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Small Woman on Swallow Street

Four feet up, under the bruise-blue Fingered hat-felt, the eyes begin. The sly brim Slips over the sky, street after street, and nobody Knows, to stop it. It will cover The whole world, if there is time. Fifty years’ Start in gray the eyes have; you will never Catch up to where they are, too clever And always walking, the legs not long but The boots big with wide smiles of darkness Going round and round at their tops, climbing. They are almost to the knees already, where There should have been ankles to stop them. So must keep walking all the time, hurry, for The black sea is down where the toes are And swallows and swallows all. A big coat Can help save you. But eyes push you down; never Meet eyes. There are hands in hands, and love Follows its furs into shut doors; who Shall be killed first? Do not look up there: The wind is blowing the building-tops, and a hand Is sneaking the whole sky another way, but It will not escape. Do not look up. God is On High. He can see you. You will die.

W. S. Merwin

Living,Death,Growing Old,The Body,Nature

A Muse of Water

We who must act as handmaidens To our own goddess, turn too fast, Trip on our hems, to glimpse the muse Gliding below her lake or sea, Are left, long-staring after her, Narcissists by necessity; Or water-carriers of our young Till waters burst, and white streams flow Artesian, from the lifted breast: Cupbearers then, to tiny gods, Imperious table-pounders, who Are final arbiters of thirst. Fasten the blouse, and mount the steps From kitchen taps to Royal Barge, Assume the trident, don the crown, Command the Water Music now That men bestow on Virgin Queens; Or goddessing above the waist, Appear as swan on Thames or Charles Where iridescent foam conceals The paddle-stroke beneath the glide: Immortal feathers preened in poems! Not our true, intimate nature, stained By labor, and the casual tide. Masters of civilization, you Who moved to riverbank from cave, Putting up tents, and deities, Though every rivulet wander through The final, unpolluted glades To cinder-bank and culvert-lip, And all the pretty chatterers Still round the pebbles as they pass Lightly over their watercourse, And even the calm rivers flow, We have, while springs and skies renew, Dry wells, dead seas, and lingering drouth. Water itself is not enough. Harness her turbulence to work For man: fill his reflecting pools. Drained for his cofferdams, or stored In reservoirs for his personal use: Turn switches! Let the fountains play! And yet these buccaneers still kneel Trembling at the water's verge: “Cool River-Goddess, sweet ravine, Spirit of pool and shade, inspire!” So he needs poultice for his flesh. So he needs water for his fire. We rose in mists and died in clouds Or sank below the trammeled soil To silent conduits underground, Joining the blindfish, and the mole. A gleam of silver in the shale: Lost murmur! Subterranean moan! So flows in dark caves, dries away, What would have brimmed from bank to bank, Kissing the fields you turned to stone, Under the boughs your axes broke. And you blame streams for thinning out, plundered by man’s insatiate want? Rejoice when a faint music rises Out of a brackish clump of weeds, Out of the marsh at ocean-side, Out of the oil-stained river’s gleam, By the long causeways and gray piers Your civilizing lusts have made. Discover the deserted beach Where ghosts of curlews safely wade: Here the warm shallows lave your feet Like tawny hair of magdalens. Here, if you care, and lie full-length, Is water deep enough to drown.

Carolyn Kizer

Living,Parenthood,Relationships,Men & Women

We Real Cool

The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Living,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality,Race & Ethnicity

How We Heard the Name

The river brought down dead horses, dead men and military debris, indicative of war or official acts upstream, but it went by, it all goes by, that is the thing about the river. Then a soldier on a log went by. He seemed drunk and we asked him Why had he and this junk come down to us so from the past upstream. “Friends,” he said, “the great Battle of Granicus has just been won by all of the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians and myself: this is a joke between me and a man named Alexander, whom all of you ba-bas will hear of as a god.”

Alan Dugan

Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Separation

Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

W. S. Merwin

Living,Separation & Divorce,Sorrow & Grieving,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Romantic Love,Relationships

The Stump

1. Today they cut down the oak. Strong men climbed with ropes in the brittle tree. The exhaust of a gasoline saw was blue in the branches. The oak had been dead a year. I remember the great sails of its branches rolling out green, a hundred and twenty feet up, and acorns thick on the lawn. Nine cities of squirrels lived in that tree. Yet I was happy that it was coming down. "Let it come down!" I kept saying to myself with a joy that was strange to me. Though the oak was the shade of old summers, I loved the guttural saw. 2. By night a bare trunk stands up fifteen feet and cords of firewood press on the twiggy frozen grass of the yard. One man works every afternoon for a week to cut the trunk gradually down. Bluish stains spread through the wood and make it harder to cut. He says they are the nails of a trapper who dried his pelts on the oak when badgers dug in the lawn. Near the ground he hacks for two days, knuckles scraping the stiff snow. His chain saw breaks three teeth. He cannot make the trunk smooth. He leaves one night after dark. 3. Roots stiffen under the ground and the frozen street, coiled around pipes and wires. The stump is a platform of blond wood in the gray winter. It is nearly level with the snow that covers the little garden around it. It is a door into the underground of old summers, but if I bend down to it, I am lost in crags and buttes of a harsh landscape that goes on forever. When snow melts the wood darkens into the ground; rain and thawed snow move deeply into the stump, backwards along the disused tunnels. 4. The edges of the trunk turn black. In the middle there is a pale overlay, like a wash of chalk on darkness. The desert of the winter has moved inside. I do not step on it now; I am used to it, like a rock, or a bush that does not grow. There is a sailing ship beached in the cove of a small island where the warm water is turquoise. The hulk leans over, full of rain and sand, and shore flowers grow from it. Then it is under full sail in the Atlantic, on a blue day, heading for the island. She has planted sweet alyssum in the holes where the wood was rotten. It grows thick, it bulges like flowers contending from a tight vase. Now the stump sinks downward into its roots with a cargo of rain and white blossoms that last into October.

Donald Hall

Living,Death,Time & Brevity,Nature,Trees & Flowers

Some Last Questions

What is the head a. Ash What are the eyes a. The wells have fallen in and have Inhabitants What are the feet a. Thumbs left after the auction No what are the feet a. Under them the impossible road is moving Down which the broken necked mice push Balls of blood with their noses What is the tongue a. The black coat that fell off the wall With sleeves trying to say something What are the hands a. Paid No what are the hands a. Climbing back down the museum wall To their ancestors the extinct shrews that will Have left a message What is the silence a. As though it had a right to more Who are the compatriots a. They make the stars of bone

W. S. Merwin

The Body,Nature

Things We Dreamt We Died For

Flags of all sorts. The literary life. Each time we dreamt we’d done the gentlemanly thing, covering our causes in closets full of bones to remove ourselves forever from dearest possibilities, the old weapons re-injured us, the old armies conscripted us, and we gave in to getting even, a little less like us if a lot less like others. Many, thus, gained fame in the way of great plunderers, retiring to the university to cultivate grand plunder-gardens in the service of literature, the young and no more wars. Their continuing tributes make them our greatest saviors, whose many fortunes are followed by the many who have not one.

Marvin Bell

Living,Death,Activities,School & Learning,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Heroes & Patriotism

Monuments for a Friendly Girl at a Tenth Grade Party

The only relics left are those long spangled seconds our school clock chipped out when you crossed the social hall and we found each other alive, by our glances never to accept our town's ways, torture for advancement, nor ever again be prisoners by choice. Now I learn you died serving among the natives of Garden City, Kansas, part of a Peace Corps before governments thought of it. Ruth, over the horizon your friends eat foreign chaff and have addresses like titles, but for you the crows and hawks patrol the old river. May they never forsake you, nor you need monuments other than this I make, and the one I hear clocks chip in that world we found.

William E. Stafford

Living,Death,Activities,School & Learning,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Philosophy

Seaweeds

I know a little what it is like, once here at high tide Stranded, for them to be so attached to the bottom’s Sarcophagus lids, up to their brown green gold wine Bottle necks in the prevailing booze, riding, as far As we can see, like a picnic on a blanket. Whatever plucks them from below the red horizon Like snapped pulleys and ropes for the pyramidal effort Of the moon, they come in, they come through the breakers, Heaps of hair, writing across the beach a collapsed Script, signers of a huge independence. Melville thought them pure, bitter, seeing the fog-sized Flies dancing stiff and renaissance above. But I Have eaten nori and dulse, and to have gone deep Before being cast out leaves hardly a taste of loneliness. And I take in their iodine.

Sandra McPherson

Nature,Animals,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

Triolet

She was in love with the same danger everybody is. Dangerous as it is to love a stranger, she was in love. With that same danger an adulteress risks a husband’s anger. Stealthily death enters a house: she was in love with that danger. Everybody is dangerous.

Sandra McPherson

Living,Death,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships

Pig Song

This is what you changed me to: a greypink vegetable with slug eyes, buttock incarnate, spreading like a slow turnip, a skin you stuff so you may feed in your turn, a stinking wart of flesh, a large tuber of blood which munches and bloats. Very well then. Meanwhile I have the sky, which is only half caged, I have my weed corners, I keep myself busy, singing my song of roots and noses, my song of dung. Madame, this song offends you, these grunts which you find oppressively sexual, mistaking simple greed for lust. I am yours. If you feed me garbage, I will sing a song of garbage. This is a hymn.

Margaret Atwood

Relationships,Pets,Nature,Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism

Rat Song

When you hear me singing you get the rifle down and the flashlight, aiming for my brain, but you always miss and when you set out the poison I piss on it to warn the others. You think: That one’s too clever, she’s dangerous,

Margaret Atwood

Relationships,Pets

Vowel Movements

Take a statement, the same as yesterday’s dictation: Lately pain has been there waiting when I awake. Creative despair and failure have made their patient. Anyway, I’m afraid I have nothing to say. Those crazy phrases I desecrated the paper With against the grain ... Taste has turned away her face Temporarily, like a hasty, ill-paid waitress At table, barely capable but very vague. Mistaken praise and blame degrade profane and sacred Places so strange you may not even know their names. Vacant the gymnasium where words once played naked Amazing games that always used to end in mate. Better, then, the effort than preterite perfection, I guess. Indeed, I envy the eminent dead The special effects I am ready to inherit Less than their sentiments and impenitent sense Of aesthetic gesture. Unpleasant and pretentious, The Western hemisphere has plenty to forget. The mess men might yet make of themselves, given present Events! Are many content to accept the best? Precious as sex is, flesh, perenially wretched, Begs the bread of heaven, blessing nevertheless The unexpected sender’s address on a letter. Every breathless sentence says not yet to death. The past cannot matter except as an abstraction, A flattering caricature of happy lands Wherein many a grand, imaginary castle In fact turns out to be a tourist trap at last, A vast palace that adrastic phantoms inhabit. Maps of madness, characteristically blank, Ask vatic questions, exact a magic answer: The family photograph album at a glance, Granny, Dad, Aunt Sally, that dissatisfied madame Who manages passion’s incalculable acts, Paris, everyman’s romantic trash and tarry— Abracadabra, and the vanished cast comes back! If civilization isn’t a silly gimmick, Is it the wit to wish, the will to make it stick? The mathematical vision which built this system Figures the width of a minute within an inch. Primitive physics, a sophisticated fiction, Insists that in principle everything is fixed. Visitors picnic amid pretty Chichèn Itzá With its sacrificial pit, artificial hills And cricket pitch wherein the winner is the victim. To think an instinct like iniquity exists! Hidden riches fill big individual middens; In the Wizard’s Pyramid little lizards live. Specious sweets we reach for eagerly with Eve’s evil Greed recede like the fleeting details of a dream. It seems that we have been a brief season in Eden: Chic unreal estates where immediately green Trees repeated in completely meaningless series Briefly yield to the weaker tyranny of weeds Even as we seek relief in a secret clearing. Prehistory can be too recent; need we read These steles’ queried speech? Here undefeated peoples Experienced deceit; here scenes of deepest grief Teach us to weep the cheap and easy tears of reason; Here the sea of being sleeps, a period peace. Frustration, fuss, and lust are love’s unlucky colours. Thunderstruck, the muscular monuments look dumb. Judged by the numbers that once flourished in the jungle In hundreds of miles of dull undercover scrub, Unless somebody was insufferably ugly Mistrust of one another must be in the blood. Unsuccess in a dozen tough struggles instructs us Justice is a mother-fucker. Suffering’s fun For a month, but in a millenium no wonder One becomes somewhat disgusted. Unsubtle skull, The mysteries of dust are nothing to live up to. Insulted by a touch, one mutters, “Summer sucks.” Undone by the siesta and by sudden showers, Is it uncomfortable in the hungry South? Now cowed by Kulkulkan’s geometrical scowl, Now wowed by the classic brown faces in a crowd, You falter at mounds memorial to a thousand Bleeding hearts in a single holiday cut out, Submitted to the sun, insatiable flesh-flower Of the universe, all-devouring powerhouse, Confounded by our sound of pronounceable vowels. Myths, as the guidebook says, are handed down by mouth. Though mood and voice and person, gender, tense, and number Predicate a verb, its cases explain a noun: Proper noun or pronoun, indubitably human, Whose beautiful excuse is usually youth Doomed to the brutal usufructu of the future, Consumed by the illusions of jejune amours. You used to choose the rules with superfluous humour, Tuned to the influential movements of the moon Whose smooth, translucent route through roofless rooms illumines From dewy moonrise unto lunar afternoonTulum and its improvements, tumulus and ruins, Poorly reproduced, a too crudely stupid view. Who knew nude truth from rumour, amusement from music Soon would prove a fool. Beauty, useless, is a wound. On and off; the impossible is honour’s motto, Monotony the awful drawback of my song. What was lost was often all we had got in common, Our quasi-comic quandary depended onQu’en dirai-je? chronic, colossal hypochondry, Neurotic complication or hypnotic calm. Gods begotten of loss, not bronze nor terra cotta, Haunt the province of law, of cause and conscious wrong. Following the Long Count a lot has been forgotten: Positive nonsense, fraud, false plots and hollow talk, Soporific concepts toppled by fall or conquest, The cosmos as a model watch that wants to stop. At any moment the doors of the soul may open And those reproachful ghosts invoked from the remote Coasts of tomorrow begin to impose the order Of bone and trophy, home and the odour of smoke. O mornings that broke on the slopes of cold volcanos, Almost frozen, golden and old-rose, like a scroll Slowly unfolded, or a brocade robe thrown over The throne of the mountains, cloaking their cones in snow! Hope, an emotion swollen by every omen, No psychotrope, only a semiprecious stone, Topaz or opal, adorns the close of the strophe. Woe wrote these notes in a code also known as prose. Ode: this leafy, streamless land where coy waters loiter Under the embroidered soil, subterfluous coin Of another culture destroyed by lack of moisture, Spoiled by the unavoidable poison of choice. Archaeological lawyers exploit the foibles Of a royalty that in time joined hoi polloi: History’s unemployed, geography’s anointed, Unlike the orchids of the forests, spin and toil. Imperfectly convinced of final disappointment, Persuaded of the possibility of joy, Pen poised for the pointless impressions of those voices That boil up like bubbles on the face of the void, Finally I try to define why divine silence Underlies the tidy designs of paradise. Priceless as the insights of the inspired psyche, Blind, violent as a geyser, right as a rhyme, Fine ideas likely to undermine the idle Mind divided between the types of fire and ice, “Highly stylized” politely describes the bright eyesores Shining like diamonds or rhinestones in the night sky, Lifelike, provided life survives its vital cycle And the tireless indictment of time’s diatribe, While mankind, sightless, frightened, like a child in twilight, Dies of the devices it was enlightened by. Amazing games that always used to end in mate! Precious as sex is, flesh, perennially wretched, In fact turns out to be a tourist trap at last. The mathematical vision which built this system Of the universe, all-devouring powerhouse, (The mysteries of dust are nothing to live up to!) Briefly yields to the weaker tyranny of weeds. You used to choose the rules with superfluous humour: Monotony, the awful drawback of my song, Slowly unfolded, like a brocade robe thrown over. Persuaded of the possibility of joy, Finally I tried to define why divine silence ...

