Nina Simone - I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free (Montreux 1976)

Small Axe (1992) - Bob Marley & The Wailers

Gene Wilder - Final Monologue (Rhinoceros - 1974) (Berenger/Stanley)

Leonard Cohen - Anthem (Live in London)

How to Apologize

Cook a large fish—choose one with many bones, a skeleton
you will need skill to expose, maybe the flying
silver carp that's invaded the Great Lakes, tumbling
the others into oblivion. If you don't live
near a lake, you'll have to travel.
Walking is best and shows you mean it,
but you could take a train and let yourself
be soothed by the rocking
on the rails. It's permitted
to receive solace for whatever you did
or didn't do, pitiful, beautiful
human. When my mother was in the hospital,
my daughter and I had to clear out the home
she wouldn't return to. Then she recovered
and asked, incredulous,
How could you have thrown out all my shoes?
So you'll need a boat. You could rent or buy,
but, for the sake of repairing the world,
build your own. Thin strips
of Western red cedar are perfect,
but don't cut a tree. There'll be
a demolished barn or downed trunk
if you venture further.
And someone will have a mill.
And someone will loan you tools.
The perfume of sawdust and the curls
that fall from your plane
will sweeten the hours. Each night
we dream thirty-six billion dreams. In one night
we could dream back everything lost.
So grill the pale flesh.
Unharness yourself from your weary stories.
Then carry the oily, succulent fish to the one you hurt.
There is much to fear as a creature
caught in time, but this
is safe. You need no defense. This
is just another way to know
you are alive.

--Ellen Bass

 

Berlin, 1932

The People's History of 1998

France won the World Cup. 

Our dark-goggled dictator died from eating

a poisoned red apple  

though everyone knew it was the CIA.  

We lived miles from the Atlantic. 

 We watched Dr. Dolittle, Titanic, The Mask

of Zorro. Our grandfather, purblind and waiting  

for the Kingdom of God, sat on a throne in his dark 

room, translating Dante.  

The Galileo space probe revealed

there was an entire ocean hiding beneath a sheet  

of ice in Jupiter's moon. 

 The Yangtze River in China lost its nerve 

 and wanted vengeance.

Elsewhere a desert caught fire.  

We got a plastic green turtle and named it Sir  

Desmond Tutu. 

A snake entered our house through the drain

and like any good son, I ran  

and hid under the bed. 

Google became a thing.  

Viagra became a thing.     

In July, it flooded at night and a wind nearly 

 tore off our roof. I thought God is so in love with us, 

 he wants to fill us with himself. 

My mother, I saw her through a slit in the door, a glimpse 

 of amaranth-red scarf and swirling yellow skirt. 

 She thought no one was looking. She was dancing in a trance 

 to Fela Kuti. She laughed and clapped 

at the mirror. It was the year our house 

became a house of boys and girls, and a ghost, our little sister.  

Calmaria. That's what the Portuguese called it. When it rained  

and the world was suddenly becalmed, we would run

and peel out of the door, waving at the aurora  

of birds flitting past in the sky.  

We knew one of them, the little one, used to be one of us,  

those spectral white egrets.  

 

--Gbenga Adesina   

Kin: First Responders

 

^{On August 2, 2010, siblings and cousins Takeitha Warner, 13; JaMarcus Warner, 14; JaTavious Warner, 17; Litrelle Stewart, 18; LaDarius Stewart, 17; and Latevin Stewart, 15, drowned in the Red River in Shreveport, Louisiana in attempt to save DeKendrix Warner, 15, who was rescued.}

One of they own was down in the belly of the river, so The Six dove and flew, neither flippered nor winged, as if air could hold them, as if riverwater was sweet.

The children believed in miracles, believed they was miracles, believed life was not life without they people.

Somebody said they was searching for stars but looked down into them waves. The stars they perceived was brother, sister, cousin, each eye shining with rivermud studded with gemstone, each mouth open and gleaming with tooth, gold, child-holler. 

So, they did what humans do when they fall in love: fall. Flung they bodies in full panic, full surrender, one after another after another after another after another, one behind the other, into riverwater—We blood in life, blood in death, ain’t we, Blood?—drowned as one sound. 

Water was neither translucent nor transparent, which means not one could read their futures, which were dying as they dove, dying as their limbs did not heed the love-command of they individual hearts to stroke and live, stroke and live, but stroke they did, stroke they did.

Ingested riverwater
like shine—mud, sediment, sludge—
they blues turned mouth,
part holy, part tomb:

Kin, when you go, I go.
We bout to die soon.

