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To her Sister Mistress A. B.

Because I to my brethern wrote and to my sisters two:Good sister Anne, you this might wote, if so I should not doTo you, or ere I parted hence,You vainly had bestowed expence.Yet is it not for that I write, for nature did you bindTo do me good, and to requite hath nature me inclined:Wherefore good sister take in greeThese simple lines that come from me.Wherein I wish you Nestor's days, in happy health to rest:With such success in all assays as those which God hath blest:Your husband with your pretty boys,God keep them free from all annoys.And grant if that my luck it be to linger here so longTill they be men, that I may see for learning them so strongThat they may march amongst the bestOf them which learning have possest.By that time will my aged years perhaps a staff require:And quakingly as still in fears my limbs draw to the fire:Yet joy I shall them so to see,If any joy in age there be.Good sister so I you commend to him that made us all:I know you huswifery intend, though I to writing fall:Wherefore no lenger shall you stayFrom business that profit may.Had I a husband, or a house, and all that longs thereto,My self could frame about to rouse, as other women do:But till some household cares me tie,My books and pen I will apply.

Isabella Whitney

A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Poesy, Containing a Hundred and Ten Philosophical Flowers

Those strokes which mates in mirth do give do seem to be but light,Although sometime they leave a sign seems grievous to the sight.He that is void of any friend, him company to keep,Walks in a world of wilderness, full fraught with dangers deep.Each lover knoweth what he likes and what he doth desire,But seld, or never, doth he know what thing he should require.Affection fond deceives the wise and love makes men such noddiesThat to their selves they seem as dead yet live in other bodies.Ask nothing of thy neighbour that thou wouldst not let him have:Nor say him nay of that which thou wouldst get if thou didst crave.Two eyes, two ears, and but one tongue Dame Nature hath us framedThat we might see and hear much more than should with tongue be named.Seek not each man to please, for that is more than God bids do:Please thou the best, and neuer care, what wicked say thereto.

Isabella Whitney

'No Thank You, I Don’t Care For Artichokes,'

decreed my mother-in-law as my husband passed the platter of inward-turning soft-skulled Martian baby heads around the table, and they were O so shyly slyly jostling each other with their boiled- green sardonic gossip (what was the news they told?) when he sharply answered, “Mother, have you ever eaten an artichoke?” “No,” she said, majestic, “but I just know I don’t care for them, don’t care for them at all”— for truly, if they weren’t Martian they were at the least Italian from that land of “smelly cheese” she wouldn’t eat, that land of oily curves and stalks, unnerving pots of churning who knows what, and she, nice, Jewish, from the Bronx, had fattened on her Russian- Jewish mother’s kugel, kosher chicken, good rye bread .... Bearded, rosy, magisterial at forty-five, he laughed, kept plucking, kept on licking those narcissistic leaves, each with its razor point defending the plump, the tender secret at the center, each a greave or plate of edible armor, so she smiled too, in the flash of dispute, knowing he’d give her ice cream later, all she wanted, as the rich meal drew to an end with sweets dished out in the lamplit circle, to parents, children, grandma— the chocolate mint she craved, and rocky road he bought especially for her, whose knees were just beginning to crumble from arthritis, whose heart would pump more creakily each year, whose baby fat would sag and sorrow as her voice weakened, breathing failed until she too was gathered into the same blank center where her son at sixty bearded still, still laughing, magisterial (though pallid now) had just a year before inexplicably settled.

Sandra M. Gilbert

Living,Parenthood,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Home Life,Philosophy,Social Commentaries

Into Battle

The naked earth is warm with Spring,And with green grass and bursting treesLeans to the sun's gaze glorying,And quivers in the sunny breeze;And life is Colour and Warmth and Light,And a striving evermore for these;And he is dead who will not fight,And who dies fighting has increase.The fighting man shall from the sunTake warmth, and life from glowing earth;Speed with the light-foot winds to runAnd with the trees to newer birth;And find, when fighting shall be done,Great rest, and fulness after dearth.All the bright company of HeavenHold him in their bright comradeship,The Dog star, and the Sisters Seven,Orion's belt and sworded hip:The woodland trees that stand together,They stand to him each one a friend;They gently speak in the windy weather;They guide to valley and ridges end.The kestrel hovering by day,And the little owls that call by night,Bid him be swift and keen as they,As keen of ear, as swift of sight.The blackbird sings to him: "Brother, brother,If this be the last song you shall sing,Sing well, for you may not sing another;Brother, sing."In dreary doubtful waiting hours,Before the brazen frenzy starts,The horses show him nobler powers; —O patient eyes, courageous hearts!And when the burning moment breaks,And all things else are out of mind,And only joy of battle takesHim by the throat and makes him blind,Through joy and blindness he shall know,Not caring much to know, that stillNor lead nor steel shall reach him, soThat it be not the Destined Will.The thundering line of battle stands,And in the air Death moans and sings;But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

Julian Grenfell

Defence of Fort M'Henry

O! say can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming,Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there — O! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep, Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,What is that which the breeze o'er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, In full glory reflected now shines on the stream — 'Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.And where is that band who so vauntingly swore That the havock of war and the battle's confusionA home and a country should leave us no more? Their blood has wash'd out their foul foot-steps' pollution, No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave; And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.O! thus be it ever when freemen shall stand Between their lov'd home, and the war's desolation,Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land Praise the power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto — "In God is our trust!" And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

Francis Scott Key

Piers Plowman: The Prologue

In a somer sesun, whon softe was the sonne, I schop me into a shroud, as I a scheep were; In habite as an hermite unholy of werkes Wente I wyde in this world wondres to here; Bote in a Mayes morwnynge on Malverne hulles Me bifel a ferly, of fairie, me-thoughte. I was wery, forwandred, and wente me to reste Undur a brod banke bi a bourne side; And as I lay and leonede and lokede on the watres, I slumbrede in a slepynge, hit swyed so murie. Thenne gon I meeten a mervelous sweven, That I was in a wildernesse, wuste I never where; And as I beheold into the est an heigh to the sonne, I sauh a tour on a toft, tryelyche i-maket; A deop dale bineothe, a dungun ther-inne, With deop dich and derk and dredful of sighte. A feir feld full of folk fond I ther bitwene, Of alle maner of men, the mene and the riche, Worchinge and wandringe as the world asketh. Summe putten hem to the plough, pleiden ful seldene, In settynge and in sowynge swonken ful harde, And wonnen that theos wasturs with glotonye distruen. And summe putten hem to pruide, apparaylden hem ther-after, In cuntenaunce of clothinge comen disgisid. To preyeres and to penaunce putten hem monye, For love of ur Lord liveden ful streite, In hope for to have hevene-riche blisse; As ancres and hermytes that holdeth hem in heore celles, Coveyte not in cuntré to cairen aboute, For non likerous lyflode heore licam to plese. And summe chosen chaffare to cheeven the bettre, As hit semeth to ure sighte that suche men thryveth; And summe, murthhes to maken as munstrals cunne, And gete gold with here gle, giltles, I trowe. Bote japers and jangelers, Judas children, Founden hem fantasyes and fooles hem maaden, And habbeth wit at heore wille to worchen yif hem luste. That Poul precheth of hem, I dar not preoven heere;Qui loquitur turpiloquium he is Luciferes hyne. Bidders and beggers faste aboute eoden, Til heor bagges and heore balies weren bretful i-crommet; Feyneden hem for heore foode, foughten atte ale; In glotonye, God wot, gon heo to bedde, And ryseth up with ribaudye this roberdes knaves; Sleep and sleughthe suweth hem evere. Pilgrimes and palmers plihten hem togederes For to seche Seint Jame and seintes at Roome; Wenten forth in heore wey with mony wyse tales, And hedden leve to lyen al heore lyf aftir. Ermytes on an hep with hokide staves, Wenten to Walsyngham and here wenchis after; Grete lobres and longe that loth weore to swynke Clotheden hem in copes to beo knowen for bretheren; And summe schopen hem to hermytes heore ese to have. I fond there freres, all the foure ordres, Prechinge the peple for profyt of heore wombes, Glosynge the Gospel as hem good liketh, For covetyse of copes construeth hit ille; For monye of this maistres mowen clothen hem at lyking, For moneye and heore marchaundie meeten togedere; Seththe Charité hath be chapmon, and cheef to schriven lordes, Mony ferlyes han bifalle in a fewe yeres. But Holychirche and heo holde bet togedere, The moste mischeef on molde is mountyng up faste. Ther prechede a pardoner, as he a prest were, And brought forth a bulle with bisschopes seles, And seide that himself mighte asoylen hem alle Of falsnesse and fastinge and of vouwes i-broken. The lewede men levide him wel and likede his speche, And comen up knelynge to kissen his bulle; He bonchede hem with his brevet and blered heore eiyen, And raughte with his ragemon ringes and broches. Thus ye yiveth oure gold glotonis to helpen! And leveth hit to losels that lecherie haunten. Weore the bisschop i-blesset and worth bothe his eres, His sel shulde not be sent to deceyve the peple. It is not al bi the bisschop that the boye precheth, Bote the parisch prest and the pardoner parte the selver That the pore peple of the parisch schulde have yif that heo ne weore, Persones and parisch prestes playneth to heore bisschops, That heore parisch hath ben pore seththe the pestilence tyme, To have a lycence and leve at Londun to dwelle, To singe ther for simonye, for selver is swete. Ther hovide an hundret in houves of selke, Serjauns hit semide to serven atte barre; Pleden for pens and poundes the lawe, Not for love of ur Lord unloseth heore lippes ones, Thou mightest beter meten the myst on Malverne hulles Then geten a mom of heore mouth til moneye weore schewed! I saugh ther bisschops bolde and bachilers of divyne Bicoome clerkes of acounte the king for to serven. Erchedekenes and denis, that dignité haven To preche the peple and pore men to feede, Beon lopen to Londun, bi leve of heore bisschopes, To ben clerkes of the Kynges Benche the cuntré to schende Barouns and burgeis and bonde-men also I saugh in that semblé, as ye schul heren aftur, Bakers, bochers, and breusters monye, Wollene-websteris, and weveris of lynen, Taillours, tanneris, and tokkeris bothe, Masons, minours, and mony other craftes, Dykers, and delvers, that don heore dedes ille, And driveth forth the longe day with "Deu vous save, Dam Emme!" Cookes and heore knaves cryen "Hote pies, hote! "Goode gees and grys! Go we dyne, go we!" Taverners to hem tolde the same tale, With wyn of Oseye and win of Gaskoyne, Of the Ryn and of the Rochel, the rost to defye, Al this I saugh slepynge and seve sithes more.

William Langland

The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race

I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, Pounded on the table, Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom, Hard as they were able, Boom, boom, BOOM, With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom, Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM. THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision. I could not turn from their revel in derision. THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK. Then along that riverbank A thousand miles Tattooed cannibals danced in files; Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong. And “BLOOD” screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors, “BLOOD” screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors, “Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle, Harry the uplands, Steal all the cattle, Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle, Bing. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM,” A roaring, epic, rag-time tune From the mouth of the Congo To the Mountains of the Moon. Death is an Elephant, Torch-eyed and horrible, Foam-flanked and terrible. BOOM, steal the pygmies, BOOM, kill the Arabs, BOOM, kill the white men, HOO, HOO, HOO. Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. Hear how the demons chuckle and yell Cutting his hands off, down in Hell. Listen to the creepy proclamation, Blown through the lairs of the forest-nation, Blown past the white-ants’ hill of clay, Blown past the marsh where the butterflies play: — “Be careful what you do, Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo, And all of the other Gods of the Congo, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.” II. THEIR IRREPRESSIBLE HIGH SPIRITS Wild crap-shooters with a whoop and a call Danced the juba in their gambling-hall And laughed fit to kill, and shook the town, And guyed the policemen and laughed them down With a boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM. THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK. A negro fairyland swung into view, A minstrel river Where dreams come true. The ebony palace soared on high Through the blossoming trees to the evening sky. The inlaid porches and casements shone With gold and ivory and elephant-bone. And the black crowd laughed till their sides were sore At the baboon butler in the agate door, And the well-known tunes of the parrot band That trilled on the bushes of that magic land. A troupe of skull-faced witch-men came Through the agate doorway in suits of flame, Yea, long-tailed coats with a gold-leaf crust And hats that were covered with diamond-dust. And the crowd in the court gave a whoop and a call And danced the juba from wall to wall. But the witch-men suddenly stilled the throng With a stern cold glare, and a stern old song: — “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.” ... Just then from the doorway, as fat as shotes, Came the cake-walk princes in their long red coats, Canes with a brilliant lacquer shine, And tall silk hats that were red as wine. And they pranced with their butterfly partners there, Coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair, Knee-skirts trimmed with the jassamine sweet, And bells on their ankles and little black-feet. And the couples railed at the chant and the frown Of the witch-men lean, and laughed them down. (O rare was the revel, and well worth while That made those glowering witch-men smile.) The cake-walk royalty then began To walk for a cake that was tall as a man To the tune of “Boomlay, boomlay, BOOM,” While the witch-men laughed, with a sinister air, And sang with the scalawags prancing there: — “Walk with care, walk with care, Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo, And all the other Gods of the Congo, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you. Beware, beware, walk with care, Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.” Oh rare was the revel, and well worth while That made those glowering witch-men smile. III. THE HOPE OF THEIR RELIGION A good old negro in the slums of the town Preached at a sister for her velvet gown. Howled at a brother for his low-down ways, His prowling, guzzling, sneak-thief days. Beat on the Bible till he wore it out Starting the jubilee revival shout. And some had visions, as they stood on chairs, And sang of Jacob, and the golden stairs, And they all repented, a thousand strong From their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong And slammed with their hymn books till they shook the room With “glory, glory, glory,” And “Boom, boom, BOOM.” THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK. And the gray sky opened like a new-rent veil And showed the Apostles with their coats of mail. In bright white steel they were seated round And their fire-eyes watched where the Congo wound. And the twelve Apostles, from their thrones on high Thrilled all the forest with their heavenly cry: — “Mumbo-Jumbo will die in the jungle; Never again will he hoo-doo you, Never again will he hoo-doo you.” Then along that river, a thousand miles The vine-snared trees fell down in files. Pioneer angels cleared the way For a Congo paradise, for babes at play, For sacred capitals, for temples clean. Gone were the skull-faced witch-men lean. There, where the wild ghost-gods had wailed A million boats of the angels sailed With oars of silver, and prows of blue And silken pennants that the sun shone through. ’Twas a land transfigured, ’twas a new creation. Oh, a singing wind swept the negro nation And on through the backwoods clearing flew: — “Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle. Never again will he hoo-doo you. Never again will he hoo-doo you. Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and the men, And only the vulture dared again By the far, lone mountains of the moon To cry, in the silence, the Congo tune:— “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you. Mumbo ... Jumbo ... will ... hoo-doo ... you.”