Daryl Hine

Living,Time & Brevity,Social Commentaries

Learning the Trees

Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn The language of the trees. That’s done indoors, Out of a book, which now you think of it Is one of the transformations of a tree. The words themselves are a delight to learn, You might be in a foreign land of terms Like samara, capsule, drupe, legume and pome, Where bark is papery, plated, warty or smooth. But best of all are the words that shape the leaves— Orbicular, cordate, cleft and reniform— And their venation—palmate and parallel— And tips—acute, truncate, auriculate. Sufficiently provided, you may now Go forth to the forests and the shady streets To see how the chaos of experience Answers to catalogue and category. Confusedly. The leaves of a single tree May differ among themselves more than they do From other species, so you have to find, All blandly says the book, “an average leaf.” Example, the catalpa in the book Sprays out its leaves in whorls of three Around the stem; the one in front of you But rarely does, or somewhat, or almost; Maybe it’s not catalpa? Dreadful doubt. It may be weeks before you see an elm Fanlike in form, a spruce that pyramids, A sweetgum spiring up in steeple shape. Still, pedetemtim as Lucretius says, Little by little, you do start to learn; And learn as well, maybe, what language does And how it does it, cutting across the world Not always at the joints, competing with Experience while cooperating with Experience, and keeping an obstinate Intransigence, uncanny, of its own. Think finally about the secret will Pretending obedience to Nature, but Invidiously distinguishing everywhere, Dividing up the world to conquer it, And think also how funny knowledge is: You may succeed in learning many trees And calling off their names as you go by, But their comprehensive silence stays the same.

Howard Nemerov

Activities,School & Learning,Nature,Trees & Flowers,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books

Late Echo

Alone with our madness and favorite flower We see that there really is nothing left to write about. Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things In the same way, repeating the same things over and over For love to continue and be gradually different. Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally And the color of the day put in Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting. Only then can the chronic inattention Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

John Ashbery

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets

The Three-Legged Dog at the Heart of Our Home

She dances to the wheeze of my lungs. Were she taller, or had she both hind legs, she would lick my aching knees. There’s nothing like practice I firmly believe. Practice makes the heart grow fond. When the graft heals, you’ve apples on a cherry tree, delicious domestic freaks. I had a splendid grandmother, I might have made her up. She wore cotton dresses, usually blue, and glasses with thin gold frames and plastic cushions for the nose. The plastic was slightly pink, intended to blend with the flesh. She never raised her voice. Her knuckles enlarged, her goiter enlarged. There are ways within ways. A man will go down displaying himself in a nursing home. The mystery left, and there’s more than when we began, has nothing to do with reticence, or safety.

Linda Gregerson

Living,Growing Old,Health & Illness,The Body,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature

In a U-Haul North of Damascus

1 Lord, what are the sins I have tried to leave behind me? The bad checks, the workless days, the scotch bottles thrown across the fence and into the woods, the cruelty of silence, the cruelty of lies, the jealousy, the indifference? What are these on the scale of sin or failure that they should follow me through the streets of Columbus, the moon-streaked fields between Benevolence and Cuthbert where dwarfed cotton sparkles like pearls on the shoulders of the road. What are these that they should find me half-lost, sick and sleepless behind the wheel of this U-Haul truck parked in a field on Georgia 45 a few miles north of Damascus, some makeshift rest stop for eighteen wheelers where the long white arms of oaks slap across trailers and headlights glare all night through a wall of pines? 2 What was I thinking, Lord? That for once I'd be in the driver's seat, a firm grip on direction? So the jon boat muscled up the ramp, the Johnson outboard, the bent frame of the wrecked Harley chained for so long to the back fence, the scarred desk, the bookcases and books, the mattress and box springs, a broken turntable, a Pioneer amp, a pair of three-way speakers, everything mine I intended to keep. Everything else abandon. But on the road from one state to another, what is left behind nags back through the distance, a last word rising to a scream, a salad bowl shattering against a kitchen cabinet, china barbs spiking my heel, blood trailed across the cream linoleum like the bedsheet that morning long ago just before I watched the future miscarried. Jesus, could the irony be that suffering forms a stronger bond than love? 3 Now the sun streaks the windshield with yellow and orange, heavy beads of light drawing highways in the dew-cover. I roll down the window and breathe the pine-air, the after-scent of rain, and the far-off smell of asphalt and diesel fumes. But mostly pine and rain as though the world really could be clean again. Somewhere behind me, miles behind me on a two-lane that streaks across west Georgia, light is falling through the windows of my half-empty house. Lord, why am I thinking about this? And why should I care so long after everything has fallen to pain that the woman sleeping there should be sleeping alone? Could I be just another sinner who needs to be blinded before he can see? Lord, is it possible to fall toward grace? Could I be moved to believe in new beginnings? Could I be moved?

David Bottoms

Living,Separation & Divorce,Activities,Travels & Journeys

The Voyage Home

The social instincts ... naturally lead to the golden rule. —CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man 1 Holding her steady, into the pitch and roll, in raw Midwestern hands ten thousand tons of winter wheat for the fall of Rome, still swallowing the hunger of the war: the binnacle glows like an open fire, east-southeast and steady, Anderssen, the Viking mate, belaboring me for contraband, my little book of Einstein, that “Commie Jew.” (So much for the social instincts, pacifism, humanism, the frail and noble causes.) I speak my piece for western civ: light bends ... stars warp ... mass converts ... “Pipe dreams,” says the Dane, “pipe dreams.” “Well, mate, remember, those Jewish dreams made nightmares out of Hiroshima, and blew us out of uniform, alive.” He stomps down off the bridge; some day he’ll fire me off his rusty liberty: I read too much. The ocean tugs and wrestles with ten thousand deadweight tons of charity, trembling on degrees and minutes. Anderssen steams back in with coffee, to contest the stars with Einstein, full ahead. We haven’t come to Darwin. 2 Freezing on the flying bridge, staring at the night for nothing, running lights of freighters lost in a blur of blowing snow, we hold on through the midnight watch, waiting out the bells. With Einstein in our wake, the tricks are easier: liberty churns on, ten knots an hour, toward Rome. One starry night we ride at last with Darwin on the Beagle: endless ocean, sea sickness, revelations of Toxodon and Megalonyx—a voyage old as the Eocene, the watery death of Genesis. The going gets rough again, the threat of all those bones churning the heavy swells: Anderssen, a true believer, skeptical, and Darwin trapped in a savage earthquake, the heave of coastal strata conjuring the wreck of England, lofty houses gone, government in chaos, violence and pillage through the land, and afterward, fossils gleaming white along the raw ridges. “Limeys.” Anderssen puts his benediction to empire: “Stupid Limeys.” After that we breathe a bit and watch the stars and tell sad stories of the death of tribes, the bones, the countless bones: we talk about the war, we talk about extinction. 3 Okinawa, Iwo Jima: slouching toward Tokyo, the only good Jap is a dead Jap. We must get the bomb, Einstein writes to F.D.R., waking from the dreams of peace, the noble causes: get it first, before the Nazis do. (The only good Nazi is an extinct Nazi.) At the death of Hiroshima, all day long we celebrate extinction, chugalugging free beer down at the px, teen- age kids in khaki puking pints of three-point-two in honor of the fire: no more island-hopping now to the murderous heart of empire. Later, in the luxury of peace, the bad dreams come. “Certainly,” Darwin broods, “no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated extermination of its inhabitants.” 4 Off somewhere to starboard, the Canaries, Palma, Tenerife: sunrise backlights the rugged peaks, as Darwin, twenty-two years old, gazes at the clouds along the foothills. Longitudes ease westward; it’s my birthday: twenty-two years old as Tenerife falls into the sunset, I’m as greedy for the old world as Darwin for the new, Bahia, Desire, the palms and crimson flowers of the Mediterranean, clear water dancing with mines. Ahead of us a tanker burns; the war will never end. 5 “You talk a lot,” says the melancholy Dane. “You sure you’re not Jewish yourself? You got a funny name.” “Well, mate, I’m pure Celtic on one side, pure Orphan on the other: therefore half of anything at all—Jewish, Danish, what you will: a problem, isn’t it, for Hitler, say, or the Klan, or even Gregor Mendel, sweating out the summer in his pea patch?” The fact is, I know those ancestors floating through my sleep:an animal that breathed water, had a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, undoubtedly hermaphrodite

Philip Appleman

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Arts & Sciences,Sciences,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity,War & Conflict

In the Black Camaro

Through the orange glow of taillights, I crossed the dirt road, entered the half-mile of darkness and owl screech, tangled briar and fallen trunk, followed the yellow beam of Billy Parker's flashlight down the slick needle-hill, half crawling, half sliding and kicking for footholds, tearing up whole handfuls of scrub brush and leaf mold until I jumped the mud bank, walked the ankle-deep creek, the last patch of pine, the gully, and knelt at the highway stretching in front of Billy Parker's house, spotted the black Chevy Camaro parked under a maple not fifty feet from the window where Billy Parker rocked in and out of view, studying in the bad light of a table lamp the fine print of his Allstate policy. I cut the flashlight, checked up and down the highway. Behind me the screech growing distant, fading into woods, but coming on a network of tree frogs signaling along the creek. Only that, and the quiet of my heels coming down on asphalt as I crossed the two-lane and stood at the weedy edge of Billy Parker's yard, stood in the lamp glare of the living room where plans were being made to make me rich and thought of a boat and Johnson outboard, of all the lures on a K-Mart wall, of reels and graphite rods, coolers of beer, weedy banks of dark fishy rivers, and of Billy Parker rocking in his chair, studying his coverage, his bank account, his layoff at Lockheed, his wife laboring in the maternity ward of the Cobb General Hospital. For all of this, I crouched in the shadow of fender and maple, popped the door on the Camaro, and found in the faint house-light drifting through the passenger's window the stripped wires hanging below the dash. I took the driver's seat, kicked the clutch, then eased again as I remembered the glove box and the pint of Seagram's Billy Parker had not broken the seal on. Like an alarm the tree frogs went off in the woods. I drank until they hushed and I could hear through cricket chatter the rockers on Billy Parker's chair grinding ridges into his living room floor, worry working on him like hard time. Then a wind working in river grass, a red current slicing around stumps and river snags, a boat-drift pulling against an anchor as I swayed in the seat of the black Camaro, grappled for the wires hanging in darkness between my knees, saw through the tinted windshield by a sudden white moon rolling out of the clouds, a riverbank two counties away, a place to jump and roll on the soft shoulder of the gravel road, a truck in a thicket a half-mile downstream.

David Bottoms

Life Choices,Social Commentaries

The Trickle-down Theory of Happiness

Out of heaven, to bless the high places, it falls on the penthouses, drizzling at first, then a pelting allegro, and Dick and Jane skip to the terrace and go boogieing through the azaleas, while mommy and daddy come running with pots and pans, glasses, and basins and try to hold all of it up there, but no use, it’s too much, it keeps coming, and pours off the edges, down limestone to the pitchers and pails on the ground, where delirious residents catch it, and bucket brigades get it moving inside, until bathtubs are brimful, but still it keeps coming, that shower of silver in alleys and gutters, all pouring downhill to the sleazy red brick, and the barefoot people who romp in it, laughing, but never take thought for tomorrow, all spinning in a pleasure they catch for a moment; so when Providence turns off the spigot and the sky goes as dry as a prairie, then daddy looks down from the penthouse, down to the streets, to the gutters, and his heart goes out to his neighbors, to the little folk thirsty for laughter, and he prays in his boundless compassion: on behalf of the world and its people he demands of his God, give me more.

