon
they went hunting guitars.
And brought back this one,
pale, delicate, shapely,
eyes of inexhaustible mulata

waist of wood with an opening.
She is young, barely flies.
But already she sings when she hears
songs and couplets
flutter their wings in other cages.
Sombersongs and lonelycouplets.
There is inscription on her cage:

"Beware: she dreams."

--Nicolas Guillen

The Difference between a Child and a Poem

2011-07-18T18:39:00.000-04:00

If you are terrified of your own death,
and want to escape from it,
you may want to write a poem,
for the poem might carry your name
into eternity, the poem
may become immortal, beyond flesh
and fashion, it may be read
in a thousand years by someone
as frightened of death as you are,
in a dark field, at night,
when he has failed once again at love
and there is no illusion with which to escape
the inward pull of his own flesh
against the narrowing margins of the spirit.

But if you have accepted your own death,
if you have pinched daily the corroborating flesh,
and have passed the infinite gravestones
bearing your name, if you know for certain
that the day will one day come
when you will gaze into the mirror in search of your face
and find only a silence, then
you may want to make a child, you may want to push
the small oracles of flesh forward
into some merely finite but lengthening story,
you may want to toss your seed into the wind
like a marigold, or a passion fruit, and watch
as a fresh flower grows in your place, as your face
inches onto another face, and your eyes
slip down over your cheeks onto the forehead
of your silenced, speakable future.

And, then, when you are done with all that,
you may want to write a poem.

--Michael Blumenthal

Be Kind

2011-07-18T17:21:00.000-04:00

Not merely because Henry James said
there were but four rules of life—
be kind be kind be kind be kind—but
because it's good for the soul, and,
what's more, for others, it may be
that kindness is our best audition
for a worthier world, and, despite
the vagueness and uncertainty of
its recompense, a bird may yet wander
into a bush before our very houses,
gratitude may not manifest itself in deeds
entirely equal to our own, still there's
weather arriving from every direction,
the feasts of famine and feasts of plenty
may yet prove to be one, so why not
allow the little sacrificial squinches and
squigulas to prevail? Why not inundate
the particular world with minute particulars?
Dust's certainly all our fate, so why not
make it the happiest possible dust,
a detritus of blessedness? Surely
the hedgehog, furling and unfurling
into its spiked little ball, knows something
that, with gentle touch and unthreatening
tone, can inure to our benefit, surely the wicked
witches of our childhood have died and,
from where they are buried, a great kindness
has eclipsed their misdeeds. Yes, of course,
in the end so much comes down to privilege
and its various penumbras, but too much
of our unruly animus has already been
wasted on reprisals, too much of the
unblessed air is filled with smoke from
undignified fires. Oh friends, take
whatever kindness you can find
and be profligate in its expenditure:
It will not drain your limited resources,
I assure you, it will not leave you vulnerable
and unfurled, with only your sweet little claws
to defend yourselves, and your wet little noses,
and your eyes to the ground, and your little feet.

--Michael Blumenthal

Carmel Point

2011-07-11T03:01:00.002-04:00

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

--Robinson Jeffers

Chantal Kreviazuk-Time

2011-07-02T02:51:00.003-04:00

Before the Snake

2011-07-02T02:10:00.000-04:00

Sitting, facing the sun, eyes closed. I can hear the
sun. I can hear the bird life all around for miles.
It flies through us and around us, it takes up all
space, as if we were not there, as if we had never
interrupted this place. The birds move diorami-
cally through our heads, from ear to ear. What
are they doing, singing in this luminous fall. It is
marvelous to be so alone, the two of us, in this
garden desert. Forgotten, but remembering
ourselves as no one will ever remember us. The
space between the trees, the bare ground-sand
between them, you can see the land's skin which
is so much home. We cannot buy or sell this
marvelous day. I can hear the sun and, within
the sun, the wind which comes out of the world's
lungs from immeasurable depth; we catch only
a distant echo. Beyond the birds there are per-
sons carrying their names like great weights.
Just think: carrying X your whole life, or Y, or Z.
Carrying all that A and B and C around with you,
having to be A all the time, B, or C. Here you can
be the sun, the pine, the bird. You can be the
breathing. I can tell you, I think this may be
Eden. I think it is.

--Nathaniel Tarn

The Fifth Dream: Bullets and Deserts and Borders

2011-06-30T14:50:00.000-04:00

A man is walking toward me.
He is alone.
He has been walking through the desert.
He has been walking for days.
He has been walking for years.
His lips are dry
and cracking
like a piece of spent soil.
I can see his open wounds.
His eyes are dark
as a Tanzanian night.