Vachel Lindsay

Arts & Sciences,Music,Theater & Dance,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, flyScarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie, In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who dieWe shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

John McCrae

Living,Death,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Barbury Camp

We burrowed night and day with tools of lead,Heaped the bank up and cast it in a ringAnd hurled the earth above. And Caesar said,"Why, it is excellent. I like the thing."We, who are dead,Made it, and wrought, and Caesar liked the thing.And here we strove, and here we felt each veinIce-bound, each limb fast-frozen, all night long.And here we held communion with the rainThat lashed us into manhood with its thong,Cleansing through pain.And the wind visited us and made us strong.Up from around us, numbers without name,Strong men and naked, vast, on either handPressing us in, they came. And the wind cameAnd bitter rain, turning grey all the land.That was our game,To fight with men and storms, and it was grand.For many days we fought them, and our sweatWatered the grass, making it spring up green,Blooming for us. And, if the wind was wet,Our blood wetted the wind, making it keenWith the hatredAnd wrath and courage that our blood had been.So, fighting men and winds and tempests, hotWith joy and hate and battle-lust, we fellWhere we fought. And God said, "Killed at last then? What!Ye that are too strong for heaven, too clean for hell,(God said) stir not.This be your heaven, or, if ye will, your hell."So again we fight and wrestle, and againHurl the earth up and cast it in a ring.But when the wind comes up, driving the rain(Each rain-drop a fiery steed), and the mists rollingUp from the plain,This wild procession, this impetuous thing.Hold us amazed. We mount the wind-cars, thenWhip up the steeds and drive through all the world,Searching to find somewhere some brethren,Sons of the winds and waters of the world.We, who were men,Have sought, and found no men in all this world.Wind, that has blown here always ceaselessly,Bringing, if any man can understand,Might to the mighty, freedom to the free;Wind, that has caught us, cleansed us, made us grand,Wind that is we(We that were men) — make men in all this land,That so may live and wrestle and hate that whenThey fall at last exultant, as we fell,And come to God, God may say, "Do you come thenMildly enquiring, is it heaven or hell?Why! Ye were men!Back to your winds and rains. Be these your heaven and hell!"

Charles Hamilton Sorley

Expectans Expectavi

From morn to midnight, all day through,I laugh and play as others do,I sin and chatter, just the sameAs others with a different name.And all year long upon the stageI dance and tumble and do rageSo vehemently, I scarcely seeThe inner and eternal me.I have a temple I do notVisit, a heart I have forgot,A self that I have never met,A secret shrine—and yet, and yetThis sanctuary of my soulUnwitting I keep white and whole,Unlatched and lit, if Thou should'st careTo enter or to tarry there.With parted lips and outstretched handsAnd listening ears Thy servant stands,Call Thou early, call Thou late,To Thy great service dedicate.

Charles Hamilton Sorley

To Germany

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,And no man claimed the conquest of your land.But gropers both through fields of thought confinedWe stumble and we do not understand.You only saw your future bigly planned,And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,And in each other's dearest ways we stand,And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.When it is peace, then we may view againWith new-won eyes each other's truer formAnd wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warmWe'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,When it is peace. But until peace, the stormThe darkness and the thunder and the rain.

Charles Hamilton Sorley

Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

'When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead'

When you see millions of the mouthless deadAcross your dreams in pale battalions go,Say not soft things as other men have said,That you'll remember. For you need not so.Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they knowIt is not curses heaped on each gashed head?Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto,“Yet many a better one has died before.”Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should youPerceive one face that you loved heretofore,It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.Great death has made all his for evermore.

Charles Hamilton Sorley

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

The Comedian as the Letter C

i The World without Imagination Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil, The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates Of snails, musician of pears, principium And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig Of things, this nincompated pedagogue, Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea Created, in his day, a touch of doubt. An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes, Berries of villages, a barber's eye, An eye of land, of simple salad-beds, Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung On porpoises, instead of apricots, And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts Dibbled in waves that were mustachios, Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world. One eats one paté, even of salt, quotha. It was not so much the lost terrestrial, The snug hibernal from that sea and salt, That century of wind in a single puff. What counted was mythology of self, Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin, The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane, The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw Of hum, inquisitorial botanist, And general lexicographer of mute And maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself, A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass. What word split up in clickering syllables And storming under multitudinous tones Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt? Crispin was washed away by magnitude. The whole of life that still remained in him Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear, Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh, Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust. Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea, The old age of a watery realist, Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age That whispered to the sun's compassion, made A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars, And on the cropping foot-ways of the moon Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that Which made him Triton, nothing left of him, Except in faint, memorial gesturings, That were like arms and shoulders in the waves, Here, something in the rise and fall of wind That seemed hallucinating horn, and here, A sunken voice, both of remembering And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain. Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved. The valet in the tempest was annulled. Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next, And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt. Crispin, merest minuscule in the gates, Dejected his manner to the turbulence. The salt hung on his spirit like a frost, The dead brine melted in him like a dew Of winter, until nothing of himself Remained, except some starker, barer self In a starker, barer world, in which the sun Was not the sun because it never shone With bland complaisance on pale parasols, Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets. Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin Became an introspective voyager. Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last, Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing, But with a speech belched out of hoary darks Noway resembling his, a visible thing, And excepting negligible Triton, free From the unavoidable shadow of himself That lay elsewhere around him. Severance Was clear. The last distortion of romance Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea Severs not only lands but also selves. Here was no help before reality. Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new. The imagination, here, could not evade, In poems of plums, the strict austerity Of one vast, subjugating, final tone. The drenching of stale lives no more fell down. What was this gaudy, gusty panoply? Out of what swift destruction did it spring? It was caparison of mind and cloud And something given to make whole among The ruses that were shattered by the large. iiConcerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers Of the Caribbean amphitheatre, In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea, As if raspberry tanagers in palms, High up in orange air, were barbarous. But Crispin was too destitute to find In any commonplace the sought-for aid. He was a man made vivid by the sea, A man come out of luminous traversing, Much trumpeted, made desperately clear, Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies, To whom oracular rockings gave no rest. Into a savage color he went on. How greatly had he grown in his demesne, This auditor of insects! He that saw The stride of vanishing autumn in a park By way of decorous melancholy; he That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring, As dissertation of profound delight, Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes, Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged His apprehension, made him intricate In moody rucks, and difficult and strange In all desires, his destitution's mark. He was in this as other freemen are, Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly. His violence was for aggrandizement And not for stupor, such as music makes For sleepers halfway waking. He perceived That coolness for his heat came suddenly, And only, in the fables that he scrawled With his own quill, in its indigenous dew, Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed, Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt, Green barbarism turning paradigm. Crispin foresaw a curious promenade Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate, And elemental potencies and pangs, And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen, Making the most of savagery of palms, Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom That yuccas breed, and of the panther's tread. The fabulous and its intrinsic verse Came like two spirits parlaying, adorned In radiance from the Atlantic coign, For Crispin and his quill to catechize. But they came parlaying of such an earth, So thick with sides and jagged lops of green, So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns, Scenting the jungle in their refuges, So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red In beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins, That earth was like a jostling festival Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent, Expanding in the gold's maternal warmth. So much for that. The affectionate emigrant found A new reality in parrot-squawks. Yet let that trifle pass. Now, as this odd Discoverer walked through the harbor streets Inspecting the cabildo, the façade Of the cathedral, making notes, he heard A rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed, Approaching like a gasconade of drums. The white cabildo darkened, the façade, As sullen as the sky, was swallowed up In swift, successive shadows, dolefully. The rumbling broadened as it fell. The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons. Gesticulating lightning, mystical, Made pallid flitter. Crispin, here, took flight. An annotator has his scruples, too. He knelt in the cathedral with the rest, This connoisseur of elemental fate, Aware of exquisite thought. The storm was one Of many proclamations of the kind, Proclaiming something harsher than he learned From hearing signboards whimper in cold nights Or seeing the midsummer artifice Of heat upon his pane. This was the span Of force, the quintessential fact, the note Of Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own, The thing that makes him envious in phrase. And while the torrent on the roof still droned He felt the Andean breath. His mind was free And more than free, elate, intent, profound And studious of a self possessing him, That was not in him in the crusty town From which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay The mountainous ridges, purple balustrades, In which the thunder, lapsing in its clap, Let down gigantic quavers of its voice, For Crispin to vociferate again. iii Approaching Carolina The book of moonlight is not written yet Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire, Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage Through sweating changes, never could forget That wakefulness or meditating sleep, In which the sulky strophes willingly Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs. Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book For the legendary moonlight that once burned In Crispin's mind above a continent. America was always north to him, A northern west or western north, but north, And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled And lank, rising and slumping from a sea Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread In endless ledges, glittering, submerged And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon. The spring came there in clinking pannicles Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came, If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening, Before the winter's vacancy returned. The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed, Was like a glacial pink upon the air. The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians, Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn. How many poems he denied himself In his observant progress, lesser things Than the relentless contact he desired; How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts, Like jades affecting the sequestered bride; And what descants, he sent to banishment! Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave The liaison, the blissful liaison, Between himself and his environment, Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight, For him, and not for him alone. It seemed Elusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse, Wrong as a divagation to Peking, To him that postulated as his theme The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight, A passionately niggling nightingale. Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not, A minor meeting, facile, delicate. Thus he conceived his voyaging to be An up and down between two elements, A fluctuating between sun and moon, A sally into gold and crimson forms, As on this voyage, out of goblinry, And then retirement like a turning back And sinking down to the indulgences That in the moonlight have their habitude. But let these backward lapses, if they would, Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew It was a flourishing tropic he required For his refreshment, an abundant zone, Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious Yet with a harmony not rarefied Nor fined for the inhibited instruments Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed Between a Carolina of old time, A little juvenile, an ancient whim, And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn From what he saw across his vessel's prow. He came. The poetic hero without palms Or jugglery, without regalia. And as he came he saw that it was spring, A time abhorrent to the nihilist Or searcher for the fecund minimum. The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring, Although contending featly in its veils, Irised in dew and early fragrancies, Was gemmy marionette to him that sought A sinewy nakedness. A river bore The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose, He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells Of dampened lumber, emanations blown From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes, Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks That helped him round his rude aesthetic out. He savored rankness like a sensualist. He marked the marshy ground around the dock, The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence, Curriculum for the marvellous sophomore. It purified. It made him see how much Of what he saw he never saw at all. He gripped more closely the essential prose As being, in a world so falsified, The one integrity for him, the one Discovery still possible to make, To which all poems were incident, unless That prose should wear a poem's guise at last. iv The Idea of a Colony Nota: his soil is man's intelligence. That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find. Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare His cloudy drift and planned a colony. Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, Rex and principium, exit the whole Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose More exquisite than any tumbling verse: A still new continent in which to dwell. What was the purpose of his pilgrimage, Whatever shape it took in Crispin's mind, If not, when all is said, to drive away The shadow of his fellows from the skies, And, from their stale intelligence released, To make a new intelligence prevail? Hence the reverberations in the words Of his first central hymns, the celebrants Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength Of his aesthetic, his philosophy, The more invidious, the more desired. The florist asking aid from cabbages, The rich man going bare, the paladin Afraid, the blind man as astronomer, The appointed power unwielded from disdain. His western voyage ended and began. The torment of fastidious thought grew slack, Another, still more bellicose, came on. He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena, And, being full of the caprice, inscribed Commingled souvenirs and prophecies. He made a singular collation. Thus: The natives of the rain are rainy men. Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes, And April hillsides wooded white and pink, Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears. And in their music showering sounds intone. On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote, What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore, What pulpy dram distilled of innocence, That streaking gold should speak in him Or bask within his images and words? If these rude instances impeach themselves By force of rudeness, let the principle Be plain. For application Crispin strove, Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute As the marimba, the magnolia as rose. Upon these premises propounding, he Projected a colony that should extend To the dusk of a whistling south below the south. A comprehensive island hemisphere. The man in Georgia waking among pines Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man, Planting his pristine cores in Florida, Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery, But on the banjo's categorical gut, Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays. Sepulchral señors, bibbing pale mescal, Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs, Should make the intricate Sierra scan. And dark Brazilians in their cafés, Musing immaculate, pampean dits, Should scrawl a vigilant anthology, To be their latest, lucent paramour. These are the broadest instances. Crispin, Progenitor of such extensive scope, Was not indifferent to smart detail. The melon should have apposite ritual, Performed in verd apparel, and the peach, When its black branches came to bud, belle day, Should have an incantation. And again, When piled on salvers its aroma steeped The summer, it should have a sacrament And celebration. Shrewd novitiates Should be the clerks of our experience. These bland excursions into time to come, Related in romance to backward flights, However prodigal, however proud, Contained in their afflatus the reproach That first drove Crispin to his wandering. He could not be content with counterfeit, With masquerade of thought, with hapless words That must belie the racking masquerade, With fictive flourishes that preordained His passion's permit, hang of coat, degree Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly. It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was, Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event, A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown. There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not The oncoming fantasies of better birth. The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way. All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged. But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim. Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets, With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener? No, no: veracious page on page, exact. v A Nice Shady Home Crispin as hermit, pure and capable, Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent Had kept him still the pricking realist, Choosing his element from droll confect Of was and is and shall or ought to be, Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come To colonize his polar planterdom And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee. But his emprize to that idea soon sped. Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there Slid from his continent by slow recess To things within his actual eye, alert To the difficulty of rebellious thought When the sky is blue. The blue infected will. It may be that the yarrow in his fields Sealed pensive purple under its concern. But day by day, now this thing and now that Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned, Little by little, as if the suzerain soil Abashed him by carouse to humble yet Attach. It seemed haphazard denouement. He first, as realist, admitted that Whoever hunts a matinal continent May, after all, stop short before a plum And be content and still be realist. The words of things entangle and confuse. The plum survives its poems. It may hang In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground Obliquities of those who pass beneath, Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form, Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit. So Crispin hasped on the surviving form, For him, of shall or ought to be in is. Was he to bray this in profoundest brass Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems? Was he to company vastest things defunct With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky? Scrawl a tragedian's testament? Prolong His active force in an inactive dirge, Which, let the tall musicians call and call, Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds? Because he built a cabin who once planned Loquacious columns by the ructive sea? Because he turned to salad-beds again? Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape? Should he lay by the personal and make Of his own fate an instance of all fate? What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long? The very man despising honest quilts Lies quilted to his poll in his despite. For realists, what is is what should be. And so it came, his cabin shuffled up, His trees were planted, his duenna brought Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands, The curtains flittered and the door was closed. Crispin, magister of a single room, Latched up the night. So deep a sound fell down It was as if the solitude concealed And covered him and his congenial sleep. So deep a sound fell down it grew to be A long soothsaying silence down and down. The crickets beat their tambours in the wind, Marching a motionless march, custodians. In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod, Each day, still curious, but in a round Less prickly and much more condign than that He once thought necessary. Like Candide, Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight, And cream for the fig and silver for the cream, A blonde to tip the silver and to taste The rapey gouts. Good star, how that to be Annealed them in their cabin ribaldries! Yet the quotidian saps philosophers And men like Crispin like them in intent, If not in will, to track the knaves of thought. But the quotidian composed as his, Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves, The tomtit and the cassia and the rose, Although the rose was not the noble thorn Of crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet, Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights In which those frail custodians watched, Indifferent to the tepid summer cold, While he poured out upon the lips of her That lay beside him, the quotidian Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner. For all it takes it gives a humped return Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed. vi And Daughters with Curls Portentous enunciation, syllable To blessed syllable affined, and sound Bubbling felicity in cantilene, Prolific and tormenting tenderness Of music, as it comes to unison, Forgather and bell boldly Crispin's last Deduction. Thrum, with a proud douceur His grand pronunciamento and devise. The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed, Hands without touch yet touching poignantly, Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee, Prophetic joint, for its diviner young. The return to social nature, once begun, Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute, Involved him in midwifery so dense His cabin counted as phylactery, Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt Of children nibbling at the sugared void, Infants yet eminently old, then dome And halidom for the unbraided femes, Green crammers of the green fruits of the world, Bidders and biders for its ecstasies, True daughters both of Crispin and his clay. All this with many mulctings of the man, Effective colonizer sharply stopped In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom. But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex The stopper to indulgent fatalist Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant, She seemed, of a country of the capuchins, So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed, Attentive to a coronal of things Secret and singular. Second, upon A second similar counterpart, a maid Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake Excepting to the motherly footstep, but Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep. Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light, A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth, Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified, All din and gobble, blasphemously pink. A few years more and the vermeil capuchin Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was, The dulcet omen fit for such a house. The second sister dallying was shy To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself Out of her botches, hot embosomer. The third one gaping at the orioles Lettered herself demurely as became A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody. The fourth, pent now, a digit curious. Four daughters in a world too intricate In the beginning, four blithe instruments Of differing struts, four voices several In couch, four more personæ, intimate As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue That should be silver, four accustomed seeds Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights That spread chromatics in hilarious dark, Four questioners and four sure answerers. Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout. The world, a turnip once so readily plucked, Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main, And sown again by the stiffest realist, Came reproduced in purple, family font, The same insoluble lump. The fatalist Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw, Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdote Invented for its pith, not doctrinal In form though in design, as Crispin willed, Disguised pronunciamento, summary, Autumn's compendium, strident in itself But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved In those portentous accents, syllables, And sounds of music coming to accord Upon his law, like their inherent sphere, Seraphic proclamations of the pure Delivered with a deluging onwardness. Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote Is false, if Crispin is a profitless Philosopher, beginning with green brag, Concluding fadedly, if as a man Prone to distemper he abates in taste, Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure, Glozing his life with after-shining flicks, Illuminating, from a fancy gorged By apparition, plain and common things, Sequestering the fluster from the year, Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops, And so distorting, proving what he proves Is nothing, what can all this matter since The relation comes, benignly, to its end? So may the relation of each man be clipped.