Philip Appleman

Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Class,Money & Economics

The Month of June: 13 1/2

As our daughter approaches graduation and puberty at the same time, at her own, calm, deliberate, serious rate, she begins to kick up her heels, jazz out her hands, thrust out her hipbones, chantI’m great! I’m great! She feels 8th grade coming open around her, a chrysalis cracking and letting her out, it falls behind her and joins the other husks on the ground, 7th grade, 6th grade, the magenta rind of 5th grade, the hard jacket of 4th when she had so much pain, 3rd grade, 2nd, the dim cocoon of 1st grade back there somewhere on the path, and kindergarten like a strip of thumb-suck blanket taken from the actual blanket they wrapped her in at birth. The whole school is coming off her shoulders like a cloak unclasped, and she dances forth in her jerky sexy child’s joke dance of self, self, her throat tight and a hard new song coming out of it, while her two dark eyes shine above her body like a good mother and a good father who look down and love everything their baby does, the way she lives their love.

Sharon Olds

Living,Coming of Age,Parenthood,Activities,School & Learning,Philosophy

Northern Exposures

for Richard Hugo You hear the roadhouse before you see it, Its four-beat country tunes Amplified like surf through the woods, Silencing bullfrog and red-tailed hawk, Setting beards of moss dancing On dim, indeterminate trees That border two-lane blacktop. Docked tonight, you reveal the badge Of the farmer, that blanched expanse of skin Where cap shades face, babyhood Pallor above the sun-blackened jaw Bulging uneasy with a concrete grin And some inevitable need to weep. Don’t you think we live and breathe In the meantime, in lockstep With dawn, sunset, brawling dawn? Even now, you await secrets worse Than the few known ways a seized sky Will come to survive your pity. But on another far field, celebrated For its arrivals and evictions, you learn To be beautiful, never leading A sensible life, playing ball in the early dark, Fighting for a taste of the sweet spot, In this uncut land, this straight-edged air. Whadya want to know that isn’t yet a mystery Somewhere, a confidential stumble, heat Lightning, a first-rate backseat turndown? So it is that later you track high above Familiar tamarack and ash, beginning The next inaccuracy alone, and again, Remembering that everything east of you Has already happened, on the same cold ground, In a swarm of time, finally spiked home To your surprise, nails flung to the air. And us all thumbs to the hot hammer-licks You hear from the roadhouse before you see it.

G. E. Murray

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Listening

You wept in your mother's arms and I knew that from then on I was to forget myself. Listening to your sobs, I was resolved against my will to do well by us and so I said, without thinking, in great panic, To do wrong in one's own judgment, though others thrive by it, is the right road to blessedness. Not to submit to error is in itself wrong and pride. Standing beside you, I took an oath to make your life simpler by complicating mine and what I always thought would happen did: I was lifted up in joy.

David Ignatow

Living,Parenthood,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Romantic Love,Relationships,Birth,Birthdays

An Xmas Murder

He sits at the table, cloudlight of March One tone with his hair, gray-silver on silver. Midday fare in Vermont is basic enough. In West Newbury, eggs and toast will do— Though our doctor’s had his sips of wine as well. “Just don’t be fooled. They’re not as nice as you Think they are. Live here a few more winters, You’ll get to know them clearer, and vice-versa.” Three years now, and we’re still finding our way; Newcomers need a guide to show them the ropes, And he has been explaining township and county Almost from the sunstruck day we met him That very first July in this old house. “I’ll cite an instance of community Spirit at work, North Country justice— A case I just happened to be involved in. No, please—all right, if you are having one.” He holds his glass aloft and then lets fall A silence that has grown familiar to us From other stories told on other days, The will to recount building its head of steam. “Well, now, you have to know about the victim. His name was Charlie Deudon, no doubt Canuck Stock some generations back, but he Nor no one else could tell you—if they cared. Deudons had been dirt farmers here as long As anybody knew. They never starved But never had a dime to spare, either. Charlie resolved to change the Deudon luck. And that’s just what he did. Or almost did. . . . He’d graduated two classes ahead of mine; We knew each other, naturally, but not On terms of friendship. Fact is, he had no friends, And only one girlfriend, whom he married Day after Commencement, June of ‘32. And then he set to work and never stopped Again, until they made him stop for good.” A wisp of a smile, half irony, half Bereavement plays about his guileless face— Red cheeks, blue eyes, a beardless Santa Claus; Whose bag contains (apart from instruments Of healing) stories, parables and proverbs, Painkillers, too, for when all else fails. “What kind of work had all that hard work been?” “Oh, farming, like his elders, only better. All the modern improvements, fancy feed And fertilizers, plus machinery— He was the first in these parts to milk His herd in any way but as ‘twas done Since Adam’s boys first broke ground with a plow. And anything machines couldn’t handle, Charlie did himself, from dawn to midnight. He never wasted a word or spilled a drop Of milk or drank a drop of beer or liquor. He was unnatural. And he made that farm Into a showplace, a kind of 4-H model. He made good money, yes, but not a dollar Would he spend unnecessarily. Do you get the picture? They hated him, The boys that hung around the package store. The most they ever got from tightfist Charlie Deudon was a nod out from under his cap. (His trademark—a baseball cap striped white and red.) They envied him for getting his hay in first; And there was more. A boy that he had hired, By the name of Carroll Giddens, was their buddy. Likeable fellow, regulation issue, The sort that knocks back a pint or a fifth In half a shake and tells off-color stories Till he’s got them choked to death with laughing. ‘Course the wisecracks they loved best were those About poor Charlie and his gold-plated farm. . . . Just one more case of what’s been often said By commentators on democracy— How it helps everyone keep modest.” Teasing mischief has crept into his voice. A self-taught anthropologist as well As teller of tales, he has other frames Of reference to place around events Local or international. He knows That things can stand for more than what they are; Indeed, says standing for things is why we’re here, And quotes chapter and verse to prove his point. “Think of the worldwide scapegoat ritual. In halfway civilized societies An animal’s the one relieved from life Duty, am I right? A fellow tribesman Will do in a pinch, if animals are lacking, Or if communal fears get screwed too tight. . . . Anyhow, it was clear that something more Than common envy stirred up the lynch law. Their own failure’s what they wanted dead.” Seconds pass in silence as he stares At something—perhaps a knothole in the pine Floorboard. He looks up, eyebrows raised, And twirls the glass stem between stubby fingers. A coil of rope hung on the wall, we see, Has made him pause and heave experienced sighs. “Here. Have another. So: was Charlie punished?” “I’m going to tell you—better me than others. You see, I was involved—no, no, no, Not in the deed, Lord, no, just as a witness. It happened this way—hope you’re not squeamish. Charlie had this boy to help with chores, The one named Carroll. Married, two kids, I think. Not too reliable. But so few are; Nor could you call his wages generous. His buddies must have stood him drinks, is all I can say. He’d a skinful half the time— Was certainly drunk that Christmas Eve morning. No reason to doubt what Charlie told his wife. Charlie’d been up to help at six with the milking, And Carroll, drunk as a fiddler’s bitch, was there Loading a pair of milk cans into the barrow. He took a slip and the whole business spilled. Wooden handle clipped him in the side, And he fell, too, right in the puddle of milk. And started laughing. Charlie, you can guess, Didn’t join in; he told him to get on home. ‘What about the milk?’ ‘Go home,’ he said, ‘You’re drunk.’ ‘But what about the milk?’ asks Carroll. ‘Comes out of next week’s paycheck,’ Charlie says. And then the trouble starts, with Carroll swearing And yelping, till Charlie gives him a little tap And goes indoors. By then Carroll could tell The barrow handle had cracked a rib or two. He drove into town to see his doctor—that Wasn’t me—and word went out that Charlie Had roughed up his innocent assistant. That’s all they needed, Carroll’s friends. About Time that stuck-up bastard got his due, He’s gone too far this time, but we’ll show him,

Alfred Corn

Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Christmas

Ice

In the warming house, children lace their skates, bending, choked, over their thick jackets. A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy it’s hard to imagine why anyone would leave, clumping across the frozen beach to the river. December’s always the same at Ware’s Cove, the first sheer ice, black, then white and deep until the city sends trucks of men with wooden barriers to put up the boys’ hockey rink. An hour of skating after school, of trying wobbly figure-8’s, an hour of distances moved backwards without falling, then—twilight, the warming house steamy with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs aching. Outside, the hockey players keep playing, slamming the round black puck until it’s dark, until supper. At night, a shy girl comes to the cove with her father. Although there isn’t music, they glide arm in arm onto the blurred surface together, braced like dancers. She thinks she’ll never be so happy, for who else will find her graceful, find her perfect, skate with her in circles outside the emptied rink forever?

Gail Mazur

Living,Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Winter,Philosophy

Nabokov’s Blues

The wallful of quoted passages from his work, with the requisite specimens pinned next to their literary cameo appearances, was too good a temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn’t, why should we? The prose dipped and shimmered and the “flies,” as I heard a buff call them, stood at lurid attention on their pins. If you love to read and look, you could be happy a month in that small room. One of the Nabokov photos I’d never seen: he’s writing (left-handed! why did I never trouble to find out?) at his stand-up desk in the hotel apartment in Montreux. The picture’s mostly of his back and the small wedge of face that shows brims with indifference to anything not on the page. The window’s shut. A tiny lamp trails a veil of light over the page, too far away for us to read. We also liked the chest of specimen drawers labeled, as if for apprentice Freudians, “Genitalia,” wherein languished in phials the thousands he examined for his monograph on the Lycaenidae, the silver-studded Blues. And there in the center of the room a carillon of Blues rang mutely out. There must have been three hundred of them. Amanda’s Blue was there, and the Chalk Hill Blue, the Karner Blue (Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov), a Violet-Tinged Copper, the Mourning Cloak, an Echo Azure, the White-Lined Green Hairstreak, the Cretan Argus (known only from Mt. Ida: in the series Nabokov did on this beauty he noted for each specimen the altitude at which it had been taken), and as the ads and lovers say, “and much, much more.” The stilled belle of the tower was a Lycaeides melissa melissa. No doubt it’s an accident Melissa rhymes, sort of, with Lolita, The scant hour we could lavish on the Blues flew by, and we improvised a path through cars and slush and boot-high berms of mud-blurred snow to wherever we went next. I must have been mute, or whatever I said won from silence nothing it mourned to lose. I was back in that small room, vast by love of each flickering detail, each genital dusting to nothing, the turn, like a worm’s or caterpillar’s, of each phrase. I stood up to my ankles in sludge pooled over a stopped sewer grate and thought— wouldn’t you know it—about love and art: you can be ruined (“rurnt,” as we said in south- western Ohio) by a book or improved by a butterfly. You can dodder in the slop, septic with a rage not for order but for the love the senses bear for what they do, for detail that’s never annexed, like a reluctant crumb to a vacuum cleaner, to a coherence. You can be bead after bead on perception’s rosary. This is the sweet ache that hurts most, the way desire burns bluely at its phosphorescent core: just as you’re having what you wanted most, you want it more and more until that’s more than you, or it, or both of you, can bear.

William Matthews

Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Nature,Animals,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books

Morning

Why do we bother with the rest of the day, the swale of the afternoon, the sudden dip into evening, then night with his notorious perfumes, his many-pointed stars? This is the best— throwing off the light covers, feet on the cold floor, and buzzing around the house on espresso— maybe a splash of water on the face, a palmful of vitamins— but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso, dictionary and atlas open on the rug, the typewriter waiting for the key of the head, a cello on the radio, and, if necessary, the windows— trees fifty, a hundred years old out there, heavy clouds on the way and the lawn steaming like a horse in the early morning.