 

--Tameka Cage Conley

Once and Future

We painted dawn into midnight  
Out of cement ceilings  
we made skylights  
From gravel, we crafted fine and delicate chandeliers  
hung them with fishing line  
so they appeared to float in midair  
We turned copper piping into rings  
Venus circling our fingers  
the oxidation turned our digits green  
our limbs transforming  
into ferns and orchids  
We breathed and our condensation  
Created clouds  
Our tears fed the sea  
We prayed to all the living things 
We sat in silence with the trees  
Our feet rooting into the ground  
To touch the highest energy  
The evergreens and us  
We breathed in tandem  
And inside our lungs  
Sprung a forest of veins  
Mimicking their cousins’ limbs  
We sprouted two intricate flowers  
In our minds 
For the left and right hemispheres  
And we hung our thoughts there  
Believing that the petals would keep them safely tucked away  
We recognized ourselves 
Didn’t need mirrors to see our likeness  
Even the dirt felt like us  
The sand, our bones in a trillion pieces 
We walked atop these beaches
Sinking in, their legacy holding us 
There was silence  
and we were not afraid  
There was peace  
And we were not anxious 
There was a world  
We did not conquer 

--Desdamona

Though from Here I Can’t Smell the Smoke

 

In medieval frescoes haloed saints are edged in flame 
when God is around,
melting like a rumor
to the corners of a room,
giving off heat. Tulip-tipped, sky-bright. 

These days, they name fires like saints:

Willow, Glass, Dixie, August, Wolf,
Live Oak, Snow, Point, Camp, Creek. I’m feeling thermal

as my home state burns 
up another set of firsts.

I watch footage on repeat:

embers fly, jump highways, scrape
life from gnarled hillsides. Soot
in the atmosphere. Viewable

from space. I turn
the volume up: interference on the microphone, ash-colored, this pitch
of burning, this tunnel
funneling waves—

The glowing perimeter thrums, widens.
Rim of the world, smoldering.

Where did my edges go?
What holds
head to neck, hand to fingers,
brain to sickness?
I can feel the stitches lift—

The flame stalks, flowers 
up, and eats

now stands of trees, now scrub
and mountain underbrush. The sky
gauzes with smoke

and air
that rustles—spark and sear
of holy cellophane. 

 

 --Allison Hutchcraft

Missing the Farm

Here's the orchard someone else will tend to.
And the crawl space beneath the porch
of the house where someone else's barn cat
will slumber through the summer nights
dreaming of long-tailed mice in the high grass.
Over that field, the light dips and refracts
through the broken glass of the muck pond
where a catfish will take someone else's bait
and hook—that it might meet the refined
heat of a skillet. The ghosts of a thousand
head of cattle walk through the woods at night
in someone else's dream while the windows,
cracked slightly, let a mild breeze pass
through the empty rooms like an appraiser.
There is no death that cannot be undone
by simply turning the compost with a pitchfork
or by scattering scratch in the dirt for chickens
who sing each time they lay, but every repair
is only a gesture against the torment of slow
winds and steady rain and heavy sun. It will be
someone else who grows too old to climb
the ladder into the barn's cool loft or the flight
of stairs that lead to and from their own bed.
It will be their hand weighing the mortgage.
It will be their face forgetting its smile. Listen,
if the well pump kicks to life at dawn, it will be
someone else drawing a bath for the last time—
joints relaxing as their form submerges, body
recovering and failing in the same held breath.  

--Travis Mossotti

Two Poems

 
 I wiped the last men from my shelves

I didn't know I was already done with
              gathering unto

jackets and books and even an aroma
I dragged across the century

collecting dust and some tacky film
trinkets of a life            I threw away

everything I had and knew
and even some of the things I liked

but oh I could never throw
away a thing I love

nothing I have loved
has been that light

 

          * * *

I do so love a sad red barn

the lassitude of a bar
of soap

                empty pat
of butter on the stair

a lasting warm remark

like a country mouse
with its tail in its mouth

I fall asleep in the field
with my hand around my throat

to suffer lilies alone
confusing my own smell

for the pasture

 

--Stella Corso

9th and 2nd

I’m alive you say
to no one in particular.

You are no one in particular.
That’s a good thing. The street is filled with souls

nested in good-looking bodies
that aren’t looking

in your direction. Someone is singing,
someone’s holding hands

with someone who is embarrassed by affection,
men and women made of light

drink in light
made of men and women.

They are alive you say,
meaning no one in particular.

One of them is singing, one is selling flowers,
one is so thin

you can almost see through her. One is looking
in your direction.

I’m alive you say, a little embarrassed
to be no one in particular, a soul

nested in a body
of men and women.

Someone is singing, someone is drinking
tea that is sweet and bitter.

It’s a good thing you say,
drinking in the light

of men and women,
men and women made of light, nested

in the sweet and bitter. A soul
is singing in your direction, so alive

you can almost see her.

--Joy Ladin

 

Joy Ode

                   *     *     *                 

Every day my joy puts on the tomato costume. Every day I stroll through the garden, wink at the bees, the stone steps bedding the river of my body. Once, I sewed magnolia leaves into a cape. All of us pretend to be ourselves and in pretending never notice that a self is just a seed inside a burlap sack. I slice my joy into uneven halves, and when I rinse the knife I wound the water.