Wallace Stevens

Living,Parenthood,The Mind,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Home Life,Nature,Fall,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Spring,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Language & Linguistics,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets

This World is not Conclusion (373)

This World is not Conclusion. A Species stands beyond - Invisible, as Music - But positive, as Sound - It beckons, and it baffles - Philosophy, dont know - And through a Riddle, at the last - Sagacity, must go - To guess it, puzzles scholars - To gain it, Men have borne Contempt of Generations And Crucifixion, shown - Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies - Blushes, if any see - Plucks at a twig of Evidence - And asks a Vane, the way - Much Gesture, from the Pulpit - Strong Hallelujahs roll - Narcotics cannot still the Tooth That nibbles at the soul -

Emily Dickinson

Living,Life Choices,Religion,Christianity,Faith & Doubt,The Spiritual,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Blue

As through marble or the lining of certain fish split open and scooped clean, this is the blue vein that rides, where the flesh is even whiter than the rest of her, the splayed thighs mother forgets, busy struggling for command over bones: her own, those of the chaise longue, all equally uncooperative, and there’s the wind, too. This is her hair, gone from white to blue in the air. This is the black, shot with blue, of my dark daddy’s knuckles, that do not change, ever. Which is to say they are no more pale in anger than at rest, or when, as I imagine them now, they follow the same two fingers he has always used to make the rim of every empty blue glass in the house sing. Always, the same blue-to-black sorrow no black surface can entirely hide. Under the night, somewhere between the white that is nothing so much as blue, and the black that is, finally; nothing, I am the man neither of you remembers. Shielding, in the half-dark, the blue eyes I sometimes forget I don’t have. Pulling my own stoop- shouldered kind of blues across paper. Apparently misinformed about the rumored stuff of dreams: everywhere I inquired, I was told look for blue.

Carl Phillips

The Body,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

Strange!

I’d have you known! It puzzles me forever To hear, day in, day out, the words men use, But never a single word about you, never. Strange!—in your every gesture, worlds of news. On busses people talk. On curbs I hear them; In parks I listen, barbershop and bar. In banks they murmur, and I sidle near them; But none allude to you there. None so far. I read books too, and turn the pages, spying: You must be there, one beautiful as you! But never, not by name. No planes are flying Your name in lacy trailers past the blue Marquees of heaven. No trumpets cry your fame. Strange!—how no constellations spell your name!

John Frederick Nims

Brancusi’s Golden Bird

The toy become the aesthetic archetype As if some patient peasant God had rubbed and rubbed the Alpha and Omega of Form into a lump of metal A naked orientation unwinged unplumed the ultimate rhythm has lopped the extremities of crest and claw from the nucleus of flight The absolute act of art conformed to continent sculpture —bare as the brow of Osiris— this breast of revelation an incandescent curve licked by chromatic flames in labyrinths of reflections This gong of polished hyperaesthesia shrills with brass as the aggressive light strikes its significance The immaculate conception of the inaudible bird occurs in gorgeous reticence

Mina Loy

Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture

The Dance in Jinotega

In Jinotega women greeted us with thousands of flowers roses it was hard to tell the petals on our faces and arms falling then embraces and the Spanish language which is a little like a descent of petals pink and orange Suddenly out of the hallway our gathering place AMNLAE the Asociación de Mujeres women came running seat yourselves dear guests from the north we announce a play a dance a play the women their faces mountain river Indian European Spanish dark-haired women dance in gray-green fatigues they dance the Contra who circles the village waiting for the young teacher the health worker (these are the strategies) the farmer in the high village walks out into the morning toward the front which is a circle of terror they dance the work of women and men they dance the plowing of the fields they kneel to the harrowing with the machetes they dance the sowing of seed (which is always a dance) and the ripening of corn the flowers of grain they dance the harvest they raise their machetes for the harvest the machetes are high but no! out of the hallway in green and gray come those who dance the stealth of the Contra cruelly they dance the ambush the slaughter of the farmer they are the death dancers who found the schoolteacher they caught the boy who dancing brought seeds in his hat all the way from Matagalpa they dance the death of the mother the father the rape of the daughter they dance the child murdered the seeds spilled and trampled they dance sorrow sorrow they dance the search for the Contra and the defeat they dance a comic dance they make a joke of the puppetry of the Contra of Uncle Sam who is the handler of puppets they dance rage and revenge they place the dead child (the real sleeping baby) on two chairs which is the bier for the little actor they dance prayer bereavement sorrow they mourn Is there applause for such theater? Silence then come let us dance together now you know the usual dance of couples Spanish or North American let us dance in twos and threes let us make little circles let us dance as though at a festival or in peace- time together and alone whirling stamping our feet bowing to one another the children gather petals from the floor to throw at our knees we dance the children too banging into us into each other and one small boy dances alone pulling at our skirts wait he screams stop! he tugs at the strap of our camera Stop! stop dancing I’m Carlos take a picture of me No! Now! Right now! because soon Look! See Pepe! even tomorrow I could be dead like him the music catches its breath the music jumping in the guitar and phonograph holds still and waits no no we say Carlos not you we put our fingers on his little shoulder we touch his hair but one of us is afraid for god’s sake take his picture so we lift him up we photo- graph him we pass him from one to another we photograph him again and again with each of us crying or laughing with him in our arms we dance

Grace Paley

Arts & Sciences,Music,Theater & Dance,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Hymn

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth and go on out over the sea marshes and the brant in bays and over the hills of tall hickory and over the crater lakes and canyons and on up through the spheres of diminishing air past the blackset noctilucent clouds where one wants to stop and look way past all the light diffusions and bombardments up farther than the loss of sight into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest coelenterates and praying for a nerve cell with all the soul of my chemical reactions and going right on down where the eye sees only traces You are everywhere partial and entire You are on the inside of everything and on the outside I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down and if I find you I must go out deep into your far resolutions and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

A. R. Ammons

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Trees & Flowers,Religion,God & the Divine,The Spiritual

Imagined Room

Barbara Guest

Living,Time & Brevity,Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens

The Plain Sense of Things

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires.

Wallace Stevens

Living,The Mind

Reunion

Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead. It has my photograph in its soft pocket. It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind. I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.

Charles Wright

Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire? What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?

William Butler Yeats

Love,Heartache & Loss,Infatuation & Crushes,Unrequited Love,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict,Mythology & Folklore,Greek & Roman Mythology,Heroes & Patriotism

A Song

Oh, Love, he went a-straying, A long time ago! I missed him in the Maying, When blossoms were of snow; So back I came by the old sweet way; And for I loved him so, wept that he came not with me, A long time ago! Wide open stood my chamber door, And one stepped forth to greet; Gray Grief, strange Grief, who turned me sore With words he spake so sweet. I gave him meat; I gave him drink; (And listened for Love’s feet.) How many years? I cannot think; In truth, I do not know— Ah, long time ago! Oh, love, he came not back again, Although I kept me fair; And each white May, in field and lane, I waited for him there! Yea, he forgot; but Grief stayed on, And in Love’s empty chair Doth sit and tell of days long gone— ’Tis more than I can bear!

Lizette Woodworth Reese

Self-Portrait at Twenty

I stood inside myself like a dead tree or a tower. I pulled the rope of braided hair and high above me a bell of leaves tolled. Because my hand stabbed its brother, I said: Make it stone. Because my tongue spoke harshly, I said: Make it dust. And yet it was not death, but her body in its green dress I longed for. That’s why I stood for days in the field until the grass turned black and the rain came.

Gregory Orr

Love,Relationships

Jealousy

When I see you, who were so wise and cool, Gazing with silly sickness on that fool You’ve given your love to, your adoring hands Touch his so intimately that each understands, I know, most hidden things; and when I know Your holiest dreams yield to the stupid bow Of his red lips, and that the empty grace Of those strong legs and arms, that rosy face, Has beaten your heart to such a flame of love, That you have given him every touch and move, Wrinkle and secret of you, all your life, —Oh! then I know I’m waiting, lover-wife, For the great time when love is at a close, And all its fruit’s to watch the thickening nose And sweaty neck and dulling face and eye, That are yours, and you, most surely, till you die! Day after day you’ll sit with him and note The greasier tie, the dingy wrinkling coat; As prettiness turns to pomp, and strength to fat, And love, love, love to habit! And after that, When all that’s fine in man is at an end, And you, that loved young life and clean, must tend A foul sick fumbling dribbling body and old, When his rare lips hang flabby and can’t hold Slobber, and you’re enduring that worst thing, Senility’s queasy furtive love-making, And searching those dear eyes for human meaning, Propping the bald and helpless head, and cleaning A scrap that life’s flung by, and love’s forgotten,— Then you’ll be tired; and passion dead and rotten; And he’ll be dirty, dirty! O lithe and free And lightfoot, that the poor heart cries to see, That’s how I’ll see your man and you!— But you —Oh, when that time comes, you’ll be dirty too!

Rupert Brooke

Love,Heartache & Loss,Unrequited Love,Relationships,Men & Women

A Farewell

Good-bye!—no, do not grieve that it is over, The perfect hour; That the winged joy, sweet honey-loving rover, Flits from the flower. Grieve not—it is the law. Love will be flying— Yes, love and all. Glad was the living—blessed be the dying. Let the leaves fall.

Harriet Monroe

Farewells & Good Luck

Another Attempt at Rescue

The time is important here—not because this has been a long winter or because it is my first at home since childhood—but because there is so much else to be unsure of. We are on the brink of an invasion. At a time like this how is it that when I left only a week ago there was three feet of snow on the ground, and now there is none, not even a single patch on in the shadow of the fence-line. And to think I paid a cousin twenty dollars to shovel the walk. He and two of his buddies, still smelling of an all-nighter, arrived at 7 am to begin their work. When I left them a while later and noticed their ungloved hands, winter made me feel selfish and unsure. This ground seems unsure of itself for its own reasons and we do not gauge enough of our lives by changes in temperature. When I first began to write poems I was laying claim to battle. It started with a death that I tried to say was unjust, not because of the actual dying, but because of what was left. What time of year was that? I have still not yet learned to write of war. I have friends who speak out—as is necessary— with subtle and unsubtle force. But I am from this place and a great deal has been going wrong for some time now. The two young Indian boys who almost drowned last night in the fast-rising creek near school are casualties in any case. There have been too many just like them and I have no way to fix these things. A friend from Boston wrote something to me last week about not having the intelligence to take as subject for his poems anything other than his own life. For a while now I have sensed this in my own mood: This poem was never supposed to mention itself, other writers, or me. But I will not regret that those boys made it home, or that the cousins used the money at the bar. Still, there are no lights on this street. Still, there is so much mud outside that we carry it indoors with us.