Billy Collins

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Home Life

THE ODD LAST THING SHE DID

A car is idling on the cliff. Its top is down. Its headlights throw A faint, bright ghost-shadow glow On the pale air. On the shore, so far Below that the waves' push and drag Is dwindled to a hush—a kind Of oceanic idle—the sea Among the boulders plays a blind- Fold game of hide and seek, Or capture the flag. The flag Swells and sways. The car Is empty. A Friday, the first week Of June. Nineteen fifty-three. A car's idling on the cliff, But surely it won't be long before Somebody stops to investigate And things begin to happen fast: Men, troops of men will come, Arrive with blazing lights, a blast Of sirens, followed by still more Men. Though not a soul's in sight, The peace of the end of the late Afternoon—the sun down, but enough light Even so to bathe the heavens from Horizon to shore in a deep And delicate blue—will not keep. Confronted with such an overload Of questions (most beginning, Why would she... So gifted, bright, and only twenty-three), Attention will come to fix upon This odd last thing she did: leaving The car running, the headlights on. She stopped—it will transpire—to fill The tank a mere two miles down the road. (Just sixteen, the kid at the station will Quote her as saying, "What a pity You have to work today! It's not right... What weather! Goodness, what a night It'll be!" He'll add: "She sure was pretty.") Was there a change of plan? Why the stop for gas? Possibly She'd not yet made up her mind? Or Had made it up but not yet settled On a place? Or could it be she knew Where she was headed, what she would do— And wanted to make sure the car ran For hours afterward? Might the car not be, Then, a sort of beacon, a lighthouse- In-reverse, meant to direct one not Away from but toward the shore And its broken boulders, there to spot The bobbing white flag of a blouse? Her brief note, which will appear In the local Leader, contains a phrase ("She chanted snatches of old lands") That will muddle the town for three days, Until a Professor E. H. Wade Pins it to Ophelia—and reprimands The police, who, this but goes to show, Have not the barest knowledge of Shakespeare, Else would never have misread "lauds" As "lands." A Detective Gregg Messing Will answer, tersely, "Afraid It's not our bailiwick. Missing Persons, yes; missing poems, no." (What's truly tragic's never allowed To stand alone for long, of course. At each moment there's a crowd Of clowns pressing in: the booming ass At every wake who, angling a loud Necktie in the chip dip, Airs his problems with intestinal gas, Or the blow-dried bonehead out to sell Siding to the grieving mother . . . . Well, Wade sent the Leader another briefword: "Decades of service to the Bard now force Me to amend the girl's little slip. 'Chaunted' not 'chanted' is the preferred . . .") Yet none of her unshakeable entourage —Pedants, pundits, cops without a clue, And a yearning young grease-monkey—are Alerted yet. Still the empty car Idles, idles on the cliff, and night Isn't falling so much as day Is floating out to sea . . . . Soon, whether She's found or not, her lights will draw Moths and tiny dark-winged things that might Be dirt-clumps, ashes. Come what may, The night will be lovely, as she foresaw, The first stars easing through the blue, Engine and ocean breathing together.

Brad Leithauser

Living,Death,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

At the Poetry Reading

I can’t keep my eyes off the poet’s wife’s legs—they’re so much more beautiful than anything he might be saying, though I’m no longer in a position really to judge, having stopped listening some time ago. He’s from the Iowa Writers Workshop and can therefore get along fine without my attention. He started in reading poems about his childhood— barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers, that sort of stuff—the loss of innocence he keeps talking about between poems, which I can relate to, especially under these circumstances. Now he’s on to science, a poem about hydrogen, I think, he’s trying to imagine himself turning into hydrogen. Maybe he’ll succeed. I’m imagining myself sliding up his wife’s fluid, rhythmic, lusciously curved, black- stockinged legs, imagining them arched around my shoulders, wrapped around my back. My God, why doesn’t he write poems about her! He will, no doubt, once she leaves him, leaves him for another poet, perhaps, the observant, uninnocent one, who knows a poem when it sits down in a room with him.

John Brehm

The Body,Love,Desire,Relationships,Men & Women,Nature,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

American Future

In 1963 the morning probably seemed harmless enough to sign on the dotted line as the insurance man talked to my parents for over an hour around a coffee table about our future. This roof wasn't designed to withstand meteors he told my father, who back then had a brush haircut that made his ears stick out, his moods still full of passion, still willing to listen, my mother with her beehive hairdo, smiling back at him, all three of them wanting so much to make the fine print of the world work. They laughed and smoked, and after they led the man politely to the door, my parents returned to the living room and danced in the afternoon light, the phonograph playing Frank Sinatra, the green Buick's payments up to date, five-hundred dollars safely in the bank— later that evening, his infallible common sense ready to protect us from a burst pipe or dry rot, my father waded up to his ankles in water, a V of sweat on the back of his shirt. Something loomed deeper than any basement on our block, larger than he was, a fear he could not admit was unsolvable with a monkey wrench or a handshake and a little money down.

Peter Bethanis

Living,Midlife,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

Swifts

Bing Crosby died in Spain while playing golf with Franco but who could care less, and at this writing only a few of my dear ones are gone—ah I could make a sad list—the swifts, as if to prove a point, fly into the light and make a mockery out of our darkness. They scream for food but in the world of shadows they only make a quick motion; I have studied them—the whiter the wall is—the barer the bulb— the more they scream, the more they dip down. I have made my two hands into a shape and I have darkened the wall to see what it looks like—I have shortened my two broken fingers to make the small tail and twisted the knuckles sideways so when they come in to eat one shadow overtakes the other, that way I can live in the darkness with Franco's poisonous head and Crosby's ears, who fainted, a thousand to one, behind a number two club, though no swift died for him, well, for them, digging for clubs. I watch the birds every night; they fly in a great circle, much larger than what I can see, their dipping is what I dreaded in front of my plain white wall—I say it for the nine hundred Americans who died in Spain. I thought I'd have to wait forever to do them a tiny justice and listen to their songs and die a little from the foolhardy mournful words, flying down one air current or another and doing the sides of buildings and tops of trees, the low-lying straggling dogwood, the full-bodied huge red maple, my dear ones.

Gerald Stern

Living,Death,Nature,Animals,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Noah’s Wife

is doing her usual for comic relief. She doesn’t see why she should get on the boat, etc., etc., while life as we know it hangs by a thread. Even God has had one or two great deadpan lines:Who told you (this was back at the start— the teeth of the tautology had just snapped shut) Whotold you you were naked? The world was so new that death hadn’t been till this minute required. What makes you think (the ground withers under their feet) we were told? The woman’s disobedience is good for plot, as also for restoring plot to human scale: three hundred cubits by fifty by what? What’s that in inches exactly? Whereas all obstinate wife is common coin. In the beginning was nothing and then a flaw in the nothing, a sort of mistake that amplified, the nothing mistranscribed (it takes such discipline to keep the prospect clean) and now the lion whelps, the beetle rolls its ball of dung, and Noah with no more than a primitive double- entry audit is supposed to make it right. We find the Creator in an awkward bind. Washed back to oblivion? Think again. The housewife at her laundry tub has got a better grip. Which may be why we’ve tried to find her laughable, she’s such an unhappy reminder of what understanding costs. Ask the boy who cannot, though God know’s he’s tried, he swears each bar of melting soap will be his last, who cannot turn the water off when once he’s turned it on. His hands are raw. His body seems like filth to him.Who told you (the pharmacopoeia has changed, the malady’s still the same) Who told youyou were food for worms? What makes you think (the furrow, the fruit)I had to be told?

Linda Gregerson

Religion,Christianity,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

Natural Selection

proceeds by chance and necessity becomes nonrandom through randomness builds complexity from simplicity nurtures consciousness unconsciously evolves purposelessly creatures who demand purpose and discover natural selection

Alan R. Shapiro

Nature,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Philosophy,Sciences

The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill

You may think it strange, Sam, that I'm writing a letter in these circumstances. I thought it strange too—the first time. But there's a misconception I was laboring under, and you are too, viz. that the imagination in your vicinity is free and powerful. After all, you say, you've been creating yourself all along imaginatively. You imagine yourself playing golf or hiking in the Olympics or writing a poem and then it becomes true. But you still have to do it, you have to exert yourself, will, courage, whatever you've got, you're mired in the unimaginative. Here I imagine a letter and it's written. Takes about two-fifths of a second, your time. Hell, this is heaven, man. I can deluge Congress with letters telling every one of those mendacious sons of bitches exactly what he or she is, in maybe about half an hour. In spite of your Buddhist proclivities, when you imagine bliss you still must struggle to get there. By the way the Buddha has his place across town on Elysian Drive. We call him Bud. He's lost weight and got new dentures, and he looks a hell of a lot better than he used to. He always carries a jumping jack with him everywhere just for contemplation, but he doesn't make it jump. He only looks at it. Meanwhile Sidney and Dizzy, Uncle Ben and Papa Yancey, are over by Sylvester's Grot making the sweetest, cheerfulest blues you ever heard. The air, so called, is full of it. Poems are fluttering everywhere like seed from a cottonwood tree. Sam, the remarkable truth is I can do any fucking thing I want. Speaking of which there's this dazzling young Naomi who wiped out on I-80 just west of Truckee last winter, and I think this is the moment for me to go and pay her my respects. Don't go way. I'll be right back.

Hayden Carruth

Living,Death,Religion,Buddhism,Christianity,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Mythology & Folklore,Ghosts & the Supernatural

Iceberg Lettuce

What vegetable leviathan extends beneath the dinner table, an unseen, monstrous green that pulls the chair out from under our faith in appearances: see a mere tuft of leaf on the plate like a wing, but if it flies away, it undoubtedly will disturb the continental drift asleep under the salad plate, the hidden world we forget as we reach for the smaller fork— (and now, mouth full, don't speak: politely chew your leaf of firmament that's torn and tossed up in vinegar here as we'll be tossed before its vast root maybe someday or any moment).

Joanie Mackowski

The Visit

A flashlight rolls over the walls of a cave, searching, until the transducer comes to a halt low on my still-flat belly. The doctor says, "There's definitely a kid in there." Easy for her to say—she sees this all day. But it took us years to get to this point. Years in the dark. Months of nothing and never. Her expert eye interprets the grainy screen, which I can't stop reaching toward, pretending to point to features but really just longing to touch the image, as if it were somehow more there than in me, this tiny, blurry, leaping bison or bear, something from Altamira or Lascaux, from the hand of an ancestor— the first art we know.

Carole Bernstein

Living,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

One Angel: Palazzo Arian

At San Raffaele Arcangelo One angel got it all wrong. She plopped into this sad century feet first in her dark clothes. There wasn't much water that winter—just a few puddles really— to break her fall. Mud-splattered, she rose and shook like a canine. It didn't take long to see her soaked wings as a backdrop to all the nonmagic to which we were accustomed, or to see what passed for history as a forgetting of sorts. (Was that one or two wars?) Strange how, as she limped down a dim vicolo, some willful disc hovered above her more florid than a sky—how the putrid puddles with their last reflections could neither correct nor register that light.

Ann Snodgrass

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Religion,Faith & Doubt,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Count Down

Survival is the final offer that arrives at the eleventh hour just when pain to the tenth power would kill you with another ninth degree. By then, relief strikes you brief as an eighth note; you wear doom proudly; it's your seventh seal. But life whispers through your sixth sense of what might await you in some fifth dimension where miracle is saved for the fourth quarter. Tricked, you sigh and rise on the third day. You know better, but with no second thought, risk that first step—absurd as first love at first sight— as if you were back at ground zero, as if it cost nothing, as if this were not the last laugh.

Robin Morgan

Living,Growing Old,Health & Illness

Before the Rain

Minutes before the rain begins I always waken, listening to the world hold its breath, as if a phone had rung once in a far room or a door had creaked in the darkness. Perhaps the genes of some forebear startle in me, some tribal warrior keeping watch on a crag beside a loch, miserable in the cold, though I think it is a woman's waiting I have come to know, a Loyalist hiding in the woods, muffling the coughing of her child against her linen skirts, her dark head bent over his, her fear spent somewhere else in time, leaving only this waiting, and I hope she escaped with her child, and I suppose she did. If not, I wouldn't be lying here awake, alive, listening for the rain to begin so that she can run, the sound of her footsteps lost, the sight of them blotted away on the path.

Lianne Spidel

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Weather,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

On the Road

Those dutiful dogtrots down airport corridors while gnawing at a Dunkin' Donuts cruller, those hotel rooms where the TV remote waits by the bed like a suicide pistol, those hours in the air amid white shirts whose wearers sleep-read through thick staid thrillers, those breakfast buffets in prairie Marriotts— such venues of transit grow dearer than home. The tricycle in the hall, the wife's hasty kiss, the dripping faucet and uncut lawn—this is life? No, vita thrives via the road, in the laptop whose silky screen shimmers like a dark queen's mirror, in the polished shoe that signifies killer intent, and in the solitary mission, a bumpy glide down through the cloud cover to a single runway at whose end a man just like you guards the Grail.

John Updike

Living,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

Truly Pathetic

Lately, the weather aches; the air is short of breath, and morning stumbles in, stiff-jointed. Day by day, the sun bores the sky, until the moon begins its tiresome disappearing act, making the oceans yawn. Even the seasons change with a throb of weariness— bud, bloom, leaf, fall. If it would help, I would paint my house silver or sell it or buy a red convertible. I would, but who am I to try to cheer up the self-indulgent universe.

Neal Bowers

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens,Weather,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire

Immigrant Picnic

It's the Fourth of July, the flags are painting the town, the plastic forks and knives are laid out like a parade. And I'm grilling, I've got my apron, I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish, I've got a hat shaped like the state of Pennsylvania. I ask my father what's his pleasure and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare," and then, "Hamburger, sure, what's the big difference," as if he's really asking. I put on hamburgers and hot dogs, slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas, uncap the condiments. The paper napkins are fluttering away like lost messages. "You're running around," my mother says, "like a chicken with its head loose." "Ma," I say, "you mean cut off, loose and cut off being as far apart as, say, son and daughter." She gives me a quizzical look as though I've been caught in some impropriety. "I love you and your sister just the same," she says, "Sure," my grandmother pipes in, "you're both our children, so why worry?" That's not the point I begin telling them, and I'm comparing words to fish now, like the ones in the sea at Port Said, or like birds among the date palms by the Nile, unrepentantly elusive, wild. "Sonia," my father says to my mother, "what the hell is he talking about?" "He's on a ball," my mother says. "That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands, "as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll...." "And what about roll out the barrels?" my mother asks, and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says, "let's have some fun," and launches into a polka, twirling my mother around and around like the happiest top, and my uncle is shaking his head, saying "You could grow nuts listening to us," and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai burgeoning without end, pecans in the South, the jumbled flavor of them suddenly in my mouth, wordless, confusing, crowding out everything else.

Gregory Djanikian

Independence Day

Tea-Strainer

Leaf-keep, un-sibyl; if the soul Has the weight of a swallow, what less Has the weight of a sip? You equal This riddle, unposed in your dish As a hand at rest in a lap. Held to, You hold back what can't be Prevented, what's no more palatable For that: the unfine; formerly, our future.