                  *     *     * 

From the center of a small town a well sings of all the children that have fallen in. It is a sad song—there are many children—but a beautiful song, and in the constant din of stars it sounds like love would sound if love could be an echo. But love is not an echo. Love is a staircase in a meadow whose shadow tells the time. If you listen to its song the well will beg you not come and as you come the song grows low and soft and secret. We do not know what things are real. In winter we cut down the trees because they look too much like us. 

--William Erickson 

Spain 1937

Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
the chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;

The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. but to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
"O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor."

And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
"But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss. O show us
History the operator, the
Organizer. Time the refreshing river."

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."

And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the

"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city.
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
the photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

--W.H Auden

from In the Clearing

 In winter in the woods alone

Against the trees I go.

I mark a maple for my own

And lay the maple low.

At four o'clock I shoulder axe 

And in the afterflow

I link a line of shadowy tracks

Across the tinted snow.

I see for Nature no defeat

In one tree's overthrow

Or for myself in my retreat

For yet another blow.

--Robert Frost

An Endless Story

I.Halfway through the sentence
she fell asleep. She had been telling
some sort of fable concerning
a young girl who wakens one morning
as a bird. So like life,
said the person next to me. I wonder,
he went on, do you suppose our friend here
plans to fly away when she wakens?
The room was very quiet.
We were both studying her; in fact,
everyone in the room was studying her.
To me, she seemed as before, though
her head was slumped on her chest; still,
her color was good—She seems to be breathing,
my neighbor said. Not only that, he went on,
we are all of us in this room breathing—
just how you want a story to end. And yet,
he added, we may never know
whether the story was intended to be
a cautionary tale or perhaps a love story,
since it has been interrupted. So we can not be certain
we have as yet experienced the end.
But who does, he said. Who does?

II.We stayed like this a long time,
stranded, I thought to myself,
like ships paralyzed by bad weather.
My neighbor had withdrawn into himself.
Something, I felt, existed between us,
nothing so final as a baby,
but real nevertheless—
Meanwhile, no one spoke.
No one rushed to get help
or knelt beside the prone woman.
The sun was going down; long shadows of the elms
spread like dark lakes over the grass.
Finally my neighbor raised his head.
Clearly, he said, someone must finish this story
which was, I believe, to have been
a love story such as silly women tell, meaning
very long, filled with tangents and distractions
meant to disguise the fundamental
tedium of its simplicities. But as, he said,
we have changed riders, we may as well change
horses at the same time. Now that the tale is mine,
I prefer that it be a meditation on existence.
The room grew very still.
I know what you think, he said; we all despise
stories that seem dry and interminable, but mine
will be a true love story,
if by love we mean the way we loved when we were young,
as though there were no time at all.

 III.Soon night fell. Automatically
the lights came on.
On the floor, the woman moved.
Someone had covered her with a blanket
which she thrust aside.
Is it morning, she said. She had
propped herself up somehow so she could see
the door. There was a bird, she said.
Someone is supposed to kiss it.
Perhaps it has been kissed already, my neighbor said.
Oh no, she said. Once it is kissed
it becomes a human being. So it cannot fly;
it can only sit and stand and lie down.
And kiss, my neighbor waggishly added.
Not anymore, she said. There was just the one time
to break the spell that had frozen its heart.
That was a bad trade, she said,
the wings for the kiss.
She gazed at us, like a figure on top of a mountain
looking down, though we were the ones looking down,
in actual fact. Obviously my mind is not what it was, she said.
Most of my facts have disappeared, but certain
underlying principles have been in consequence
exposed with surprising clarity.
The Chinese were right, she said, to revere the old.
Look at us, she said. We are all of us in this room
still waiting to be transformed. This is why we search for love.
We search for it all our lives,
even after we find it.

 --Louise Gluck

 

Civil War (Breakers Roar - Sturgill Simpson)

Object Permanence

 

I want to know how things will end. I've heard of the beginning, how grains of pollen fell from the poplars. Then a little choral music, cavalry, bright skirmish on the hillside, a thousand years of this. Here is a flute and here is a steamship. Here is a gun and your grandmother's ring. The devil has seven blue heads, and when we draw him on the inside of the chapel, each one tells a different lie. How many gods do you believe in? How many good men? The story of the world can be told in relation to umbrellas, invented in the seventh century when we finally had enough rain. Don't look at the gun directly. And don't remove the flute from its sheath of ice. The end's already in motion, the end was starting this whole time and today Brooklyn is a beautiful, devastating autumn. Everyone I love is dancing in the plaza. A band plays below the archway, we're drinking wine and rolling up our sleeves to show the soft parts of our arms. When this ends I hope it ends completely. How brave I feel, right now, watching my old friends beside my father and imagining the end as one imagines something certain, a birthday or a doctor's visit. Not like last year when we watched the movie about ruins—I ignored the crusted amphitheater and wanted to touch you. It was February. You wore a long blue coat.   --Madeleine Cravens

Katie Herzig - I Hurt Too (Live at the Fillmore)