M.L. Smoker

Grace

for Darlene Wind and James Welch I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace. Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace. I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn. I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

Joy Harjo

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Animals,Weather,Religion,Other Religions,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Mythology & Folklore

Hinged Double Sonnet for the Luna Moths

For ten days now, two luna moths remain silk-winged and lavish as a double broach pinned beneath the porch light of my cabin. Two of them, patinaed that sea-glass green of copper weather vanes nosing the wind, the sun-lit green of rockweed, the lichen's green scabbing-over of the bouldered shore, the plush green peat that carpets the island, that hushes, sinks then holds a boot print for days, and the sapling-green of new pines sprouting through it. The miraculous green origami of their wings - false eyed, doomed and sensual as the mermaid's long green fins: a green siren calling from the moonlight. A green siren calling from the moonlight, from the sweet gum leaves and paper birches that shed, like tiny white decrees, scrolled bark. They emerge from cocoons like greased hinges, all pheromone and wing, instinct and flutter. They rise, hardwired, driven, through the creaking pine branches tufted with beard moss and fog. Two luna moths flitting like exotic birds towards only each other and light, in these their final few days, they mate, then starving they wait, inches apart, on my cabin wall to die, to share fully each pure and burning moment. They are, like desire itself, born without mouths. What, if not this, is love?

Sean Nevin

Primer

In the sixth grade I was chased home by the Gatlin kids, three skinny sisters in rolled-down bobby socks. HissingBrainiac! and Mrs. Stringbean!, they trod my heel. I knew my body was no big deal but never thought to retort: who's calling who skinny? (Besides, I knew they'd beat me up.) I survived their shoves across the schoolyard because my five-foot-zero mother drove up in her Caddie to shake them down to size. Nothing could get me into that car. I took the long way home, swore I'd show them all: I would grow up.

Rita Dove

Dawn Revisited

Imagine you wake up with a second chance: The blue jay hawks his pretty wares and the oak still stands, spreading glorious shade. If you don't look back, the future never happens. How good to rise in sunlight, in the prodigal smell of biscuits - eggs and sausage on the grill. The whole sky is yours to write on, blown open to a blank page. Come on, shake a leg! You'll never know who's down there, frying those eggs, if you don't get up and see.

Rita Dove

The Arrival

Luggage first, the lining of his suit jacket dangling As always, just when you’d given up hope Nimbly he backs out of the taxi Eyes nervously extending, like brave crabs Everywhere at once, keeping track of his papers He pilots himself into the home berth Like a small tug in a cloud of seagulls Worries flutter around him so thick It takes him some time to arrive And you wonder if he’s ever really been happy: When the blue eyes blur And stare out to sea Whether it’s only a daydream Or a long pain that silences him In such gray distances You’ll never know, but now Turning to you, the delicate mouth Like a magician Is curious, sensitive, playing tricks, Pouting like a wise turtle It seems he has a secret With the driver, With the stewardess on the airplane So that even when he opens his arms When the warm voice surrounds you, Wraps you in rough bliss, Just before you go under Suddenly you remember: The beloved does not come From nowhere: out of himself, alone Often he comes slowly, carefully After a long taxi ride Past many beautiful men and women And many dead bodies, Mysterious and important companions.

Patricia Goedicke

Long Marriage

You’re worried, so you wake her & you talk into the dark: Do you think I have cancer, you say, or Were there worms in that meat

Gerald Fleming

Going Deaf

No matter how she tilts her head to hear she sees the irritation in their eyes. She knows how they can read a small rejection, a little judgment, in every What did you say? So now she doesn’t say What? or Come again? She lets the syllables settle, hoping they form some sort of shape that she might recognize. When they don’t, she smiles with everyone else, and then whoever was talking turns to her and says, “Break wooden coffee, don’t you know?” She pulls all she can focus into the face to know if she ought to nod or shake her head. In that long space her brain talks to itself. The person may turn away as an act of mercy, leaving her there in a room full of understanding with nothing to cover her, neither sound nor silence .

Miller Williams

At the Bridal Shop

The gowns and dresses hang like fleece in their glaring whiteness, sheepskin-softness, the ruffled matrimonial love in which the brides- in-waiting dance around, expectantly, hummingbirds to tulips. I was dragged here: David’s Bridal, off the concrete-gray arterial highways of a naval town. I sink into the flush bachelors’ couch, along with other men sprinkled throughout the shop, as my friend and her female compatriots parade taffeta dresses in monstrous shades of pastels—persimmons, lilacs, periwinkles—the colors of weddings and religious holidays. Trains drag on the floor, sleeves drape like limp, pressed sheets of candied fruits, ribbons fluttering like pale leaves. I watch families gathered together: the women, like worshippers, circling around the smiling brides-to-be, as if they were the anointed ones. The men, in turn, submerge deeper into couches, into sleep, while the haloed, veiled women cannot contain their joy, they flash their winning smiles, and they are beautiful.

Joseph O. Legaspi

My Mother Would Be a Falconress

My mother would be a falconress, And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist, would fly to bring back from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize, where I dream in my little hood with many bells jangling when I'd turn my head. My mother would be a falconress, and she sends me as far as her will goes. She lets me ride to the end of her curb where I fall back in anguish. I dread that she will cast me away, for I fall, I mis-take, I fail in her mission. She would bring down the little birds. And I would bring down the little birds. When will she let me bring down the little birds, pierced from their flight with their necks broken, their heads like flowers limp from the stem? I tread my mother's wrist and would draw blood. Behind the little hood my eyes are hooded. I have gone back into my hooded silence, talking to myself and dropping off to sleep. For she has muffled my dreams in the hood she has made me, sewn round with bells, jangling when I move. She rides with her little falcon upon her wrist. She uses a barb that brings me to cower. She sends me abroad to try my wings and I come back to her. I would bring down the little birds to her I may not tear into, I must bring back perfectly. I tear at her wrist with my beak to draw blood, and her eye holds me, anguisht, terrifying. She draws a limit to my flight. Never beyond my sight, she says. She trains me to fetch and to limit myself in fetching. She rewards me with meat for my dinner. But I must never eat what she sends me to bring her. Yet it would have been beautiful, if she would have carried me, always, in a little hood with the bells ringing, at her wrist, and her riding to the great falcon hunt, and me flying up to the curb of my heart from her heart to bring down the skylark from the blue to her feet, straining, and then released for the flight. My mother would be a falconress, and I her gerfalcon raised at her will, from her wrist sent flying, as if I were her own pride, as if her pride knew no limits, as if her mind sought in me flight beyond the horizon. Ah, but high, high in the air I flew. And far, far beyond the curb of her will, were the blue hills where the falcons nest. And then I saw west to the dying sun-- it seemd my human soul went down in flames. I tore at her wrist, at the hold she had for me, until the blood ran hot and I heard her cry out, far, far beyond the curb of her will to horizons of stars beyond the ringing hills of the world where the falcons nest I saw, and I tore at her wrist with my savage beak. I flew, as if sight flew from the anguish in her eye beyond her sight, sent from my striking loose, from the cruel strike at her wrist, striking out from the blood to be free of her. My mother would be a falconress, and even now, years after this, when the wounds I left her had surely heald, and the woman is dead, her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart were broken, it is stilld I would be a falcon and go free. I tread her wrist and wear the hood, talking to myself, and would draw blood.

Robert Duncan

When Roots Are Exposed

I. The empty of stomach manifests silence a stillness that levels coffee in a cup and in a respectful manner allows steam to penetrate the surface. Reversal of action has created my sandstone canyon rooted cedar and sage at my feet. This movement is where a tranquility stems. II. When my child creates bubbles through a soapy wand, I occupy the action of fate that bursts the perfect form. A halcyon absorbed nesting within the existence of the form that no longer exists. The formless form is where my mind floats. III. It is easy to give form especially with English words a promotion of mechanical ligaments binding spirit with assembly-fabricated molds. Just as my hair poses an appendage of my brain my tongue poses an appendage of my heart. I cannot classify this thought as a typewritten symbol. An ideogram of essence cultivates my stillness to action.

Esther Belin

Living,The Body,The Mind,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets

Cue Lazarus

Start this with the invocation: a seventy-seven Pinto, an eastbound freeway, two boysa few months from their driver’s license.It happens again because you’ve said it. You sit in the back seat, a ghost of red vinyl, to listento these boys—one of whom was you,the one along for the ride—talk brave about cheerleaders and socket wrenches as they passa stolen cigarette between them.They don’t know you’re there, wouldn’t believe in you should they look backstage, backseat.The boys are driving back from an Octoberorchard where they’d gone to see leaves change. You remember: orange, brown, as though you’d just seen those leaves,because in this proximityto yourself—the boy in the passenger seat—you are thinking the same thing, and each of your in-carnations feels like they’ve thought thisbefore. Your ghost, your present tense thinks that maybe this isn’t right. Now you’re along for the ride.These boys haven’t cuffed up againsttheir own mortality yet, though one of them is sick. The other one, driving and picking at the thinhair falling from his scalp, will diesoon, because what lurks in his dark blood can be cured by medical science. And that cure is what willkill him, as it leaves him weak,unable to fight off infection in his lungs. But that comes later. You are here with them now to findout what you owe to whom—your life,mortgaged to one of these boys and you’ve never been able to rectify that debt. You are thestage direction, a ghost backstage,wanting a spotlight, a soapbox a soliloquy. Dissolve back into your life, like sugarin tea—exit this scene now, stage left. *You are the apparition again in your mother’s house. You follow yourself down the yellow hallwayto the ringing phone in the kitchen.You already know who’s calling, the way you knew then—when you were the self you’re haunting. Your friendis dead. You know this even before his sister tells you—but because your ghost is too close, the boy can feel your grief, but can’t feel his own.And you did know then, didn’t you?You knew that morning, that the earth awakes closest to the sun—four days into every new year.And Lazarus, dead now, four days.Roll away the stone. Believe in something besides the past. Awaken from this dream likea man called out from a cave.It happens this way each time: a bourbon breakdown in January rain—weeping an invocation,cursing corollary. *Can you go to Tom’s grave today and mandate him back to this life? Should you cue him from the winglike a stage direction? Would hedamn you—a sadness, a gravestone on your chest, for calling him into this mortal suffering?If you had been in Houston that dayhe’d have died anyway. You’re a fool to think you can bargain across the river. Haunting the past won’t stopit from happening each time, exactly the same way. Won’t stop your heart from breaking like a glass decanter, brown whisky sliding mercury across the tile.

Carl Marcum

Living,Coming of Age,Death,Life Choices,Sorrow & Grieving,The Body,Love,Heartache & Loss,Relationships,Friends & Enemies

Driving in Oklahoma

On humming rubber along this white concrete, lighthearted between the gravities of source and destination like a man halfway to the moon in this bubble of tuneless whistling at seventy miles an hour from the windvents, over prairie swells rising and falling, over the quick offramp that drops to its underpass and the truck thundering beneath as I cross with the country music twanging out my windows, I'm grooving down this highway feeling technology is freedom's other name when —a meadowlark comes sailing across my windshield with breast shining yellow and five notes pierce the windroar like a flash of nectar on mind, gone as the country music swells up and drops me wheeling down my notch of cement-bottomed sky between home and away and wanting to move again through country that a bird has defined wholly with song, and maybe next time see how he flies so easy, when he sings.

Carter Revard

Activities,Jobs & Working,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Music,Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life

Yom Kippur 1984

I drew solitude over me, on the long shore. —Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude” For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be cut off from his people. —Leviticus 23:29 What is a Jew in solitude? What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid far from your own or those you have called your own? What is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man? In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert what in this world as it is can solitude mean? The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs with its electric gate, its perfected privacy is not what I mean the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan Heights is not what I mean the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her attack dog suddenly risen is not what I mean Three thousand miles from what I once called home I open a book searching for some lines I remember about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the dooryard once bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside, something that bloomed and faded and was written down in the poet’s book, forever: Opening the poet’s book I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: . . . the hateful-eyedand human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them Robinson Jeffers, multitude is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling its scrolls of surf, and the separate persons, stooped over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final solution, have I a choice? To wonder far from your own or those you have called your own to hear strangeness calling you from far away and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection nowhere on your mind (the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street: Make those be a woman’s footsteps; as if she could believe in a woman’s god) Find someone like yourself. Find others. Agree you will never desert each other. Understand that any rift among you means power to those who want to do you in. Close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger. But I have a nightmare to tell: I am trying to say that to be with my people is my dearest wish but that I also love strangers that I crave separateness I hear myself stuttering these words to my worst friends and my best enemies who watch for my mistakes in grammar my mistakes in love. This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me? If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud. To love the Stranger, to love solitude—am I writing merely about privilege about drifting from the center, drawn to edges, a privilege we can’t afford in the world that is, who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy river, woman dragged from her stalled car into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing availing his Blackness Jew deluded that she’s escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion, the men too holy to touch her hand; Jew who has turned her back on midrash and mitzvah (yet wears the chai on a thong between her breasts) hiking alone found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs (did she die as queer or as Jew?) Solitude, O taboo, endangered species on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend you In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can’t have: your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant’s hand outspread her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away? have I traded off something I don’t name? To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist? What will I do to defend my want or anyone’s want to search for her spirit-vision far from the protection of those she has called her own? Will I find O solitude your plumes, your breasts, your hair against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird’s singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song? in the old places, anywhere? What is a Jew in solitude? What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man? When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock, crumble the prophet’s headland, and the farms slide into the sea when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities crushed together on which the world was founded when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean? 1984-1985

Adrienne Rich

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Religion,Judaism,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Gender & Sexuality,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity,War & Conflict,Yom Kippur

The Walls

Julius Caesar’s head was cut off and fed to the barbarians waiting outside the walls of Rome. Salvador Dali wore one orange sock and a white one on days he went to eat breakfast in cafes. On days he stared at the wall, he did not wear socks. Yukio Mishima sheathed his knives in wall of whale oil, claiming such creatures were the only ones that understood the art of sacrifice. The last thing John Lennon saw before he was gunned down was the brick wall of his apartment house. Sitting Bull had fourteen wives he lined up against the cliff walls. He would close his eyes and walk blindly to them with an erection, promising he would take the first one his erection touched. Crazy Horse watched silently from the cliff walls above. J. D. Salinger scribbled on his bedroom walls as a boy, promising his mother to whitewash the figures the first time he was caught. Joan of Arc climbed over the walls and fell on top of a castle guard, the commotion bringing soldiers who swore the wall opened and she escaped by stepping through. Nikita Khrushchev stared at the wall of nuclear buttons and knew it was a green one they told him to push, but the triggers were every color except green. Hernán Cortés’ men met a wall of arrows, then turned and ran. Montezuma’s men met a wall of armor, wept, then stoned their chief off the wall for helping the conquistadores. Carl Jung opened his eyes to find himself sleeping against a wall of flowers, the beautiful smell giving him the answer he had been looking for. Charlie Chaplin ordered his crew to remove the hidden mirror from the wall, footage of his latest lover overflowing onto the studio floor. Sor Juana de la Cruz hid her new poem in a hole in the wall, but when a fellow nun went to retrieve it after Sor Juana’s death, it was gone. The Dalai Lama stopped in the snow and bowed his head to pray before the wall of dead monks killed by the Chinese. Virginia Woolf’s last memory before drowning was the wall of family portraits, the photographs of her father and brothers so radiant in the river fog. Billy the Kid simply dug a hole in the adobe wall of the jail with his bare hands and walked away. Janis Joplin was found dead of an overdose in her Los Angeles hotel, her face facing the wall. Federico García Lorca did not face any walls when he was shot under the trees. No one knows how Tu Fu encased himself in a wall of bamboo, staying inside the tube for ten years, never saying a word, his feet becoming the roots of bamboo within the first few months of his silence. Al Capone stared at the walls of his cell in Alcatraz and added the bank figures again, trying to get them right. Babe Ruth heard a thud against the wall of his hotel suite, the baseball rolling down the hallways as a signal his tryst with the team owner’s wife about to be revealed. William Shakespeare stared at the empty walls of the theatre, stood there without saying a word, and stared at the empty walls of the theatre. Geronimo extended his arms over the walls of rock, the approaching sound of the cavalry troops echoing down the canyon, the pictograph Geronimo carved high on the wall, years ago, lifting him to safety. Two days before Salvador Allende was assassinated, Pablo Neruda, dying of cancer, woke at Isla Negra to find the walls of the room where he lay were covered in hundreds of clinging starfish.