Joyelle McSweeney

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

Nimis Compos Mentis

(Too sound of mind) The paper table cloth was tastefully bleak, The misty morning light shone on his cheek, And made him look alone and masculine. He talked of Seneca and bad translations, Of modern critics' lightweight observations; A bread crumb rested sweetly on his chin. Behind him, through the glass, the ocean's heave Uncurled against the sand, beside his sleeve, As Eros aimed his toxic javelin. I ducked out of the way, to no avail; It glanced my flesh, injecting quite a cocktail That blurred my sight and caused my head to spin— Never mind the coffee we were drinking, Whatever I said was not what I was thinking. I wanted to become his mandolin, And lie across his lap, a dainty lute, And sing to him and feed him ripened fruit, While light upon the sea turned opaline. Instead, this conversation about art And formal education—God, he's smart! Such rationality should be a sin. The hour was up, he had to run, of course; A handshake and a peck of shy remorse— Outside, the sea was gray and dull as tin; It ruled the shore with tedious discipline.

Leslie Monsour

Love,Desire,Unrequited Love,Relationships,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books

Careless Perfection

According to Lin Yutang, both Po Chuyi and Su Tungpo "desperately admired" Tao Yuanming, a poet of nature who wrote a single love poem, a poem thought by Chinese dilettantes to be the one "blemish in a white jade." Can a poet be faulted for calling a womancarelessly perfect in beauty? He chose to long for her by envying the candle that glowed upon her beautiful face, the shadow that followed in her every move. Yet the nature poet Tao Yuanming, at home with the sudden turning of seasons, now feared the shadow in darkness, a discarded fan that once stirred her hair, feared the candle at dawn. At last believed that for beauty he had lived in vain.

Daniel Halpern

Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

The Tragedy of Hats

is that you can never see the one you're wearing, that no one believes the lies they tell, that they grow to be more famous than you, that you could die in one but you won't be buried in it. That we use them to create dogs in our own image. That the dogs in their mortarboards and baseball caps and veils crush our hubris with their unconcern. That Norma Desmond's flirty cocktail hat flung aside left a cowlick that doomed her. That two old ladies catfighting in Hutzler's Better Dresses both wore flowered straw. Of my grandmother the amateur hatmaker, this legend: that the holdup man at the Mercantile turned to say Madam I love your hat before he shot the teller dead who'd giggled at her homemade velvet roses. O happy tragedy of hats! That they make us mimic classic gestures, inspiring pleasure first, then pity and then fear. See how we tip them, hold them prettily against the wind or pull them off and mop our sweaty brows like our beloved foolish dead in photographs. Like farmers plowing under the ancient sun.

Clarinda Harriss

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

Dog Music

Amongst dogs are listeners and singers. My big dog sang with me so purely, puckering her ruffled lips into an O, beginning with small, swallowing sounds like Coltrane musing, then rising to power and resonance, gulping air to continue— her passion and sense of flawless form— singing not with me, but for the art of dogs. We joined in many fine songs—"Stardust," "Naima," "The Trout," "My Rosary," "Perdido." She was a great master and died young, leaving me with unrelieved grief, her talents known to only a few. Now I have a small dog who does not sing, but listens with discernment, requiring skill and spirit in my falsetto voice. I sing her name and words of loveandante, con brio, vivace, adagio. Sometimes she is so moved she turns to place a paw across her snout, closes her eyes, sighing like a girl I held and danced with years ago. But I am a pretender to dog music. The true strains rise only from the rich, red chambers of a canine heart, these melodies best when the moon is up, listeners and singers together or apart, beyond friendship and anger, far from any human imposter— ballads of long nights lifting to starlight, songs of bones, turds, conquests, hunts, smells, rankings, things settled long before our birth.

Paul Zimmer

Relationships,Pets,Arts & Sciences,Music

Letter of Recommendation

Miss A, who graduated six years back, has air-expressed me an imposing stack of forms in furtherance of her heart's desire: a Ph.D. Not wishing to deny her, I dredge around for something laudatory to say that won't be simply a tall story; in fact, I search for memories of her, and draw a blank—or say, at best a blur. Was hers the class in that ungodly room whose creaking door slammed with a sonic boom, whose radiators twangled for the first ten minutes, and then hissed, and (this was worst) subsided with a long, regretful sigh? Yes, there, as every Wednesday we would try to overlook cacophony and bring our wits to bear on some distinguished thing some poet sometime wrote, Miss A would sit calm in a middle row and ponder it. Blonde, I believe, and quiet (so many are). A dutiful note-taker. Not a star. Roundheads and Cavaliers received their due notice from her before the term was through. She wrote a paper on . . . could it have been "Milton's Idea of Original Sin"? Or was it "Deathbed Imagery in Donne"? Whichever, it was likely not much fun for her. It wasn't bad, though I've seen better. But I can hardly say that in a letter like this one, now refusing to take shape even as wispy memories escape the reach of certitude. Try as I may, I cannot render palpable Miss A, who, with five hundred classmates, left few traces when she decamped. Those mortarboard-crowned faces, multitudes, beaming, ardent to improve a world advancing dumbly in its groove, crossing the stage that day—to be consigned to a cold-storage portion of the mind . . . What could be sadder? (She remembered me.) The transcript says I gave Miss A a B.

Robert B. Shaw

Activities,School & Learning

The Months

January Contorted by wind, mere armatures for ice or snow, the trees resolve to endure for now, they will leaf out in April. And I must be as patient as the trees— a winter resolution I break all over again, as the cold presses its sharp blade against my throat.February After endless hibernation on the windowsill, the orchid blooms— embroidered purple stitches up and down a slender stem. Outside, snow melts midair to rain. Abbreviated month. Every kind of weather.March When the Earl King came to steal away the child in Goethe’s poem, the father said don’t be afraid, it’s just the wind. . . As if it weren’t the wind that blows away the tender fragments of this world— leftover leaves in the corners of the garden, a Lenten Rose that thought it safe to bloom so early.April In the pastel blur of the garden, the cherry and redbud shake rain from their delicate shoulders, as petals of pink dogwood wash down the ditches in dreamlike rivers of color.May May apple, daffodil, hyacinth, lily, and by the front porch steps every billowing shade of purple and lavender lilac, my mother’s favorite flower, sweet breath drifting through the open windows: perfume of memory—conduit of spring.June The June bug on the screen door whirs like a small, ugly machine, and a chorus of frogs and crickets drones like Musak at all the windows. What we don’t quite see comforts us. Blink of lightning, grumble of thunder—just the heat clearing its throat.July Tonight the fireflies light their brief candles in all the trees of summer— color of moonflakes, color of fluorescent lace where the ocean drags its torn hem over the dark sand.August Barefoot and sun-dazed, I bite into this ripe peach of a month, gathering children into my arms in all their sandy glory, heaping my table each night with nothing but corn and tomatoes.September Their summer romance over, the lovers still cling to each other the way the green leaves cling to their trees in the strange heat of September, as if this time there will be no autumn.October How suddenly the woods have turned again. I feel like Daphne, standing with my arms outstretched to the season, overtaken by color, crowned with the hammered gold of leaves.November These anonymous leaves, their wet bodies pressed against the window or falling past— I count them in my sleep, absolving gravity, absolving even death who knows as I do the imperatives of the season.December The white dove of winter sheds its first fine feathers; they melt as they touch the warm ground like notes of a once familiar music; the earth shivers and turns towards the solstice.

Linda Pastan

Nature,Fall,Winter

Stalin's Library Card

A recent piece in PRAVDA gives the library books checked out by Stalin between April and December, 1926. Much has been made of their oddity... Robert Conquest I THE ESSENCE OF HYPNOSIS (Paris: LeGrande, 1902)

David Wojahn

Living,Health & Illness,Activities,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

To My Father's Business

Leo bends over his desk Gazing at a memorandum While Stuart stands beside him With a smile, saying, "Leo, the order for those desks Came in today From Youngstown Needle and Thread!" C. Loth Inc., there you are Like Balboa the conqueror Of those who want to buy office furniture Or bar fixtures In nineteen forty in Cincinnati, Ohio! Secretaries pound out Invoices on antique typewriters— Dactyllographs And fingernail biters. I am sitting on a desk Looking at my daddy Who is proud of but feels unsure about Some aspects of his little laddie. I will go on to explore Deep and/or nonsensical themes While my father's on the dark hardwood floor Hit by a couple of Ohio sunbeams. Kenny, he says, some day you'll work in the store. But I felt "never more" or "never ever" Harvard was far away World War Two was distant Psychoanalysis was extremely expensive All of these saved me from you. C. Loth you made my father happy I saw his face shining He laughed a lot, working in you He said to Miss Ritter His secretary "Ritt, this is my boy, Kenny!" "Hello there Kenny," she said My heart in an uproar I loved you but couldn't think Of staying with you I can see the virtues now That could come from being in you A sense of balance Compromise and acceptance— Not isolated moments of brilliance Like a girl without a shoe, But someone that you Care for every day— Need for customers and the economy Don't go away. There were little pamphlets Distributed in you About success in business Each about eight to twelve pages long One whole series of them All ended with the words "P.S. He got the job" One a story about a boy who said, "I swept up the street, Sir, Before you got up." Or "There were five hundred extra catalogues So I took them to people in the city who have a dog"— P.S. He got the job. I didn't get the job I didn't think that I could do the job I thought I might go crazy in the job Staying in you You whom I could love But not be part of The secretaries clicked Their Smith Coronas closed at five p.m. And took the streetcars to Kentucky then And I left too.

Kenneth Koch

Living,Coming of Age,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Philosophy

The Heart's Archaeology

On some fundless expedition, you discover it beneath a pyracantha bush carved from the hip bone of a long-extinct herbivore that walked the plains on legs a story tall. An ocarina of bone drilled and shaped laboriously with tools too soft to be efficient by one primitive musician spending night after night squatting by the fire. No instrument of percussion: place this against your lips, fill it from your lungs to sound a note winding double helix, solo and thready calling to the pack.

Maudelle Driskell

Arts & Sciences,Music,Mythology & Folklore

Beech

For a tree, you're the worst kind of friend, remembering everything. Pale-skinned, slightly brailled, blank page of pre-adolescence. The way the smallest knife-slice would darken with time, rise and widen. mark was here. Left his. But these are the digs you're used to, sufferer of mere presence, scratched years, scratched loves we wanted to write on the world and couldn't trust to an eardrum. (I scarred you myself long ago with my own jack-knife, jill-name. You took her as the morning unsteamed around me. Took us as we had to be taken, in.) Old relief, new reminder, I was young, what could I have written? Didn't care then, had to see it scraped out, big letters beneath your erotic nubs and crotches. O beech, it's no big riddle: we fell in the forest, you heard. Quiet, in your own way. In your own way, spreading the word.

Kevin McFadden

Nature,Trees & Flowers

Scary Movies

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying, and I keep expecting some enormous black-and-white B-movie Cyclops to appear at the edge of the horizon, to come striding over the ocean and drag me from my kitchen to the deep cave that flickered into my young brain one Saturday at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless between my older brothers, pumped up on candy and horror—that cave, the litter of human bones gnawed on and flung toward the entrance, I can smell their stench as clearly as the bacon fat from breakfast. This is how it feels to lose it— not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is that helps you get up in the morning and actually leave the house on those days when it seems like death in his brown uniform is cruising his panel truck of packages through your neighborhood. I think of a friend’s voice on her answering machine—Hi, I’m not here— the morning of her funeral, the calls filling up the tape and the mail still arriving, and I feel as afraid as I was after all those vampire movies when I’d come home and lie awake all night, rigid in my bed, unable to get up even to pee because the undead were waiting underneath it; if I so much as stuck a bare foot out there in the unprotected air they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me under. And my parents said there was nothing there, when I was older I would know better, and now they’re dead, and I’m older, and I know better.

Kim Addonizio

Living,Death,Growing Old,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

Your Clothes

Of course they are empty shells, without hope of animation. Of course they are artifacts. Even if my sister and I should wear some, or if we give others away, they will always be your clothes without you, as we will always be your daughters without you.

Judith Kroll

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Funerals,Mother's Day

Pauline Is Falling

from the cliff's edge, kicking her feet in panic and despair as the circle of light contracts and blackness takes the screen. And that is how we leave her, hanging—though we know she will be rescued, only to descend into fresh harm, the story flowing on, disaster and reprieve—systole, diastole—split rhythm of a heart that hungers only to go on. So why is this like my mother, caged in a railed bed, each breath, a fresh installment in a tortured tale of capture and release? Nine days she dangled, stubborn, over the abyss, the soft clay crumbling beneath her fingertips, until she dropped with a little bird cry of surprise into the swift river below. Here metaphor collapses, for there was no love to rescue her, no small boat waiting with a net to fish her out, although the water carried her, and it was April when we buried her among the weeping cherries and the waving flags and in the final fade, a heron breasted the far junipers to gain the tremulous air and swim away.