He discovers I have been watching
though he has long ceased to care
what others see. I ask him
his name, ask him what
has brought him here, ask
him to name
his angers and his loves.
He opens his mouth
to speak—
but just as his words hit
the air, a bullet
pierces his heart.

I do not know
the country
of this man’s birth. I only know
that he is from
the desert. He has the worn
look of despair
that only rainless days can give.
That is all I know.
He might have been born
in Jerusalem. He might have been
born in Egypt. He might
have been the direct descendant
of a pharaoh. His name
might have been Ptolemy.
His name might have been
Moses. Or Jesus.
Or Muhammad.
He might have been a prophet.
He might have been a common thief.
He might have been a terrorist
or he might have been just
another man destined
to be worn down
by the ceaseless, callous storms.
He might have come
from a country called Afghanistan.
He might have been from Mexico.

He might have been
looking for a well.
His dreams were made of water.
His lips touching
water—yes—
that is what he was dreaming.

I can still hear the sound of the bullet.

*

The man reappears.
It does not matter
that I do not want him
in my dreams. He is
searching through the rubble
of what was once his house.
There are no tears on his
face. His lips still yearn
for water.

*

I wake. I begin to believe
that the man has escaped
from Auschwitz. Perhaps he sinned
against the Nazis or because
he was a collaborator or because
he was Jewish
or because he loved another man.
He has come
to the desert looking
for a place he can call home.
I fall asleep trying
to give the man a name.

*

The man is now
walking toward a city
that is no longer there.

*

I am the man.
I see clearly. I am
awake now.
It is me. It has taken me
a long time to know this.
I am a Palestinian.
I am an Israeli.
I am a Mexican.
I am an American.
I am a busboy in a tall building
that is about to collapse.
I am attending a Seder and I am
tasting my last bitter
herb. I am a boy who has learned
all his prayers. I am bowing
toward Mecca in a house
whose roof will soon collapse
on my small frame.
I am a servant. I shine shoes
and wash the feet
of the rich. I am an illegal.
I am a Mexican who hates all Americans.
I am an American who hates all Mexicans.
I am a Palestinian who hates all Israelis.
I am an Israeli who hates all Palestinians.
I am a Palestinian Jew who hates himself.

I am dying of all this knowledge.
I am dying of thirst.
I am a river that will never know water again.
I am becoming dust.

*

I am walking toward my home.
Mexico City? Washington?
Mecca? Jerusalem?
I don’t know. I don’t know.

*

I am walking in the desert.

I see that I am reaching a border.

A bullet is piercing my heart.

-- Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Ancient Theories

2011-06-30T14:43:00.000-04:00

A horse hair falls into the water and grows into an eel.
Even Aristotle believed that frogs
formed from mud,
that mice sprouted like seedlings in the damp hay.

I used to believe the world spoke
in code. I lay awake
and tried to parse the flashes of the streetlight—
obscured, revealed,
obscured by the wind-sprung tree.
Stranded with you at the Ferris wheel's apogee
I learned the physics
of desire—fixed at the center,
it spins and goes nowhere.

Pliny described eight-foot lobsters
sunning themselves
on the banks of the Ganges. The cuckoo devouring
its foster mother. Bees alighting
on Plato's young lips.

In the Andes, a lake disappears overnight, sucked
through cracks in the earth.
How can I explain
the sunlight stippling your face in the early morning?

Why not believe that the eye throws its own light,
that seeing illuminates
the world?
On the moon,
astronaut David Scott drops a hammer and a falcon feather,
and we learn nothing
we didn't already know.

--Nick Lantz

Wind out of Patmos

2011-06-30T14:25:00.003-04:00

Season of green figs
Season of green figs
Each morning I see farther beyond the wall
that separates me from the Garden of forbidden illusions
and repeat the urgent slogan:
It’s a season of green figs.
I wake up with this conviction
it stays with me through the difficult day
buffeted by stupidity and uselessness
and at the hour of the yearned-for meeting
I share it with you
in places condemned to ruin
strictly separated from God’s affection.
This is the season of green figs
The animals appear to sense it
they keep a cautious distance
they stray from whoever we continue to wait for.
For amorous friendship
it’s also the season of green figs.
I have seen too much to do nothing
The wind out of Patmos moves my beloved papers
hovers above my parents’ house
it’s threatening the places that you and I,
together, are trying to save from chaos and ruin.
I have seen too much to wait calmly
for the revelation to happen.
Civitas Dei, your cry in the wilderness, your sign
in the rainbow displayed as an only token of survival

--Delfín Prats