Ray Gonzalez

Living,Death,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Popular Culture,Race & Ethnicity,War & Conflict

For the Other World

For those who ran in the streets, there were no faces to welcome them back. José escaped and loved the war. For those who swam with bitterness of a scorched love, there was a rusted car to work on. For those who merely passed and reclined in prayer, there was the tower and the cross. For those who dedicated tongues to the living and dying, there were turquoise painted doorways. For those who left their children tied to the water heater, there was a shout and a name. For those whose world was real and beautiful, there was a cigarette and a saint. For those who asked José to stay and feed his children, there were flowers at their funerals. For those who carried a shovel tattooed on their backs, there was a wet towel and a bottle. For those who swept the street of superstition and lie, there was the house to come home to. For those who came home late and put their swollen feet up, there was love and the smell of dirty socks. For those who feared the devil and spit on his painted arms, there was a lesson in rosaries. For those who had to leave before the sun went down, there was asphalt and a bus. For those who stared at wet plaster and claimed the face of Christ appeared, there was confinement and stale bread. For those who talked with each other and said it was time to go, there was lead in the paint and on the tongue. For those who left children behind, there was a strange world of sulphur and sparrow nests. For those who accused their ancestors of eating salt, there were these hands tracing what was left after the sweat.

Ray Gonzalez

Living,Death,Life Choices,Relationships

Kick the Heart

Kick in the heart. Kick the starting lance. Throw the ground a word and stand back. The color of terror is the envy on body rags, the dragonfly war scraped off a painting inside the door. Kick the shame. Kick the falling dawn as fortunate. Throw the corrupted guest out the door. A sequence of rhythms bound for the light on your bed. On the eggplant cooked for the husband working late: an ant, a hair— the only thing said to race the mind. Take someone else’s voice and touch their ears. Make sure they hear you cry in their own whispers, their harangue. Kick the soil. Kick the sweet drowning as if you know the round jubilance of pear is afraid of a darkening spoon, a honey of flavor, the tender one who never touches your plate. The tired one who rations food to thank God eternity is here and there. Slip the eye the blue-black stranger, his instrument of scars and neglect, its tune of every wish besides the grave of a careless, quiet man. Shape his sound into the thumb asking for a ride in the years of not going anywhere. Kick the alphabet. Kick the hungry thigh and try again. Reduce yourself to a moving mouth, a solemn happiness that smells of the past, takes hold of the throat and teaches you to despise omens— ignore Apache mirrors on rock arches as if you knew what their scratchings meant. Kick the heart. Kick the starting lance. It moves deeper into the month of blinking neon where vertigo is perfume, desire foaming on your bare feet killed by frost, taken by the animal waking inside your holy cross— a figure of green gowns and things that follows you until you dance. Kick the truth. Kick the belly until it confesses. Admit you were fed by a woman flapping in the wind, told to sit there by a father who made her give birth to a shimmering head, your brain of flowers blossoming upon the body always first to confess. What snow is left is tired water unmoved by your seasonal words, your circle healing by slowing down, swelling to the size of God, yellow leaves in the blood nothing dangerous— this impulse, this kick to the brittle lake where the snow goes away.

Ray Gonzalez

Living,Life Choices,Relationships

Calling the White Donkey

I called the white donkey that hurt my left shoulder the last time it appeared, ramming me with its ivory head, cracking my back to relieve me of worry and hope. I called the white donkey, surprised at the sound of my voice. Scared, I wondered if the white head would give me its donkey brain, snowy matter dripping into my ears like the horse of the first man who fell off, the donkey teaching me about desire and the moan, that white hair on the back of my head that warns me. I called the donkey. It came slowly toward me, huge ears shaking with fury, its breath turning the air white as it bit into the white apple of my throat. I faced the donkey, watched its gait become a shuffle of possession, shaking its head as it stopped to root its dirty hoofs in the ground. I stepped back and clicked my fingers, but it would not come closer, its snort commanding I listen as it farted. I walked away and did not know it was I who yearned for labor of the ass because the animal I summoned couldn’t remove the white scar from my heart, a blind life I lived for good.

Ray Gonzalez

Living,Life Choices,The Body,Nature,Animals,Social Commentaries

Me and Bubble went to Memphis

Thylias Moss

Footnote to Howl

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel! The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy! The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy! Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels! Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas! Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums! Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets! Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles! Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul! Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch! Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss! Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul! Berkeley 1955

Allen Ginsberg

Living,The Body,The Mind,Love,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Religion,The Spiritual,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

Lost in Translation

The kinship with those humans who speak directly to me is webbed to the ceiling. An economy of satellites, a cosmos, where revision we think comes without the benefit of our witness. A peculiar time when stars with modest faces sleep in enormity and mirror death like a child’s infirmity that despite socio-economics is still an illness, definitive as fading paint grossing a distant understanding from a stain pooled from its center resonant of some terrific nucleus making sense of its own words with the strangest electricity.

Gabriel Gomez

Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries

Timbre

I can’t tell you I had climbed for hours on ledges and crawled through gaps in the earth. My hands negotiating through the teeth of the palisade lipped under the vineyard of temperate skies. And I can’t tell you that I came onto a ledge within the shelter of a granite roof, ceaselessly carved by centuries of dripping water. Feeding from pooled water and singular sunlight a chamisa plant sat like a chopped wood. The opposite end of root speaking for its entirety through silence and color. And I wish I could tell you that at the moment I met its splitting scent under the enormity of stone your name appeared in my throat with clarity. And I wish we were old and in front of a grand painting, a picture or postcard of Picasso’s “Guernica” perhaps. It would be then that I would tell you Picasso once said that it took him his entire life to learn how to paint like a child. It would be through these words that would make you understand the same clarity that pooled over me on that ledge those years before when as a young man I extended like direction, like timbre itself for a dying song that echoed your name.

Gabriel Gomez

Living,Coming of Age,Life Choices,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics

Bluegrass

I. sound knots pinned to a fabric-less body form of oak bone a barreled chest the presence of acoustic music over the instrument resting on your lap a limited vehicle but you knew that having learned tablature the guitar posed in sculpture clear its throat by reaching the oval gap flushed against stomach into its curious sound gather fingers around an inexhaustible voice and play the strings II. bread shaped to song as we ate and fidgeted the pitch of river frozen to stillness a film reeled and taut swelling water oily in its cold steps before it hardens an utterance before song is shaped a compression of freezing water eating away at its own babbling faceIII. where are the boxes of clothes the newspaper to scoop inside of cups feel free to comment miss nothing as of chewing a new food these are features of comfort a lower altitude, moved further but no egg crate to snug the ends of the hutch a chimera of tempered sand speak of her house absolved by the wiping ocean speak of her name by way of mountains the mirrors silver flaking for the edges of the mirrors leaving only glass unreflective patches the promised half the unanswerable ruin of aperture begging from where you haven’t seen yourself in years

Gabriel Gomez

Living,Life Choices,Time & Brevity,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Music

Garbage Truck

After it lifts the army-green, stuffed dumpster over its head and the trash falls to the receptacle, it hulks backward with a cadenced beep as if to say, get out the fucking way, please.

Paul Martínez Pompa

Activities,Jobs & Working,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

The Abuelita Poem

I. SKIN & CORN Her brown skin glistens as the sun pours through the kitchen window like gold leche. After grinding the nixtamal, a word so beautifully ethnic it must not only be italicized but underlined to let you, the reader, know you’ve encountered something beautifully ethnic, she kneads with the hands of centuries-old ancestor spirits who magically yet realistically posses her until the masa is smooth as a lowrider’s chrome bumper. And I know she must do this with care because it says so on a website that explains how to make homemade corn tortillas. So much labor for this peasant bread, this edible art birthed from Abuelitas’s brown skin, which is still glistening in the sun. II. APOLOGY Before she died I called my abuelitagrandma. I cannot remember if she made corn tortillas from scratch but, O, how she’d flip the factory fresh El Milagros (Quality Since 1950) on the burner, bathe them in butter & salt for her grandchildren. How she’d knead the buttons on the telephone, order me food from Pizza Hut. I assure you, gentle reader, this was done with the spirit of Mesoamérica ablaze in her fingertips.

Paul Martínez Pompa

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture,Race & Ethnicity

MyKillAdoreHer

That Lucia broke the machine twice in one week was evidence enough. He also offered this—she’s no longer automatic, her stitches are crooked and once another seamstress found Lucia’s “lost” sewing patterns in the trash. The security guard half listened as Lucia gathered her things. Then the manager turned directly to her—what is it with you? We give you work, put money in your pocket. She put on her best disappointed face as they escorted her past rows of itchy throats, bowed heads, the refrain of needle through fabric. Every day Elena counts pig. A pageant of molded plastic rolling down the conveyor belt. The task: grab Miss Piggy, pull gown over snout, fasten two tiny buttons, grab another. With each doll Elena’s hands grow stiffer. Her feet grow heavy as the concrete below. Dolls spit at her, or maybe this is imagined, but the ache in her legs might be real. The supervisor brushes against her back when he patrols the floor. After standing for hours, the room begins to blur. Her mouth opens like an empty wallet as naked dolls march on. What will settle in, what will rise from the lungs of girls who still burn weeks after detox treatment at a local clinic. Speak of headaches, blurred vision, diarrhea. How they suck air thick with sulfuric acid. Acetone working past unfiltered exhaust systems and through their livers. Most return to work despite doctors’ orders. Back inside, the tin roof and their steady perspiration remind them they’re still alive—together one breathing, burning machine. Like Celia’s pockets, there’s nothing but lint here. Lint & dead machines. The sound of layoffs & profit margins. Yesterday this department droned an unsynchronized rhythm of coughing girls tethered to well-lubed motors. Row after row of pre-asthmatic lungs. Black hair buried under perpetual white. The decision was made across the border, he tells them. Nothing I can do about it. Sometimes Celia would imagine the whole place caught inside a tiny globe. Something she could pick up. Shake. A perpetual conveyor, he patrols her mouth. The sound of unfiltered white. Breathing margins. The task: grab Elena’s hands. Pull. Fasten. He also offered crooked patterns. Put money in her hair. That Lucia broke. Was evidence enough? Molded vision as a refrain. An empty wallet will rise. Speak. How they exhaust systems. Despite the blurred other, the ache might be real. Something she could pick up. Across the border, nothing I can imagine.

Paul Martínez Pompa

Activities,Jobs & Working,Relationships,Men & Women,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Class,Gender & Sexuality,Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity

Driving Eye

Bangkok Caught in a slip of particulars, say, between the dirt road and the brand-new Seven-Eleven, a bucket of lotus, three shades of red in the mudbank giving way to workers, faces hidden behind kerchiefs, binding the copper tines of another half-constructed building, this fretwork, that rooftop’s progress up and up, the eye riding a motor’s rev, coming to a woman who leans over the seventh story’s edge for the pulley rope’s basket of rice or rubber mallets, then a sweep down into cattle now, their beige skin over bones, the look of loose tents, or taking in a bronze Buddha, hands folded over the First National Melting Company, the red gate, black gate,red, retina arriving at a man throwing straw clumps to earth so the seeds don’t wash away, and the light behind him washing away, and this desire, a gaze shot along the border which is shaped like a question mark, cramped with hotels, pink neon grammars blinking Alpha, Alpha, Alpha Is The Bank For You And YourNeeds, another quick catch, the glance stippled with disappearances, a girl who lifts her skirt to bathe near the bus stop, a fire burning/burnt/burning in the field of bulldozers, an eye trying to fix itself as the vehicle turns, the mind from nascent to nation, drifting in instances, a grit in wind worrying the surface, the facts, out to finger the invisible gap we would inhabit, pulsing always in between.