Jean Nordhaus

Living,Death,Disappointment & Failure,Health & Illness,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Wake Me in South Galway

Wake me in South Galway, or better yet In Clare. You'll know the pub I have in mind. Improvise a hearse—one of those decrepit Postal vans would suit me down to the ground— A rust-addled Renault, Kelly green with a splash Of Oscar Wilde yellow stirred in to clash With the dazzling perfect meadows and limestone On the coast road from Kinvara down toward Ballyvaughan. Once you've got in off the road at Newquay Push aside some barstools and situate me Up in front by the door where the musicians sit, Their table crowded with pints and a blue teapot, A pouch of Drum, some rolling papers and tin Whistles. Ask Charlie Piggott to play a tune That sounds like loss and Guinness, turf smoke and rain, While Brenda dips in among the punters like a hedge-wren. Will I hear it? Maybe not. But I hear it now. The smoke of the music fills my nostrils, I feel the attuned Box and fiddle in harness, pulling the plough Of the melody, turning the bog-dark, root-tangled ground. Even the ceramic collie on the windowsill Cocks an ear as the tune lifts and the taut sail Of the Galway hooker trills wildly in its frame on the wall, Rippling to the salt pulse and seabreeze of a West Clare reel. Many a night, two octaves of one tune, We sat here side by side, your body awake To a jig or slide, me mending the drift of a line As the music found a path to my notebook. Lost in its lilt and plunge I would disappear Into the heathery freedom of a slow air Or walk out under the powerful stars to clear My head of thought and breathe their cooled-down fire. When my own session ends, let me leave like that, Porous to the wind that blows off the ocean. Goodbye to the company and step into the night Completed and one-off, like a well-played tune— Beyond the purified essence of hearth fires Rising from the life of the parish, past smoke and stars, Released from everything I've done and known. I won't go willingly, it's true, but I'll be gone.

Richard Tillinghast

Living,Death,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Music,Poetry & Poets

Today

If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze that it made you want to throw open all the windows in the house and unlatch the door to the canary's cage, indeed, rip the little door from its jamb, a day when the cool brick paths and the garden bursting with peonies seemed so etched in sunlight that you felt like taking a hammer to the glass paperweight on the living room end table, releasing the inhabitants from their snow-covered cottage so they could walk out, holding hands and squinting into this larger dome of blue and white, well, today is just that kind of day.

Billy Collins

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Spring,Weather

Suitcase Song

John-O was given a key to the apartment. The deal was this: if Phil died suddenly, and John-O heard, he would rush on over, enter the apartment, leave unseen with Phil’s brown suitcase, and secretly pitch it into the mounded deeps of the city dump. Simply, there were things that Phil didn’t want to hurt his family with. Do you have yours? I have mine. The brown suitcase. Sasha’s sister, on her deathbed—dinky, frail, just a mild skim-milk trickle of a hospice patient— tensed, sat up, and unloosed such confessional invective that it seemed the walls and the sheets would have to be splattered in shit, her cancer having acted with the harsh, disbursing force of a tornado on the brown and hard-shelled suitcase in her electrochemical memory webs. Is yours secure? from love? from sodium pentathol? Last year, when a tornado hit our fringe of downtown businesses, the air was alive for counties around with the downward dance of naked canceled checks, handwritten notes, hotel receipts, e-mail transcripts, smeary Polaroids, a swirl of lacy underwisps that jellyfished the skies, and from The G-Spot Shoppe a rain of plastic pleasure aids, of which one prime example pierced a cow between the eyes and struck her dead. Maybe AIDS—I wasn’t sure. But he was dying,that was sure: as dry as a stick of human chalk, and making the terrible scritch-sound of a stick of chalk, in his throat, in the community air, in the room across from Sasha’s sister. Something . . . hidden in the trace of rundown aura still around him as we chatted there one morning . . . a tv? a sissyboy tv? I wasn’t sure, but it was obvious his life-chalk held a story not yet written, not confessed yet for this storyniverous planet. And when I remembered my mother’s own last days . . . the way a person is a narrative, the strength of which is either revelation or withholding. It was summer, and the garden at the nursing home was fat with summer’s pleasures: flowered mounds like reefs of coral, bees as globular as whole yolks. In her room, my mother disappeared a breath at a time, and everything else was only a kind of scenery for that. The wink of pollen in the light. The birds. Their feather-lice. The bursting spores. Those opened-up cicada husks abandoned on the patio —the small, brown, unlocked luggage that’s completed its work in this world.

Albert Goldbarth

Living,Death,Health & Illness,The Body,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

Ants

Two wandering across the porcelain Siberia, one alone on the window sill, four across the ceiling's senseless field of pale yellow, one negotiating folds in a towel: tiny, bronze-colored, antennae 'strongly elbowed,' crawling over Antony and Cleopatra, face down, unsurprised, one dead in the mountainous bar of soap. Sub-family Formicinae (a single segment behind the thorax), the sickle moons of their abdomens, one trapped in bubbles (I soak in the tub); with no clear purpose they come in by the baseboard, do not bite, crush bloodless beneath a finger. Peterson's calls them 'social creatures,' yet what grim society: identical pilgrims, seed-like, brittle, pausing on the path only three seconds to touch another's face, some hoisting the papery carcasses of their dead in their jaws, which open and close like the clasp of a necklace. 'Mating occurs in flight'— what better way? Weightless, reckless rapture: the winged queen and her mate, quantum passion spiraling near the kumquat, and then the queen sheds her wings, plants the pearl-like larvae in their cribs of sand: more anvil-headed, creeping attentions to follow cracks in the tile, the lip of the tub, and one starting across the mirror now, doubled.

Joanie Mackowski

Relationships,Pets

That Child

That child was dangerous. That just-born Newly washed and silent baby Wrapped in deerskin and held warm Against the side of its mother could understand The language of birds and animals Even when asleep. It knew why Bluejay Was scolding the bushes, what Hawk was explaining To the wind on the cliffside, what Bittern had found out While standing alone in marsh grass. It knew What the screams of Fox and the whistling of Otter Were telling the forest. That child knew The language of Fire As it gnawed at sticks like Beaver And what Water said all day and all night At the creek's mouth. As its small fingers Closed around Stone, it held what Stone was saying. It knew what Bear Mother whispered to herself Under the snow. It could not tell Anyone what it knew. It would laugh Or cry out or startle or suddenly stare At nothing, but had no way To repeat what it was hearing, what it wanted most Not to remember. It had no way to know Why it would fall under a spell And lie still as if not breathing, Having grown afraid Of what it could understand. That child would learn To sit and crawl and stand and begin Putting one foot forward and following it With the other, would learn to put one word It could barely remember slightly ahead Of the other and then walk and speak And finally run and chatter, And all the Tillamook would know that child Had forgotten everything and at last could listen Only to people and was safe now.

David Wagoner

Living,Infancy,Nature,Animals,Mythology & Folklore

A HOPKINS RUMBLE, 1999

For James Richardson Gerard, juke-step Jerry, little wrestler, soul-mess of sinew and mind-sight, fired spark, joyed Jesuit, grief-clog too, but a Pan-flute in every Ave, you half-nelson the syntax dandies, ram them to canvas, sit upon and pin the god-fops, minions of ghost tomes, trite chimes, though you walk among them, too, jig and roar of black-robed stroll in golden-grove and choral iambs. You were, yes, that falcon flight, the labor, soar, and dive, but buzzard nose for carrion, too, sniffed your own, knew, alone, the rot, rope-knot or buckle of roots under-on rock, your gowned back to roses, rosaries, but eyes a song gone up, too, sickly little wings stuck in God-glue air: how long? You sang one dialectic flight, sir—the only kind. How high can the swallow swoop, how low the falcon grieve, relieve, in fall till pinions hold him, there, to kill? Light- weight, mutt, heaver of iron, scrap,feather: I believe the hurt, believe you saw what you saw.

John Hazard

Religion,Christianity,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

HUDSON

unwavering noon, self-minus sun flake on the levels of gold there are names for these things: rose, brick, plate glass the annunciation of the sparrow a gene for anxiety add hope, fear, greed, desire no rest but the shade to which a sun implodes perhaps on other worlds others walk streets muse on the weather psyches built, say, on a double sun of unwavering noon the balm of such congruence • thick, white, stick bicyclists painted on the esplanade to Chambers glinting Jersey cars helicopter blades under a ledge of cloud alien first descent past the Trade Towers drifting in on the flyway to LaGuardia landscape, local, locale: the man-made made man trying to open to something like days' unraveling waves • blue pulled toward fire out toward the skyscraper lights ancient mausoleums upheavals from personal terror dark pier jut into dark water turquoise, indigo, aqua, lapis; under the molten, under the bruise of night blood in your lips as a man I violated the boundary of your mouth I say this because in the phantasmagoria I was woman and man in another story you turn men to stone though here, out of narrative, poignant at Morton Street against the twilight • incomprehensible rain under sun heap-leached haze-gold fused into evening water's green-grey dense pliance shadowed face that bends to the shadows to drink and be salvaged tiered buildings like vast Titanics yellow truck-trailer's anonymous corpse conjoined to the numberless a boy swept from the rocks at the Verrazano stanchion tomb cold draining past Liberty it need not cohere but how could it not? without context, for which all are accountable this is for you of the future: one was here who is gone, into the eigen levels

Hugh Seidman

Missed Time

My notebook has remained blank for months thanks to the light you shower around me. I have no use for my pen, which lies languorously without grief. Nothing is better than to live a storyless life that needs no writing for meaning— when I am gone, let others say they lost a happy man, though no one can tell how happy I was.

Ha Jin

Anthem

After the Fourth of July On this night of the mid- summer festival of fire, where liquid explosives look like the arch and ache of the willow tree so near your grave, on this night of the awaiting mid- wife who lulled you in- to this world, the light all violet because the Earth and stars inclined toward each other, she also sleeps, she who was your first deliverer, guiding you out of your mother—her bluing skin no small sign of the future cyanosis of her spirit for no small journey was it to this country to bring you to birth in this torch song heat and an anthem of a free nation's conception of combustions: rosins, petroleum, tallow, arsenic and worse, as you, too, fell from the sky of her body with me a microscopic egg inside— half the composition that made up my own toss and tumble to this crash of ground I sit over and bless while you lie under, under the willow, under this world that no midwife nor wavelength can under- standably reach. So I stand in this over- determined fire forced out like bullets upon a target— the pulled trigger releasing the hammer that strikes the impacted mixture— hailstorm and hymn of memories. And the outstretched womb involutes and the abdominal wall tightens and inside all abandoned encasements the night over the day darkens.

Susan Hahn

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,The Body,Nature

Deaf Night at O'Donnell's

I happen in from another unremarkable Tuesday in the realm of gratuitous sound, but here, I can hear again the quiet voices of the ontological, the clink of ice cubes in uplifted glasses, the scrape of chairs, the mournful lowing of floorboards, the long history of blood retold in my ears. I scuffle to the bar, thoughts drowned by my suddenly thunderous presence in this world, and the silence flowing from the neon jukebox, the silence going down smooth as the shot of loneliness that would naturally follow a Billie Holiday song if one were playing— —while everywhere hands are fluttering like sheets in winds of gossip, hollering above last call for one more round.

Art Nahill

Activities,Eating & Drinking

The Answering Machine

I call and hear your voice on the answering machine weeks after your death, a fledgling ghost still longing for human messages. Shall I leave one, telling how the fabric of our lives has been ripped before but that this sudden tear will not be mended soon or easily? In your emptying house, others roll up rugs, pack books, drink coffee at your antique table, and listen to messages left on a machine haunted by the timbre of your voice, more palpable than photographs or fingerprints. On this first day of this first fall without you, ashamed and resisting but compelled, I dial again the number I know by heart, thankful in a diminished world for the accidental mercy of machines, then listen and hang up.

Linda Pastan

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving

Color in American History: An Essay

Did they enjoy this, those honorary ancestors Of ours, whom we may not speak of as Indians now, But, rather, as Native Americans? Did they, that is, Have the opportunity to take in such views? For there were no roads then, slicing through The hills, opening vistas like this. Astonishing! Unless, perhaps, they were upon the Delaware, A kind of road itself. But, otherwise, would not The land itself have been an inconvenience, The changing leaves an oracle of cruelties To come and not, as for the tourists on a bus, A postcard to sweep up at a glance and then Go home to the similar view they own— One stately maple, or two, intensely orange? Only the birds, may be, might have known These colors, the sudden shift of gears from green To ocher, umber, brightest yellow, deepest red, The colors of the gleeful dead. For birds can fly Above the trees and see what we see from a bus. But is there gladness in their flight? Might it Not as well be night? And Indians (forgive the word), Did they delight more than a bird? Were there Esthetes then as now, before the ax, The ox, the plow? I must believe there were— And why? Because they traded all Manhattan For a handful of ceramic beads. They knew, As we, that a glint of pure bright blue Is worth a whole October day, or two.

Tom Disch

Nature,Fall,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity

Call It Music

Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song in my own breath. I'm alone here in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky above the St. George Hotel clear, clear for New York, that is. The radio playing "Bird Flight," Parker in his California tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering "Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos. I would guess that outside the recording studio in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas, it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes, shook his head, and barked like a dog—just once— and then Howard McGhee took his arm and assured him he'd be OK. I know this because Howard told me years later that he thought Bird could lie down in the hotel room they shared, sleep for an hour or more, and waken as himself. The perfect sunlight angles into my little room above Willow Street. I listen to my breath come and go and try to catch its curious taste, part milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes from me into the world. This is not me, this is automatic, this entering and exiting, my body's essential occupation without which I am a thing. The whole process has a name, a word I don't know, an elegant word not in English or Yiddish or Spanish, a word that means nothing to me. Howard truly believed what he said that day when he steered Parker into a cab and drove the silent miles beside him while the bright world unfurled around them: filling stations, stands of fruits and vegetables, a kiosk selling trinkets from Mexico and the Philippines. It was all so actual and Western, it was a new creation coming into being, like the music of Charlie Parker someone later called "glad," though that day I would have said silent, "the silent music of Charlie Parker." Howard said nothing. He paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights to their room, got his boots off, and went out to let him sleep as the afternoon entered the history of darkness. I'm not judging Howard, he did better than I could have now or then. Then I was 19, working on the loading docks at Railway Express, coming day by day into the damaged body of a man while I sang into the filthy air the Yiddish drinking songs my Zadie taught me before his breath failed. Now Howard is gone, eleven long years gone, the sweet voice silenced. "The subtle bridge between Eldridge and Navarro," they later wrote, all that rising passion a footnote to others. I remember in '85 walking the halls of Cass Tech, the high school where he taught after his performing days, when suddenly he took my left hand in his two hands to tell me it all worked out for the best. Maybe he'd gotten religion, maybe he knew how little time was left, maybe that day he was just worn down by my questions about Parker. To him Bird was truly Charlie Parker, a man, a silent note going out forever on the breath of genius which now I hear soaring above my own breath as this bright morning fades into afternoon. Music, I'll call it music. It's what we need as the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean, the calm and endless one I've still to cross.