Pimone Triplett

Living,The Body,The Mind,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Arts & Sciences,Photography & Film,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

Snapshots with Wide Apertures Shown on the Road

1 This one’s on Route 80 south of Water’s End, Arizona, speeding anywhere else when I’m tired of reading the yellow dash-and-dash, highway’s old adage. Sunglasses coaxed yellows to reds, though there are none where I look into the camera. Behind me, a blur of roadside cactus called “succulents,” for the moisture they save for years. The sky cut from indigo to blue to white until I wished for the sunset’s truncations to stay there, thinking, too, that the verge of its curve could flirt me into the absolute. 2 Moving on, in Bangkok, I’m always crouching in these, wanting to keep my head lower than his to show I know he’s Mother’s father. Asked, on going in, not to say anything if he brought up the distant old dealings, metallic shrillings of long-dead women, asked to ignore what they’d do for him, offerings he could almost eat a meal on. And this from the aunt who was asked to leave the family when she was young, “for the sake of the children,” drawing the bad lot. No one told me why. That’s my foot in the foreground. That was the daylight’s assignment of unwavering white, the background. These are only the circumstances. As for an end to the glare getting the last word in, there was none. 3 He’d set the machine on the tripod himself, return to read the newspaper, wait for the click, and want to keep it, the stop-time, that is, the pretending to read the newspaper. Held half in the shadow fans of the palm tree, half in a browbeat of sun. So that the machine had to catch him quickly, the clarity, the shot of his legs as suddenly: brown leather sheaves holding bone. 4 Say the moment arrives at the frame, and she who is about to enter the picture approaches. At the end of the road trip, she turns back in the hopes of memorizing what’s been passed, the colors that changed, the mirror-winks, the real moisture, invisible, along side mirage. His face was a once-darker shade of dust in his country. Some days he’d set the aperture, the opening, as wide as he could, to ruin the picture, to let all the light in.

Pimone Triplett

Living,Life Choices,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Photography & Film

On Pattern

For Grandfather, in Bangkok I can tell you, sweeping the several jigsaw lizards away from your casket, away from their expert invasions, kneeling by the order of our births alongside the mother-of-pearl mosaics, the family at your death keeps to form, having to act out that love of endings. I can say the little I know of how you lived is your patient gaze in old photographs, surrounded by three generations, most of the spindling offspring back from the States or Australia or wherever they’d been taken, children barely known but abided on holidays. Today I’m told we have to place pennies in the dead man’s mouth to remind us of the portions left behind.You pay the debt, someone says, you give your something solid back, push your currency up against the open,up against the father tongue. It’s the formal silence we love, the hush that’s planned, the good answer, monks, boyish and newly shorn, who know to whip your burial cloth exactly three times over the altar flame to purify countless threads. Who know when to kneel, when to back away from the casket. The casket itself carved patiently, inlaid with the images, portions left behind of silver shrunken disciples, each framed to each then framed again by squares of alabaster scrollwork whittled into black wood: the whole teak surface worried, Grandfather, with carpenter’s gold, splintered, then resplintered, puzzled with lapis. The eastern window’s been slivered open, to make the sun stab the craftmen’s metallic fretwork. The mourners too, suddenly embossed, become dozens shifting to kneel. When a few clouds eclipse the sun, wiping away the borders, the frame and scrimshaw, so that we stand briefly in the room’s darkened largeness, next to me someone whispers, how your vessel is rented, a work to be given back.

Pimone Triplett

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Religion,Other Religions

My Secret Flag

What a giant I must seem to them, an exhausted giant who dozes above her sewing. Asleep in mid-stitch, sorting the day’s haul of cinders, rubies, griefs— They were laughing and carrying on, their tiny silver needles flying in and out, tiny silver thimbles on their fingers. It’s no use of course, keeping secrets from them, when chattering is almost their religion. Some held corners of the flag like an enormous quilt, and some danced on little shelves above the workshop. They were so merrie that I fell asleep again. In the morning my beautiful flag was finished, every stitch in place and every seam. So now I raise it—slowly, underneath a secret sky. Near the door to the half-daft and the cradle of kleptocracy. Where it rips and shivers, rips and shivers once more And makes me furiously glad, and fills me up with serious pleasure.

Rachel Loden

Activities,Indoor Activities,Arts & Sciences,Architecture & Design,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality,History & Politics

The Packards

The heretic’s papers were spread out on the armchair * At the window, fruit of spring, you can bite again against the weather weapons I let fall outside pharmacies, drowsy and bright * Air comes to the confused bends in the rail where in a mirror lush food puts you out for 1 night. Then it is the weather at noon that prepares to spring on you in December, a month ago blowing the lights out with a sob * On long walks a poorly tuned radio in my world my head with a star attached swims back * Useless—it was the wrong tree but the flag in the school breeze scans the men and women on my sleeve * A . . . turned her head towards the open window of the shop. The voice was low. It did not sound like a man’s voice. * Eighteen trees starting from the end of the block outside the pharmacy, with beards today to the subway, station, steps of a land-post “screen my heart” * Under the dog’s neck When the radio went on. Doctor He moved his face away to The pines, a deep thought. The trees, for a few seconds they were Real to him, his ears stopped The river where no life could touch him. He pressed his ear against the cold Shrill whine. Dusty legs Wondered why they had sent him To this place, they feared the cobwebs Were swaying on the unique bed. Mown grass has the peppery smell Of being crowded together on This bed, and a feeling of dark apprehension Came over him. I watch a horse Gather speed, look at a movie With you. Your words are the grime On the sidestreet, down towards the river, Yellow in the cold glare of floodlights In the yard. In the middle of the line I repeated your instructions, I puzzled with a stranger does to you In a dream. Chunks Of meat are marked Cars following me as a thought follows Us from the motel. Father Has read these latinized titles Aloud, but failed And gave place to some smooth yellowish substance, Checked by no one as he rubbed the sponge- Like doll. It had some hair But its legs did not tempt me, The sponginess gave place to the tubes themselves. Colleagues efficiently solve an aggressive Blank to be expected as we sat at the breakfast Table near the door. A tree blocked Her hair spread and fell over the wheel. But the living room shows its trimming of thick straw— The bad mechanic sets the bread on the white cloth

Lewis Warsh

Living,Coming of Age,Life Choices,The Body,The Mind,Activities,Jobs & Working,Relationships,Home Life

Gout

He changes into a bird, and that’s the only difference. Rain on the improved sidewalk seems inspired after so much heat. Look at the objects that have already wilted and died. Someone is losing hair trying to penetrate the meaning of death—rather language which postpones dying is inventing a drug to keep us alive. Being similar never made this body more true. Bills for electricity and answering service are burning inside the hearth. My dream, to have a hearth and set an example for fading youth. The conspicuous peacock neither turns nor changes, yet suddently loses its feathers, buckles in the dust and dies. The meaning is as fantastic as any truth. Language invents a painkilling drug for restoring youth—an occasion inviting feelings which jolt and never subside. I mean he is dying again, slowly, as he gains time.

Lewis Warsh

Living,Death,Growing Old,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets

Definition of Great

Momentarily the language of description is lost what you see with your eyes is enough, for you, anyway but how to get the sense of what you saw across to another person it’s possible through the spirit in your voice when you say “it was great!” to convey what happened in that moment & it was great not only that it was terrific, & interesting too it was nice & I had a good time doing it. I had fun. You should have been there. Not only that, it was beautiful. It was inspiring.

Lewis Warsh

Living,The Mind,Activities,Indoor Activities,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics

Not A Cage

Scientific inquiry, seen in a very broad perspective may see Foot 1957, also Wetermarck 1906, Ch. XIII To man (sic) the world is twofold, in accordance with that witness is now or in the future It wasn't until the waitress brought her Benedictine and she Villandry, "Les Douves" par Azay le Rideau mine. Yours, CYNTHIA. Not a building, this earth, not a cage, The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless a forgery: Opus loannes Bellini We named you I thought the earth is possible I could not tell to make live and conscious history in common and wake you find yourself among and wake up deep in the fruit Did you get the money we sent? I smell fire AT FULL VOLUME. STAGE DARK] 1. Russia, 1927 God, say your prayers. You were begotten in a vague war sidelong into your brain. In Letter Three & Four (as earlier) the narrator is North Dakota Portugal Moorhead, Minnesota The lights go down, the curtain opens: the first thing we gun, Veronica wrote, the end. 'Wittgenstein' Tomorrow she would be in America. Over forty years ago a tense, cunningly moving tale by the Hunga- Then he moved on and I went close behind. Interviewers: What drew a woman from Ohio to study in Tübingen? American Readers with this issue former subscribers to Marxist Perspectives The shadow of the coup continues to hover over Spain In the ordinary way of summer girls were still singing like a saguaro cactus from which any desert wayfarer can draw as is Mr. Fox, but in literature Twenty five years have gone by Ya se dijeron las cosas mas oscuras The most obscure things have already been said

Joan Retallack

Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Theater & Dance,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Popular Culture,War & Conflict

Dropping Leaflets

Help me come up with a strategy to get through this white noise. — U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney, November 2001 Are we on the ground now? Ally cells and I said operations. We cleared 50% of a wonderful friend and enduring opposition. Take the solid. Louder. We clearly are loud. We are the postal system. No evidence has been information. Attacking the caves. Are you on the ground enduring? A wonderful friend ramped it up. You ought to open your mail. Opposition element: the air. The talents work with precision. 84%. The population attacking the caves, the talents work with the caves and tunnels. Hiding in caves, wavering in caves and hiding in mosques. A wonderful friend on the ground. Freedom I said: the enduring ally cells. Interested in the view, in our aid sensitivities. 50% to the front of our effort adding that 80% are willing to play. Independent oper-oppo-sition forces that are rosy. So make assumptions on the ground. Are we on the ground now? Can be more than air. The target. The air liaison. Campaign with the bombing and entirely happy. Attacking the leaflets. We keep working hiding in hiding in caves and cowering in cowering in cowering in caves and I could say confidential areas. The mosques and rest efforts are mad. Execution in the targeting of democracy. Those risks culti-targeting to minimize the individual. An obligation to the spirit of enterprise. A war of roundup freezing worldwide, and proceeding on course. Training facilities, proceeding on course, freezing their guided munitions. A population is tons of struggle against evil. A civilized world of innocents in the mud, an enemy that’s on the ground for there is no neutral ever. No neutral homeland. For the first time first time first time in history ordinary busi-security bioterror to defend enemies with the no-ness of life. Confident in destruction / complete and cause / certain of the rightness of this time / in the right / man the victories / to comment for a freer world history / committee of evil / defeat the forces / we will fight and great coalition wherever they are an era of over flight right against terror basing global terror the global trade and lives of our world improve / the modern alliance / I like citizens / but rather than the dust settle it could mean / as acknowledged / the carpet bombs precision bombs / as long as 23 months and I said go to America on alert / get a softball to school if you work / take your child / game this afternoon / game or a soccer to the president’s going to go to the game / the fight/ our new baseball game / to help us in our task / force will sign terrorists tracking American citizens / to protect level warriors / the decibel from these shadows / open your mail louder

Jena Osman

Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict,Heroes & Patriotism

Poet

The wind dying, I find a city deserted, except for crowds of people moving and standing. Those standing resemble stories, like stones, coal from the death of plants, bricks in the shape of teeth. I begin now to write down all the places I have not been— starting with the most distant. I build houses that I will not inhabit.

Keith Waldrop

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets

The Ghost of a Hunter

He reads: What soul suffers in secret, the flesh shows openly. Deep within, in a region hardly accessible, a bold self-image sends messages of bloodshed and conquest, which reverberate in his heart of hearts. [I forget which hand is writing.] He does not doubt that he exists. The five senses have left their mark on him. It is a record of what has happened to him, but he cannot talk or travel until he finds a body of water. A man who has lived on reindeer’s flesh amuses himself with ripples. In this cage was once a nightingale. In the echo, new words for wind. The usual convulsions, and a green cat. And, after all, months or years are nothing to him. [My image contains his body.] His body contains bodies. Blemishes. Inglories. Vague figures, in a howling wind, and with no notion of perspective. Of countless ruined worlds, he would appropriate the essential emblem. Wall struggling with wall, shadow with shad- ow. Thousands of miles a day. He gazes across an unguarded cemetery—gazes idly, waiting for new equipment. As through a fixed window, he finds a kind of space, the visible world foreshortened. He does not see deeply, but—still—one thing behind another. He keeps a tiny bird, folded like a sheet of paper. Twice two is four—still—and a circle has no angles. Body sheds shoulder, jaw. However body may appear, the soulcomes back in scars. [There are no dead. Only names.] Too close, ruin wrinkles the surface—his breath bothers reality. The sun pours down. The pots are mended. An unfolding, from where it is all contained. The ships have been salvaged. [I do not know what body he has in mind.] Clothing is resumed. Temples are rebuilt. “Which body?” we inquire, while all the liars cry out, “Verily!” As though all this were in the dark. Here is a column of soldiers, a heap of apples, an avenue of trees. Here a swarm of bees, of birds, a row of equidistant lines. A set of unequal objects distributes the field of vision. Here is the painted world in an actual image. [I have no theory for the clouds he sees.]

Keith Waldrop

Living,Coming of Age,Growing Old,The Body,The Mind,Activities,Jobs & Working

Advances

seventy wingbeats per second vagaries of vegetation, rosy anticipation Iturn the page without reading essence of accident what is the strongest motive what drives the solar wind time’s not so old, dating only from the creation New England has cooled significantly, icy core with a sooty coating this ice hard to break—the brain will have to wait catharsis of the vulture, obligatory vespers a bat, painted the color of joy, head downward because the brain is heavy I put on music but don’t alwayslisten whether magma could rise to where tones reach audible frequencies modest success with a late parasitic moth we will soon find out if all thisis true sudden drain on the heart, more doubt, the big melt: anything gone is replaced

Keith Waldrop

Living,Time & Brevity,Nature,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Sciences

from The Ambition of Ghosts:  I. Remembering into Sleep

I. Separation Precedes Meeting The cat so close to the fire I smell scorched breath. Parents, silent, behind me, a feeling of trees that might fall. Or dogs. A poem, like trying to remember, is a movement of the whole body. You follow the fog into more fog. Maybe the door ahead divides the facts from natural affection. How can I know. I meet too many in every mirror. 2. When I was little, was I I? My sister? A wolf chained, smothered in green virtues? Slower time of memory. Once I’ve got something I lie down on it with my whole body. Goethe quotations, warm sand, a smell of hay, long afternoons. But it would take a road would turn, with space, in on itself, would turn occasion into offer. 3. For days I hold a tiny landscape between thumb and index: sand, heather, shimmer of blue between pines. No smell: matchbook. Sand as schematic as Falling into memory, down, with my blood, to the accretions in the arteries, to be read with the whole body, in the chambers of the heart. The light: of the match, struck, at last. 4. Concentration: a frown of the whole body. I can’t remember. Too many pasts recede in all directions. Slow movement into Distant boots. Black beetles at night. A smell of sweat. The restaurant, yes. You’ve no idea how much my father used to eat. Place thick with smoke. Cards. Beer foaming over on the table. And always some guy said I ought to get married, put a pillow behind my eyes and, with a knowing sigh, spat in my lap. 5. The present. As difficult as the past, once a place curves into Hips swinging elsewhere. Castles in sand. Or Spain. Space of another language. Sleep is a body of water. You follow your lips into its softness. Far down the head finds its level 6. Tropisms Inward, always. Night curls the clover leaf around its sleep. Tightly. The bodies of the just roll, all night, through subterranean caves which turn in on themselves. Long tunnel of forgetting. Need of blur. The air, large, curves its whole body. Big hammering waves flatten my muscles. Inward, the distances: male and female fields, rigorously equal. 7. The drunk fell toward me in the street. I hope he wasn’t disappointed. Skinned his sleep. November. And a smell of snow. Quite normal, says the landlord, the master of rubbish, smaller and smaller in my curved mirror. I have un- controllable good luck: my sleep always turns dense and visible. There are many witches in Germany. Their songs descend in steady half-tones through you. 8. You’ll die, Novalis says, you’ll die following endless rows of sheep into your even breath. Precarious, like Mozart, a living kind of air, keeps the dream spinning around itself, its missing core. Image after image of pleasure of the whole body deepens my sleep: fins. 9. Introducing Decimals A dream, like trying to remember, breaks open words for other, hidden meanings. The grass pales by degrees, twigs quaver glassily, ice flowers the window. Intimate equations more complicated than the coordinates of past and Germany. The cat can’t lift its paw, its leg longer and longer with effort. A crying fit is cancelled. An aria jelled in the larynx. Nothing moves in the cotton coma: only Descartes pinches himself an every fraction must be solved.