Philip Levine

Living,Growing Old,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Music

[IT'S BEEN TWO THOUSAND YEARS NOW]

It's been two thousand years now that, with a wounded leg, the god's amazing loves have dragged along. He has aged. Soon he won't be noticed except from way up in a plane in the markings of wheat that yield the trace of an ancient sanctuary. He solicits a language of caresses, open pasture, available bodies, and the words refuse, and this elsewhere is already in his death except for a slender purple flower under the sun. He can still act the god all around, evening's worn heart. He guesses the flower will slip fragile from one century to the next with its prayer.

Marie-Claire Bancquart

Living,Growing Old,Time & Brevity,Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine,The Spiritual

[OFTEN WHEN HE WAS ADVANCING]

often when he was advancing feeling his way in the night he was doubtful rebelled wanted to climb back up to the old light but a force held him enjoined him to pursue to venture once more once again into the thickest darkness of his shadow one day at the height of his distress emptied of all force driven to see that the inaccessible would not yield he admitted that he must renounce it to his great surprise without his having to take a single step he crossed the threshold came into the light

Charles Juliet

Religion,Faith & Doubt

[Les plantes et les planètes]

Les plantes et les planètes Au même ciel obáissent ; Du même soleil les bêtes Et les hommes se nourrissent ; Et le mátal dans la mine Couve l'astre minuscule, Soufre dont la fleur si fine Vit en chaque corpuscule. Naines ou gáantes sont Poudre et bran jetás loin Qui sans chute ou frein s'en vont Aux quatre mondes sans coin Ni angle, d'anges peuplás, Mais d'autres disent que non, Dont les mondes envolás Seraient comme d'un canon, Par qui par hasard tirá, L'expansive consáquence, Et d'aucune intelligence Le fruit de quel grain tirá. [Plants and planets] Plants and planets Obey the same heaven; As beasts and men Are nourished by the same sun; And the metal in the mine Warms minute stars, Sulphurous flowers so delicate They live in every corpuscule. Dwarves and giants are Powder and dust thrown far Without fall or check whirl To the four cornerless, angleless Worlds, peopled with angels, But others say not at all. Their worlds seem Fired from a cannon, Fired by whom by chance, This expanding consequence, The fruit of some grapeshot Without any intelligence.

Robert Marteau

Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens

Town Hall, Fifteenth Arrondissement (tr. by John Ashbery)

You should have heard the soldiers’ feet wounding the swirls that the accordion waltz left on the pavement like a mower’s swath once the parade had passed you should have kissed the soldiers’ feet pulled out of their boots and licked the ankles and climbed as far as the khaki seven and a half millimeters thick would allow you should have shaken their belly like a carpet it was grand illusion day when they escape their deep knowledge and pretend to look for handsome successors but it would be better to look for the heart and put an alarm clock in its place that could play reveille like a puppet but wouldn’t serve coffee in bed you should have rummaged under their false teeth to hunt for hidden diamonds with lively fingers hunt for them everywhere not find them even in the creases of their nakedness. Joy of being a child of the sovereign people of lending a hand to institutions and seeing one’s name inscribed on the slate of urinals in letters of coal tar for a single flag that one has become flapping its boredom at the angles of two streets that the wind stirs unless it’s first the wind of trumpets all love to the winds

Pierre Martory

Living,Growing Old,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics

[Un Citadin / A City Dweller]

The street I walk along I often see As if I'd long since left the moving surface Of the world for the endless other side that disperses Us all some day without return but free Of care. I apply myself so well to this fragile proceeding That very quickly my gaze ceases to be Part of the cloudy clump of hope and memory I'll have given my name to. But for this to succeed, A feeling of absolute happiness has to make Itself felt, as if from outside me, so much That at that moment the very street has a hunch That it, the entire city, and its uncertain space Have become one with the mobile but faithful pattern Of phrases written by our steps when we move about. I no longer know who's walking and marking out The ground, bit by bit, to the corner. My gaze then patterns Itself on tomorrow's unknown eyes, which will shine When from the roofs, posthumous and vague, mine glow, And my invisible trace on the asphalt below Might guide the élan of hardier passersby. Will they know what I sometimes suspect: what appears To be the distracted gaze with which we see The world is the world itself?—It sees and hears Itself through the thin transparency of our screens.

Jacques Réda

Living,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

Parmi beaucoup de poèmes / Among Many Poems

Parmi beaucoup de poèmes Il y en avait un Dont je ne parvenais pas à me souvenir Sinon que je l'avais composé Autrefois En descendant cette rue Du côté des numéros pairs de cette rue Baignée d'une matinée limpide Une rue de petites boutiques persistantes Entre la Seine sinistrée et l'hôpital Un poème écrit avec mes pieds Comme je compose toujours les poèmes En silence et dans ma tête et en marchant Mais je ne me souviens de rien Que de la rue de la lumière et du hasard Qui avait fait entrer dans ce poème Le mot "respect" Que je n'ai pas l'habitude de faire vibrer Dans les pages mentales de la poésie Au-delà de lui il n'y a rien Et ce mot ce mot qui ne bouge pas Atteste la cessation de la rue Comme un arbre oublié de l'espace Among Many Poems Among many poems There was one Which I couldn't remember Except having made it up Long ago While going down that street On the even-numbered side of that street Bathed in a limpid morning A street of little shops still lasting Between the hospital and the wounded Seine A poem written with my feet As I always make up my poems In silence and in my head while walking But I remember nothing Except the street the light and the chance That had caused the entry in the poem Of the word "respect" That I don't usually set resounding In poetry's mental pages Beyond it there is nothing And this word this unmoving word Awaits the ending of the street Like a tree space has forgotten

Jacques Roubaud

Activities,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

No Time

In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents are buried side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite. Then, all day, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

Billy Collins

Living,Death,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Lullaby for the Second Millennium

From the point of view of all time, these recent changes signal more a return to nature than a departure, than degradation. In the beginning, after all, there was boiling rock. Then waters arranging their bodies around an era of softer forms: lichen, grassland, swaying treetops. Then creatures, movingly fleshed, treading pathways that hardened. Then pavement hardening and cities, monumental. Soon mostly rock again, and radiant. More and more like moon. Soon, sooner than is being thought, there will be even more light. The creatures will have stopped being able to move or be moved. And the rock will boil.

J. Allyn Rosser

Nature,Weather,Arts & Sciences,Sciences

Stationed

It's the other ones, who soon enough return to being happy after the funeral, that are nearest to their own deaths—in their gaiety and everyday distraction, they're so open and unguarded . . . anything could enter them; could claim them. It's the ones who weep incessantly that are saved for now, the ones who have taken a little of it into their systems: this is how inoculation works. And sorrow is difficult, a job: it requires time to complete. And the tears?—the salt of the folk saying, that gets sprinkled over the tail feathers and keeps a bird from flying; keeps it stationed in this world.

Albert Goldbarth

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Funerals

Beginnings

National Museum of Scotland On the ground floor called "Beginnings," a fertility stone is displayed in the diamond-hard blue halogen, a line etching of an erection with two equal circles, as one sees in graffitti in the Underground. The stone is attributed to the Picts, of whom history says little, besides the Latin picti, painted people, tattooed. When set side by side with Latin engravings and Roman military hardware, the artifact makes them seem pitiful. In the museum you rise through time, the text written in first person plural as if all who enter are complicitous with the articles of defiance, Robert the Bruce, the long unveering heredity of defeat, the room of thumbscrews and "The Maiden" for severing heretical heads of witches, upward to the Reformation, then the rout of the Highlanders and the exile of the Bonnie Prince, until the museum seems like a deep well where the fertility stone of the painted people rests at its bottom, universal hieroglyph on which someone made a wish.

Jeffrey Greene

Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Arrowhead

Where two streams joined, we met By accident, sitting upon an outcropping of rock With only the intent of watching Water flow beneath unwinding water. Facing up-stream, she held a flower To the sun as I leaned back and found An arrowhead inside a crevice, which lay there As if someone had left it by intent As an excuse for me to speak above the whirl of water Swirling upon stone and thus Transform the accident of meeting her— Ablaze in sunlight with a flower in her hand— Into stark fact as obdurate as rock. Could I have called, "Look at this arrowhead I just found here!" Would she have thought "An accident, that's credible," Or feared that my intent was sinister, And that the implication of the arrowhead, Unlike the radiant white flower or The two streams merging into faster water, Casting up colored spume, Had been contrived by me, certain as rock That forms by geologic laws? She had to know an arrowhead Is humanly designed with the intent to kill, Though now it's harmless as a flower Decorating someone's hair, Or water organized into a garden fountain. An arrowhead can now be used As an adornment for a necklace Like a flower in a painting where a stream Leaps past a light-reflecting rock With nothing in a brush-stroke left to accident. And so our accidental meeting on the rock Flowed by, a flower cast upon the water With intent unknown, and all That's left now is the arrowhead.

Robert Pack

Relationships,Men & Women,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

Love Poem for an Enemy

I, as sinned against as sinning, take small pleasure from the winning of our decades-long guerrilla war. For from my job I've wanted more than victory over one who'd tried to punish me before he died, and now, neither of us dead, we haunt these halls in constant dread of drifting past the other's life while long-term memory is rife with slights that sting like paper cuts. We've occupied our separate ruts yet simmered in a single rage. We've grown absurd in middle age together, and should seek wisdom now together, by ending this row. I therefore decommission you as constant flagship of my rue. Below the threshold of my hate you now my good regard may rate. For I have let my anger pass. But, while you're down there, kiss my ass.

Richard Katrovas

Living,Midlife,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

To the Consolations of Philosophy

Thank you but not just at the moment I know you will say I have said that before I know you have been there all along somewhere in another time zone I studied once those beautiful instructions when I was young and far from here they seemed distant then they seem distant now from everything I remember I hope they stayed with you when the noose started to tighten and you could say no more and after wisdom and the days of iron the eyes started from your head I know the words must have been set down partly for yourself unjustly condemned after a good life I know the design of the world is beyond our comprehension thank you but grief is selfish and in the present when the stars do not seem to move I was not listening I know it is not sensible to expect fortune to grant her gifts forever I know

W. S. Merwin

Living,Growing Old,Sorrow & Grieving,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

Sugar Dada

Go home. It's never what you think it is, The kiss, the diamond, the slamdance pulse in the wrist. Nothing is true, my dear, not even this Rumor of passion you'll doubtless insist On perceiving in my glance. Please just Go. Home is never what you think it is. Meaning lies in meaning's absence. The mist Is always almost just about to lift. Nothing is truer. Dear, not even this Candle can explain its searing twist Of flame mounted on cool amethyst. Go on home—not where you think it is, But where you would expect its comfort least, In still-black stars our century will miss Seeing. Nothingness is not as true as this Faith we grind up with denial: grist To the midnight mill; morning's catalyst. Come, let's go home, wherever you think it is. Nothing is true, my dear. Not even this.

J. Allyn Rosser

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Marriage & Companionship,Relationships,Home Life

Implements from the "Tomb of the Poet"

Piraeus Archeological Museum On the journey to the mundane afterlife, You travel equipped to carry on your trade: A bronze, small-toothed saw to make repairs, The stylus and the ink pot and the scraper, Wax tablets bound into a little book. Here is the tortoise shell for the cithara, Bored through with holes for strings, natural sound box. Here is the harp's wood triangle, all empty— The sheep-gut having long since decomposed Into a pure Pythagorean music. The beeswax, frangible with centuries, Has puzzled all your lyrics into silence. I think you were a poet of perfection Who fled still weighing one word with another, Since wax forgives and warms beneath revision.

A. E. Stallings

Li Hua's Messenger

In a hut far from the village Li Hua bends over his canvas like an insect. He is so deliberate, each stroke is a spider's legs fighting the current. There is a war in his veins, a battle of desires. He is jealous of Li Po whose pictures glide like the moon over dark water. I do not wish to disturb him as he tries to make art in this time of death, so I will wait, like a fly on the tip of a stick, until he is finished.

Peter Bethanis

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Painting & Sculpture,Poetry & Poets

Chord

A man steps out of sunlight, sunlight that streams like grace, still gaping at blue sky staked across the emptiness of space, into a history where shadows assume a human face. A man slips into silence that began as a cry, still trailing music although reduced to the sigh of an accordion as it folds into its case.