Rosmarie Waldrop

Living,Coming of Age,The Body,The Mind,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books

Difficulties of a Heavy Body

a sense of his thirty-third year takes his elbow * any kind of he says sniff must be allowed to mature * an accident leaves him and finally the swallows * by way of curiosity he is no hand by no means to depict a woman * often he knows a crowded room * just out of his mother he falls between the pursuit and a case he’d sooner forget * he has a female muscle camouflaged for impact * streets enough to welcome snow * he knowingly succumbs to the brown sitzbaths * his wife touches a foretaste so vivid that the sheen of timber upsets * in going this sort of persistence * difficulties of a heavy body placed in alternating gestures

Rosmarie Waldrop

Living,Midlife,The Body,Relationships,Men & Women

As from a Quiver of Arrows

What do we do with the body, do we burn it, do we set it in dirt or in stone, do we wrap it in balm, honey, oil, and then gauze and tip it onto and trust it to a raft and to water? What will happen to the memory of his body, if one of us doesn't hurry now and write it down fast? Will it be salt or late light that it melts like? Floss, rubber gloves, and a chewed cap to a pen elsewhere —how are we to regard his effects, do we throw them or use them away, do we say they are relics and so treat them like relics? Does his soiled linen count? If so, would we be wrong then, to wash it? There are no instructions whether it should go to where are those with no linen, or whether by night we should memorially wear it ourselves, by day reflect upon it folded, shelved, empty. Here, on the floor behind his bed is a bent photo—why? Were the two of them lovers? Does it mean, where we found it, that he forgot it or lost it or intended a safekeeping? Should we attempt to make contact? What if this other man too is dead? Or alive, but doesn't want to remember, is human? Is it okay to be human, and fall away from oblation and memory, if we forget, and can't sometimes help it and sometimes it is all that we want? How long, in dawns or new cocks, does that take? What if it is rest and nothing else that we want? Is it a findable thing, small? In what hole is it hidden? Is it, maybe, a country? Will a guide be required who will say to us how? Do we fly? Do we swim? What will I do now, with my hands?

Carl Phillips

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,The Body,Love,Heartache & Loss,Relationships,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

My grandmother puts her feet in the sink of the bathroom at Sears to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,wudu, because she has to pray in the store or miss the mandatory prayer time for Muslims She does it with great poise, balancing herself with one plump matronly arm against the automated hot-air hand dryer, after having removed her support knee-highs and laid them aside, folded in thirds, and given me her purse and her packages to hold so she can accomplish this august ritual and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown as they notice what my grandmother is doing, an affront to American porcelain, a contamination of American Standards by something foreign and unhygienic requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom My grandmother, though she speaks no English, catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says,I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul with water from the world's ancient irrigation systems I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus over painted bowls imported from China among the best families of Aleppo And if you Americans knew anything about civilization and cleanliness, you'd make wider washbins, anyway

Mohja Kahf

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Friends & Enemies,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity

Autobiography

we didn’t really speak my summer wants to answer the architecture doesn’t matter this is not my real life when I am here I want to know why do I believe what I was taught a storm is on the way close all the windows begin at the earliest hour is there a self

Kazim Ali

Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

Echo & Elixir 2

Cairo’s taxi drivers speak to me in English. I answer, and they say your Arabic is good. How long have you been with us? All my life I tell them, but I’m never believed. They speak to me in Farsi, speak to me in Greek, and I answer with mountains of gold and silver, ghost ships sailing the weed-choked seas. And when they speak to me in Spanish, I say Moriscos and Alhambra. I say Jews rescued by Ottoman boats. And when the speak to me in Portuguese, all my life I tell them, coffee, cocoa, Indians and poisoned spears. I say Afonsso king of Bikongo writing Manuel to free his enslaved sons. And Cairo’s taxi drivers tell me your Arabic is surprisingly good. Then they speak to me in Italian, and I tell them how I lay swaddled a month’s walk from here. I tell them camps in the desert, barbed wire, wives and daughters dying, camels frothing disease, the sand stretching an endless pool. And they say so good so good. How long have you been with us? All my life, but I’m never believed. Then they speak to me in French, and I answer Jamila, Leopold, Stanley, baskets of severed hands and feet. I say the horror, battles of Algiers. And they speak to me in English and I say Lucknow, Arbenz. I say indigo, Hiroshima, continents soaked in tea. I play the drum beat of stamps. I invoke Mrs. Cummings, U.S. consul in Athens, I say Ishi, Custer, Wounded Knee. And Cairo's taxi drivers tell me your Arabic is unbelievably good. Tell the truth now, tell the truth, how long have you been with us? I say my first name is little lion, my last name is broken branch. I sing "Happiness uncontainable" and "field greening in March" until I'm sad and tired of truth, and as usual I'm never believed. Then they lead me through congestion, gritty air, narrow streets crowded with Pepsi and Daewoo and the sunken faces of the poor. And when we arrive, Cairo's taxi drivers and I speak all the languages of the world, and we argue and argue about corruption, disillusionment, the missed chances, the wicked binds, the cataclysmic fares.

Khaled Mattawa

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity

Rain Song

After Al-Sayyah The radio blares “Dialogue of Souls,” and the woman who hated clouds watches the sky. Where is the sea now? she asks. Where is it from here? What is its name?— this rain on a morning ride to school, winter, my seventh year, my father driving through rain, his eyes fixed on a world of credit and debt. On the radio, devotion to the lifter of harm from those who despair, knower of secrets with the knowledge of certainty. Not even the anguish of those years, the heavy traffic, cold and wind could have touched me. I was certain the palm holding me would be struck again. Chance allows for that and for stars to throb in reachable depths. Filled with grief bordering happiness, I didn’t care if I was safe, whether the storm was over, only that it came, the slash of lightning, the groaning sky, and the storms we made, how rain stripped everything of urgency, how to the lifter of harm rise those who despair.

Khaled Mattawa

Living,Coming of Age,Parenthood,Activities,School & Learning,Relationships,Nature,Weather,Philosophy

Bedtime Reading for the Unborn Child

Long after the sun falls into the sea and twilight slips off the horizon like a velvet sheet and the air gets soaked in blackness; long after clouds hover above like boulders and stars crawl up and stud the sky; long after bodies tangle, dance, and falter and fatigue blows in and bends them and sleep unloads its dreams and kneads them and sleepers dive into the rivers inside them, a girl unlatches a window, walks shoeless into a forest, her dark hair a flag rippling in darkness. She walks into woods, her feet light-stepping through puddles, over hard packed dirt, through grassy hills, over sticks and pebbles over sand soaked in day, stones sun-sizzled over lakes and frigid streams through dim cobbled streets darkened squares and dusty pastures. She runs from nothing, runs to nothing, beyond pain, beyond graveyards and clearings. In the dark the eyes of startled creatures gleam like a herd of candles. They scatter and give night its meaning. What echo of a bell lulled her what spirit, what scent of a word whose storm wrote her what banks fell to drown her which blood star which thread of water which trickle of light whose heart being launched whose floating soul seduced her what promise did it make her whose memory burned her whose prayer did she run to answer whose help, what sorrow clot what pain dammed inside her what wall must she rebuild now whose treasure beckons her who spread ivy like a veil to blind her? Daybreak lies chained to a blue wall from which the stars drop and lose all meaning. She runs past villages that lost their names roads that lost their destinations seas that lost their compasses and sailors rivers that lost their marshlands and travelers houses that lost their sleepers and criers trees that lost their songs and shadows gardens that lost their violets and benches valleys that lost their worms and farmers mountains that lost their prophets and marauders temples that lost their sinners and spires lightning that lost its silver and wires chimeras that lost their bridges minotaurs that lost their fountains. Crescent moons hover above her, ancient white feathers, birdless, wingless lost to their own meaning. Music rises out of her vision. It stands, a wall covered with silver mosses. A clarinet sounds a wounded mare, violins women who lost their children. Flutes blow their hot dry breezes. Drums chuckle the earth’s ceaseless laughter. Pianos are mumbling sorcerers calling spirits and powers. Cellos chew on the sounds of thunder. Dulcimers skip about on crutches. Dance floors flash their knives daring their dancers. Words mill about the streets like orphans. Then a lute begins groaning and dawn loses its meaning. Night girl, night girl your book is full now. You have drawn all the pictures. You have seen many weepers. Stars held your sky in place and moons floated on your lakes and washed them. When a bird sings when dewed branches tilt sunlight into eyes when curtains are soaked with light when mirrors drown in shadows, take your day to the shore, my child. Put out the words that fired your waking, scatter them on the sand like seeds, then with your feet gently tap them, and let the bright waves receive your meaning.