Stuart Dybek

Arts & Sciences,Music

Military Mind

I wanted to go to military school and march, I wanted to grow up and be composed and expert with a rifle, with tactics and fighting, to be safe and courageous among men in barracks and on the battlefield. I wanted to see my arms hairy and corded with muscle at the end of rolled up khaki sleeves. I wanted to flex my feet in boots and look down at the the dust of battles dimming the leather surfaces, the blood slick on the rim of the soles. I wanted the smell of gunpowder in my nostrils, the grime on my face, the washed-out hollow love for my comrades found in the foxholes, the sad understanding, the requiems of late afternoons walking away from the burial site with the widow as she cradled the triangulated flag like a plowblade in her arms.

Charlie Smith

Social Commentaries,War & Conflict,Memorial Day

Music

Han-Shan sits on a flat stone In his garden and plays the flute, Mimicking the birds singing among The gourd vines or from the top Of the blue pine tree. Or he constructs a new trellis For the rambling rose over his front Gate or works at the great loom in his porch, Weaving his own coverlets. Sometimes, he paints drinking gourds To hang at his cold spring. His poems, delicate but strong, Paper the ceiling above his bed, So he can lie and read His own masterpieces. No man, he avers, can catch Such fish in one basket.

George Scarbrough

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Music,Poetry & Poets

Willowspout

Because someone thirsty enough to trust Old Testament wisdom followed the deepening greens and found a spring, silver in the shadow of blue ridges, I can kneel beneath this spill of willow limbs a century later and drink water risen from roots to enter the evening through a spout, the way Cherokee stories say the first people were born, washing into the world of such trees whose bark, like the water I cup to my parched mouth, tastes leafy and sweet and has the power, the old ones say, to heal.

R. T. Smith

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Mythology & Folklore

Layabout

Do nothing and everything will be done, that's what Mr. Lao Tzu said, who walked around talking 2,500 years ago and now his books practically grow on trees they're so popular and if he were alive today beautiful women would rush up to him like waves lapping at the shores of his wisdom. That's the way it is, I guess: humbling. But if I could just unclench my fists, empty out my eyes, turn my mind into a prayer flag for the wind to play with, we could be brothers, him the older one who's seen and not done it all and me still unlearning, both of us slung low in our hammocks, our hats tipped forwards, hands folded neatly, like bamboo huts, above our hearts.

John Brehm

Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Social Commentaries

Apostrophe to the Apostrophe

Small floater, you stay above the fray, a wink at nothing's nod, a raised brow watching p's and q's, a selfless mote between I and m, a little horn of plenty spilling plurals, disdaining the bottom line. Unlike your twin relatives—groupies of wit and wisdom, hangers on in the smallest talk— you work alone, dark of a crescent moon. Laboring in obscurity, you never ask why, never exclaim, never tell anyone where to go. Caught up between extremes, you are both a turning away and a stepping forth, a loss and an addition. You are the urge to possess everything, and the sure sign that something is missing.

Eric Nelson

Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books

Nine-Panel Yaak River Screen

Midmorning like a deserted room, apparition Of armoire and table weights, Oblongs of flat light, the rosy eyelids of lovers Raised in their ghostly insurrection, Decay in the compassed corners beating its black wings, Late June and the lilac just ajar. Where the deer trail sinks down through the shadows of blue spruce, Reeds rustle and bow their heads, Creek waters murmur on like the lamentation of women For faded, forgotten things. And always the black birds in the trees, Always the ancient chambers thudding inside the heart. _________ Swallow pure as a penknife slick through the insected air. Swallow poised on the housepost, beakful of mud and a short straw. Swallow dun-orange, swallow blue, mud purse and middle arch, Home sweet home. Swallow unceasing, swallow unstill At sundown, the mother's shade over silver water. At the edge of the forest, no sound in the grey stone, No moan from the blue lupin. The shadows of afternoon begin to gather their dark robes And unlid their crystal eyes. Minute by minute, step by slow step, Like the small hand on a clock, we climb north, toward midnight. _________ I've made a small hole in the silence, a tiny one, Just big enough for a word. And when I rise from the dead, whenever that is, I'll say it. I can't remember the word right now, But it will come back to me when the northwest wind blows down off Mt. Caribou The day that I rise from the dead, whenever that is. Sunlight, on one leg, limps out to the meadow and settles in. Insects fall back inside their voices, Little fanfares and muted repeats, Inadequate language of sorrow, inadequate language of silted joy, As ours is. The birds join in. The sunlight opens her other leg. _________ At times the world falls away from us with all its disguises, And we are left with ourselves As though we were dead, or otherwised, our lips still moving, The empty distance, the heart Like a votive little-red-wagon on top of a child's grave, Nothing touching, nothing close. A long afternoon, and a long rain begins to fall. In some other poem, angels emerge from their cold rooms, Their wings blackened by somebody's dream. The rain stops, the robin resumes his post. A whisper Out of the clouds and here comes the sun. A long afternoon, the robin flying from post back to post. _________ The length of vowel sounds, by nature and by position, Count out the morning's meters— bird song and squirrel bark, creek run, The housefly's languor and murmurous incantation. I put on my lavish robes And walk at random among the day's dactyls and anapests, A widening caesura with each step. I walk through my life as though I were a bookmark, a holder of place, An overnight interruption in somebody else's narrative. What is it that causes this? What is it that pulls my feet down, and keeps on keeping my eyes fixed to the ground? Whatever the answer, it will start the wolf pack down from the mountain, The raven down from the tree. _________ Time gnaws on our necks like a dog gnaws on a stew bone. It whittles us down with its white teeth, It sends us packing, leaving no footprints on the dust-dour road. That's one way of putting it. Time, like a golden coin, lies on our tongue's another. We slide it between our teeth on the black water, ready for what's next. The white eyelids of dead boys, like flushed birds, flutter up At the edge of the timber. Domestic lupin Crayolas the yard. Slow lopes of tall grasses Southbound in the meadow, hurled along by the wind. In wingbeats and increments, The disappeared come back to us, the soul returns to the tree. _________ The intermittent fugues of the creek, saying yes, saying no, Master music of sunlight And black-green darkness under the spruce and tamaracks, Lull us and take our breath away. Our lips form fine words, But nothing comes out. Our lips are the messengers, but nothing can come out. After a day of high winds, how beautiful is the stillness of dusk. Enormous silence of stones. Illusion, like an empty coffin, that something is missing. Monotonous psalm of underbrush and smudged flowers. After the twilight, darkness. After the darkness, darkness, and then what follows that. _________ The unborn own all of this, what little we leave them, St. Thomas's hand returning repeatedly to the wound, Their half-formed mouths irrepressible in their half-sleep, Asking for everything, and then some. Already the melancholy of their arrival Swells like a sunrise and daydream over the eastern ridge line. Inside the pyrite corridors of late afternoon, Image follows image, clouds Reveal themselves, and shadows, like angels, lie at the feet of all things. Chambers of the afterlife open deep in the woods, Their secret hieroglyphics suddenly readable With one eye closed, then with the other. _________ One star and a black voyage, drifting mists to wish on, Bullbats and their lullabye— Evening tightens like an elastic around the hills. Small sounds and the close of day, As if a corpse had risen from somewhere deep in the meadow And walked in its shadows quietly. The mouth inside me with its gold teeth Begins to open. No words appear on its lips, no syllables bubble along its tongue. Night mouth, silent mouth. Like drugged birds in the trees, angels with damp foreheads settle down. Wind rises, clouds arrive, another night without stars.

Charles Wright

Living,Death,Time & Brevity,Nature,Animals,Landscapes & Pastorals,Trees & Flowers,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Appetite

Pale gold and crumbling with crust mottled dark, almost bronze, pieces of honeycomb lie on a plate. Flecked with the pale paper of hive, their hexagonal cells leak into the deepening pool of amber. On your lips, against palate, tooth and tongue, the viscous sugar squeezes from its chambers, sears sweetness into your throat until you chew pulp and wax from a blue city of bees. Between your teeth is the blown flower and the flower's seed. Passport pages stamped and turning. Death's officious hum. Both the candle and its anther of flame. Your own yellow hunger. Never say you can't take this world into your mouth.

Paulann Petersen

Activities,Eating & Drinking

The Parade

How exhilarating it was to march along the great boulevards in the sunflash of trumpets and under all the waving flags— the flag of ambition, the flag of love. So many of us streaming along— all of humanity, really— moving in perfect step, yet each lost in the room of a private dream. How stimulating the scenery of the world, the rows of roadside trees, the huge curtain of the sky. How endless it seemed until we veered off the broad turnpike into a pasture of high grass, headed toward the dizzying cliffs of mortality. Generation after generation, we keep shouldering forward until we step off the lip into space. And I should not have to remind you that little time is given here to rest on a wayside bench, to stop and bend to the wildflowers, or to study a bird on a branch— not when the young are always shoving from behind, not when the old keep tugging us forward, pulling on our arms with all their feeble strength.

Billy Collins

Living,Time & Brevity

Touch

We speak of the pain of childbirth, referring, of course, to the mother, but what is pain to the mother, the one through whose body the course unwinds? She understands already what kind of world she must return to, how it daily hones its many edges against human skin, unlike the child whose untried limbs inch toward it, pressing now so firmly against her he feels for the first time the pinch of bone against bone and is seared by the friction. Isn't he the one on whom the real burden falls, the one to whom resilience means nothing yet? His tender skin like a small measure of cloth unfolding before the blade under which he will, for a lifetime, bruise and heal: Crush of the long descent, grip of the steadying hands, brush of breath against cheek, even the constant barrage of the microscopic, the tiny plink-plink of the dust motes knocking against him before custom makes him numb to it. No wonder the startled mouth cries out, each pore suddenly hungry in the withering, nourishing light.

Trevor West Knapp

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Sorrow & Grieving

Chamber Thicket

As we sat at the feet of the string quartet, in their living room, on a winter night, through the hardwood floor spurts and gulps and tips and shudders came up, and the candle-scent air was thick-alive with pearwood, ebony, spruce, poplar, and horse howled, and cat skreeled, and then, when the Grösse Fugue was around us, under us, over us, in us, I felt I was hearing the genes of my birth-family, pulled, keening and grieving and scathing, along each other, scraping and craving, I felt myself held in that woods of hating longing, and I knew and knew myself, and my parents, and their parents, there—and then, at a distance, I sensed, as if it were thirty years ago, a being, far off yet, oblique-approaching, straying toward, and then not toward, and then toward this place, like a wandering dreaming herdsman, my husband. And I almost wanted to warn him away, to call out to him to go back whence he came, into some calmer life, but his beauty was too moving to me, and I wanted too much to not be alone, in the covert, any more, and so I prayed him come to me, I bid him hasten, and good welcome.

Sharon Olds

Love,Realistic & Complicated,Romantic Love,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Music

Hartley Field

And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place . . . T. S. Eliot The wind cooled as it crossed the open pond and drove little waves toward us, brisk, purposeful waves that vanished at our feet, such energy thwarted by so little elevation. The wind was endless, seamless, old as the earth. Insects came to regard us with favor. I felt them alight, felt their minute footfalls. I was a challenge, an Everest . . . And you, whom I have heard breathe all night, sigh through the water of sleep with vestigial gills . . . A pair of dragonflies drifted past us, silent, while higher up two bullet-shaped jets dragged their roars behind them on unbreakable chains. It seemed a pity we’d given up the sky to them, but I understand so little. Perhaps it was necessary. All our years together— and not just together. Surely by now we have the same blood type, the same myopia. Sometimes I think we’re the same sex, the one in the middle of man and woman, born of both as every child is. The waves came to us, one each heartbeat, and lay themselves at our feet. The swelling goes down. The fever cools. There, where the Hartleys grew lettuce eighty years ago bear and beaver, fox and partridge den and nest and hunt and are hunted. I wish I had the means to give all the north back to itself, to let the pines rise in the hayfield and the lilacs go wild. But then where would we live? I wanted that hour with you all winter— I thought of it while I worked, before I slept and when I woke, a time when the tangled would straighten, when contrition would become benediction: the positive hour, shining like mica. At last the wind brought it to us across the pond, then took it up again, every last minute.

Connie Wanek

Mary Shelley in Brigantine

Because the ostracized experience the world in ways peculiar to themselves, often seeing it clearly yet with such anger and longing that they sometimes enlarge what they see, she at first saw Brigantine as a paradise for gulls. She must be a horseshoe crab washed ashore. How startling, though, no one knew about her past, the scandal with Percy, the tragic early deaths, yet sad that her Frankenstein had become just a name, like Dracula or Satan, something that stood for a kind of scariness, good for a laugh. She found herself welcome everywhere. People would tell her about Brigantine Castle, turned into a house of horror. They thought she'd be pleased that her monster roamed its dark corridors, making children scream. They lamented the day it was razed. Thus Mary Shelley found herself accepted by those who had no monster in them — the most frightening people alive, she thought. Didn't they know Frankenstein had abandoned his creation, set him loose without guidance or a name? Didn't they know what it feels like to be lost, freaky, forever seeking who you are? She was amazed now that people believed you could shop for everything you might need. She loved that in the dunes you could almost hide. At the computer store she asked an expert if there was such a thing as too much knowledge, or going too far? He directed her to a website where he thought the answers were. Yet Mary Shelley realized that the pain she felt all her life was gone. Could her children, dead so young, be alive somewhere, too? She couldn't know that only her famous mother had such a chance. She was almost ready to praise this awful world.

Stephen Dunn

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Growing Old,Time & Brevity,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

What Became

What became of the dear strands of hair pressed against the perspiration of your lover's brow after lovemaking as you gazed into the world of those eyes, now only yours? What became of any afternoon that was so vivid you forgot the present was up to its old trick of pretending it would be there always? What became of the one who believed so deeply in this moment he memorized everything in it and left it for you?

Wesley McNair

Living,Time & Brevity,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Romantic Love,Relationships