Khaled Mattawa

Living,Coming of Age,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

East of Carthage: An Idyll

1. Look here, Marcus Aurelius, we’ve come to see your temple, deluded the guards, crawled through a hole in the fence. Why your descendent, my guide and friend has opted for secrecy, I don’t know. But I do know what to call the Africans, passport-less, yellow-eyed who will ride the boat before me for Naples, they hope. Here the sea curls its granite lip at them and flings a winter storm like a cough, or the seadog drops them at Hannibal’s shores, where they’ll stand stupefied like his elephants. What dimension of time will they cross at the Hours loop tight plastic ropes round their ankles and wrists? What siren song will the trucks shipping them back to Ouagadougou drone into their ears? I look at them loitering, waiting for the second act of their darkness to fall. I look at the sky shake her dicey fists. One can be thankful, I suppose, for not being one of them, and wrap the fabric of that thought around oneself to keep the cold wind at bay. But what world is this that makes our lives sufficient even as the horizon’s rope is about to snap, while the sea and sky ache to become an open-ended road? That’s what we’re all waiting for, a moment to peel itself like skin off fruit, and let us in on its sweetness as we wait, smoking, or fondling provisions, listening the engine’s invocational purr. In an hour that will dawn and dusk at once, one that will stretch into days strung like beads on the horizon’s throat, they will ride their tormented ship as the dog star begins to float on the water, so bright and still, you’d want to scoop it out in the palm of your hand. 2. A pair of Roman fists robbed of spear and shield; the tiles of the tapestries mixed in with popcorn that slipped from the buttery hands, aluminum wrappers smudged with processed cheese; countless cigarette butts surround the fallen columns and beams with a fringe of tarnished foam; pairs of panties still hot with forbidden passion… The ruins are not ruined. Without all this garbage packed, stratified, how else to name our age? 3. Earlier, I had walked the market of Sabratha, changed to its people, but like my old city brought me back to me. The petty merchants, all selling the same goods, shouted out jokes to each other. A Sudanese waiter carried a tray with a giant pot of green tea with mint. Among the older men, their heads capped with crimson shennas, I kept seeking my father’s face. An old lust wafted past me when the abaya-clad women, scented with knock-off Chanel, sashayed by. The sawdust floors of the shawarma and falafel eateries, the sandwich maker dabbing insides of loaves with spoons of searing harissa, my mouth watering to a childhood burn. Pyramids of local oranges, late season pomegranates, radish and turnip bulbs stacked like billiard balls, and the half carcasses of lambs as if made of wax and about to melt off their hooks, the trays of hearts, kidneys, brains and testicles arrayed in slick arabesques. The hand-woven rugs where the extinct mouflon thrives, mincers, hairdryers, and toasters, their cords tentacles drooping from rusty shelves. It was as if my eyes were painting, not seeing, what I saw, my memory slowly building the scene until it assembled whole. What face did my face put on in the midst of transfiguration? I know what the eyes of the men my age said, settled now in comfortable middle age, about the life I left behind. True, I did envy them the asceticism of their grace, where a given horizon becomes a birthright—to drive or walk past the same hills all your life, to eat from the same tree and drink from the well that gave you your name. 4. Though for centuries the locals broke the statues’ limbs and ground them to make primitive pottery, enough remains to echo all that has disappeared: you and the woman leave the towpath, and you brace her against the trunk of an oak. It’s not the moonlight, but refractions from suburban homes trapped under cloud-cover that make her bronze skin glow among glistening trees. First, God made love: the canopy like the inside of an emerald, her lips a rush of cochineal. Then a route of evanescence brought her from Carthage into these living arms, here. 5. “A nice time, “ he tells us, how he and four cousins crossed the desert heading home on top of three-years’ worth of meager pay (the tarp ballooning, a giant dough) roped to a truck. Wearing the goggles of the welder he'd hoped to become, he looked at the sky and wondered “what those flying, smoke on their tails, thought of us.” Later, deported in a cargo plane, he handed the Tuareg soldiers one of his fake passports, and they like “space aliens” (in shabby uniforms, sunglasses, tribal veils) poured into his face. As the propellers’ hammering calmed to a shuddering hum, he saw the stars, “hundreds of them like gnats” swarm Mt. Akakous’ peak. “My next road is the water,” he says serving us tonight, and we promise, if the coffee is good, to put him on the next boat to the moon shining over Syracuse. 6. Suddenly, I find your descendant’s hands leafing through my chapters, scribbling a note in the margin of my thoughts: “How is it,” he asks, “that starlight announces the hour: how can a song divide desire in two?” “My flame,” I must have written or said, “coated her body like silk, one kiss spreading threads of lightening into her pores, until she became a sob, barely lifted by the wind, and I became mist, the shadow of a statue at the break of dawn.” To that he responds, “a Platonic echo;” and “What will come of such a plasticine love?” Marcus Aurelius, your descendent knows I’ll leave as I arrive, so empty he gets lost in me. 7. Two centuries ago, one of my ancestors sat on one of the communal latrines in mid-morning and listened to Apuleius’s defense. Across from him on that marble hexagon, sat two other men. On normal days they’d have talked about the olive harvest, the feast of Venus coming soon. But today they listen to the Madaurian’s high eloquence studded with jokes, cracking their own one-liners, shaking their heads in delight. Away from the hot midday sun and the throngs, you could say, they had the best seats in the house, and so they lingered and heard as much as they could then went about their business. So what if a man maries an older woman for her money, what impoverished young Roman in his right mind wouldn’t do that? And sure too, if some man comes to take your inheritance, even if he’s your best friend, even if he takes good care of your mother, you’d be a fool not to sue him to the Council, even if you’d have to accuse him falsely of black magic. That’s the beauty of it, or rather, whoever is going to win will have to make us trust beauty, that things being already right, can be more right, which is what “beautiful” really means. And what better way, to take in all this refinement than hearing it in a latrine where only beauty shields you from the awful stuff of life. 8. Marcus Aurelius, the men at the shore follow your path into eternity, though they already see their journey as a quarrel with circumstance, their lives abscesses feeding on the universe’s hide, tumors in detention camps, in basement kitchens. Their pockets filled with drachmas, they’ll lift diffident heads and drag feet lead-heavy with shame. One of them is now driving a taxi in Thessaloniki or Perugia. With enough of the language to understand direction, he engages his late night passengers. In the light of the dashboard they’ll entrust him with their secrets. With time, he’ll become a light unto himself, his car a winged chariot of human folly, and his responses to them saplings nourished in the dark soil of philosophy. It’s the gift of seasons that stray from the earth, when soul reigns incidental to flesh, forgiving to no end, a light that has long surpassed itself. 9. The birds that drew the line to the first distance remain nameless to me— creamy white breasts, gold dust around their eyes, black/brown (dark roast) wings. The deserts they crossed, the plains east or north of here fall like sand from my hands.Um Bsisi, I want to call them, citizens of a protracted destiny, native and stranger, prodigal and peasant— admit now, they you’re none of these, that you’re not any, or even all of them combined. 10. Southwest of here is Apuleius’s hometown, his inescapable destination having spent his inheritance on travel and studies. “Lacking the poverty of the rich,” he’s splurged, a month-long trip to the Olympic games; and openhanded, he gifted his mentors their daughters’ doweries. Few return to Madaura once gone, and when heading back shamefaced like him, they’d do as he did, taking the longest route hoping the journey would never end. Here in Sabratha, the widow hooked him, or he let her reel him, and that’s how that sordid business happily ended as it began. I look out toward Madaura, my back to the theater and the latrines, Madaura birthplace of Augustine, site of his first schooling—little Augustine holding a satchel of scrolls and a loaf of bread for the teacher, awakened by his mother, his tiny feet cold in tiny sandals, his stomach warm with a barley porridge my grandmother used to make, forced to slurp it, sweetened with honey from the Atlas, a sprinkling of cinnamon and crushed almonds from the family farm. If the world is that sweet and warm, if it is that mothering, why then this perpetual scene of separation, this turning out into the cold toward something he knew he’d love? He lets go of the neighbors’ boy’s hand warming his own. He refuses the warm porridge forever, renounces his mother’s embrace. It only lasted a month, this partial answer, because even then everyone knew that the sweet fruit they grew housed the bitterest seeds, that piety is its own reward while belief only darkens and deepens like the sea before them, a place meant for those seeking life other than on this dry earth. That’s why prophets were welcomed here, calmly, because God was like rain and they like the saplings which know only the first verse to the sky’s rainless hymn. And that’s why Africa’s tallest minaret looms unfinished, visible from the next town over, and for fifty leagues from the sea if it were turned into a lighthouse for the ships that no longer come. The merchant who’d built it, money made from smuggling subsidized goods to Carthage and used Renaults from Rotterdam, ran out of money, could not afford the mosque that was to stand next to it, leaving its gray concrete bleaching in the sun. There’s enough history here to enable anyone to finish the thought. It’s useless then to track the fate of these travelers, some, without life jackets, had never learned how to swim. Why not let them live in text as they do in life?—they’ve lived without words for so long—why not release them from the pen’s anchor and let them drift to their completion? 11. In a few weeks you’ll see pedants here with binoculars trying to catch a glimpse of the Ramadan crescent, and if these migrants stick around here time will belong to the departure of other travelers, flocks of Um Bsisi follwing the sun’s arch, Japanese and Korean trawlers sailing to Gibraltar or Suez chasing the last herring or sardine. Where is she now in her time?— her life dissolved in other people’s minutes, a sense of solitude her diligent companion even when she lets go of herself to kindness. He’ll be there when she returns from the party, he’ll lie beside her when she sleeps. He’ll say, “Time belongs to the species, but your life belongs to me.” She’ll laugh at his words, and remember what you, Marcus Aurelius, had said about losing only the moment at hand, how it circles in a ring of dead nerves, how we stand impoverished before what is to come. She’ll have her answer to your elocution; she’d always had an answer for you, one she refuses to share even with herself. 12. At last they set to sail. They slaughter a rooster, douse blood on the Dido figurehead adorning the prow. The seadog opens a canvas bag and pulls out a hookah. His Egyptian assistant fills the smoke chamber with seawater, twists the brass head into it, caking the slit with sand. He fills the clay bowl with apple-flavored tobacco, wraps it with foil, pokes it tenderly with a knife. He picks embers from the going fire, places a few on the aluminum crown, and inhales and blows until the bottom vessel fills with a pearly fog, the color of semen, I think, then hands the pipe hose to the seadog who inhales his fill and hands it over to the travelers in turn. The air smells sweet around us, the breeze blows it away and brings it back tinged with iodine. Their communion done, they embark except the one who stands, the dead rooster in his hand, as if wanting to entrust it to us, then digs a hurried hole to bury it in. The boat, barely visible, leaves a leaden lacey ribbon aiming directly for the burnt orange sun. As it reddens, for a moment, their standing silhouettes eclipse it. Then the sea restores its dominion, dark as the coffee cooling in our cups. Dangling from the vine arbor, the lights reflect a constellation on the table’s dark top. I trace my fingers among them, hoping conjecture would shine on the mind’s calculus. Between my unquiet eddies, Marcus Aurelius, and the coursing water, the travelers’ moment sails, its tentacles sewing a rupture I had nursed for too long.

Khaled Mattawa

Living,Coming of Age,Growing Old,Midlife,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity,Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism

Rain

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain. Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain. Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name. No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain. The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written: “Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.” The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face. The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain. I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled. If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain. I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me. The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.

Kazim Ali

Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Desire,Unrequited Love,Nature,Weather

The First Sam Hazo at the Last

A minor brush with medicine in eighty years was all he’d known. But this was different. His right arm limp and slung, his right leg dead to feeling and response, he let me spoon him chicken-broth. Later he said without self-pity that he’d like to die. I bluffed, “The doctors think that therapy might help you walk again.” “They’re liars, all of them,” he muttered. Bedfast was never how he hoped to go. “In bed you think of everything,” he whispered with a shrug, “you think of all your life.” I knew he meant my mother. Without her he was never what he might have been, and everyone who knew him knew it. Nothing could take her place— not the cars he loved to drive, not the money he could earn at will, not the roads he knew by heart from Florida to Saranac, not the two replacement wives who never measured up. Fed now by family or strangers, carried to the john, shaved and changed by hired help, this independent man turned silent at the end. Only my wife could reach him for his private needs. What no one else could do for him, he let her do. She talked to him and held his hand, the left. She helped him bless himself and prayed beside him as my mother might have done. “Darling” was his final word for her. Softly, in Arabic.

Samuel Hazo

Living,Death,Growing Old,Health & Illness,Parenthood,Sorrow & Grieving,Love,Heartache & Loss,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

The Pampering of Leora

Therefore, no more recounting of dreams, a routine thing that bores with expectations of invention, unfiltered non sequiturs, unusual embraces only from the practiced young woman who everyday remembers being a bride, she is changing behind that white curtain Leora fifteen again experiencing prematurely the pure suckling of a baby fifteen with a virgin desire for pure suckling something to do with jasmine with jasmine tea existing only without accident It blooms while Leora sleeps when she sleeps at night and it is also dark for the jasmine four hours of tea sucking on blossoms, Cestrum nocturnum like colostrums: the earliest secretions, and then only milk from mother —there it is seven times over jasmine bath after jasmine bath till the tea can get no better highest grade as stasis all As gets so boring, ka-put to the test of innovation all the right answers Leora sees herself mermaid, eel, tiger fish from waist down form-fitting skirt of winks under that bonefish or ladyfish profile: tail fins already split, caught in transition from legs to fin hybrid mutant bastard mestizo mulatto masala mule mix mutt hm/bm/mmmmm watered down (jasmine bath tea) spiked (jasmine bath tea) stands taller on tips of split tail fin ps: pastiche, salmagundi when all dressed up Leg and fin share custody so young men sacrifice only below the belt to please her many wounded soldiers her company From now on storming the beaches rocks already aftermath, the breaking of dozens of sphinxes the taming of sandstone lions and griffins, gargoyles Leora takes to breast anything capable of sucking and being filled, no ban on leeches and vipers that stick out like misplaced overdeveloped hairs and while in position, her free hand shaves the heads of Medusa’s children screaming for more nursing with her eyes closed, her free handy blade, sharpened life line The liquids of history therefore tend to ferment; the beverages for walks down memory lane therefore become pungent cheeses and wines, the odes to bitterness and sweetness happen. This is also desirable. Taste depends on how the glass tilts, how tongue curls. What’s difficult is maintaining gaps as gaps. A sustainable nothingness. But something enters. Sustainable nothingness looks like a niche. Ghosts and spirits of what’s been lost. A young woman looks over her shoulder. Close watching of what’s fading does not mean the change from substance to spirit would be observed. On the tippy-tips of split tail fin looking over her shoulder a long line for the nurse, exceptional business, nonstop nursing and the milk won’t stop, years are at the end of the line. Pull the plug on a nearby respirator (how on earth?) (don’t assume location, location, location) the substance travels the line joins the community of electricity, colonies of gigantic storms on the sun and appearances in auroras that the mermaid sits under as under any canopy nonstop The spell of the tide tailored to make the one falling under its influence fall more willingly. It feels nothing like falling at all: Leora describes rehabilitation Sand sparkles remembering having been alive only once Leora’s eyes sparkle upon contact with crabs and their incredible redness that ought to teach her something about fire she does not know with top-heavy ways of knowing (the brain should travel the stations of the body, and one day the eyes and navel, when the eyes accompany the brain, line up in a row) —then a real reason for revisionDream on Accordingly, pureness of the situation milks its own purity Fantastic and looks disgusting (no matter where the eyes are—candidate for truth) but purity is still pure following such a milking The mermaid’s pregnancy has to be called immaculate after repeated searches for the limits. Lost without those. Pure. Last resort and best explanation for birth of a human baby from a mermaid without a human pelvis or womb. The best xrays cannot find them. Machines arrive on the beach and leave defective. Leora continues nursing her baby first in line The milk is pure. It does not need to be pasteurized. Makes (empty) no one ill. Nothing in it allows allergies. The chemistry (empty) of the milk is pure. (empty) The molecules of the tabernacle of purity. (as if they are empty) (nothing is right here) Law Flattened out they are like flattened tetrahedrons, probably are smashed pendulums now Leora blessed with impossibility of the usual kind of rape her own brand jasmine bath after jasmine bath without legs she does as much sitting as anyone who ever sat on a throne wheelchairs keep evolving

Thylias Moss

Living,Infancy,Parenthood,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Men & Women,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality,Race & Ethnicity,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

Tomato Pies, 25 Cents

Tomato pies are what we called them, those days,before Pizza came in, at my Grandmother’s restaurant, in Trenton New Jersey.My grandfather is rolling meatballs in the back. He studied to be a priest in Sicily but saved his sister Maggie from marrying a bad guy by coming to America. Uncle Joey is rolling dough and spooning sauce. Uncle Joey, is always scrubbed clean, sobered up, in a white starched shirt, after cops delivered him home just hours before. The waitresses are helping themselves to handfuls of cash out of the drawer, playing the numbers with Moon Mullin and Shad, sent in from Broad Street. 1942, tomato pies with cheese, 25 cents. With anchovies, large, 50 cents. A whole dinner is 60 cents (before 6 pm). How the soldiers, bussed in from Fort Dix, would stand outside all the way down Warren Street, waiting for this new taste treat, young guys in uniform, lined up and laughing, learning Italian, before being shipped out to fight the last great war.

Grace Cavalieri

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

The Rooster

Crows and struts. He’s got feathers! He’s got guts! Oh, the rooster struts and crows. What’s he thinking? No one knows.

David Elliott

Anatomy Class

The chair has arms. The clock, a face. The kites have long and twirly tails. The tacks have heads. The books have spines. The toolbox has a set of nails. Our shoes have tongues, the marbles, eyes. The wooden desk has legs and seat. The cups have lips. My watch has hands. The classroom rulers all have feet.Heads, arms hands, nails, spines, legs, feet, tails, face, lips, tongues, eyes.

Betsy Franco

For My Wife Cutting My Hair

You move around me expertly like the good, round Italian barber I went to in Florence, years before we met, his scissors a razor he sharpened on a belt.But at first when you were learning, I feared for my neck, saw my ears like sliced fruit on the newspapered floor. Taking us back in time, you cleverly clipped my head in a flat-top.The years in between were styles no one had ever seen, or should see again: when the wind rose half my hair floated off in feathers, the other half bristling, brief as a brush.In the chair, almost asleep, I hear the bright scissors dancing. Hear you hum, full-breasted as Aida, carefully trimming the white from my temples, so no one, not even I, will know.

Bruce Guernsey

Living,Growing Old,Midlife,The Body,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Men & Women

Watch Your Step

It's a bug's world of intrigue and mystery, with humans a blip in their history. So when insects flitter and scurry past us Take note, because they may outlast us!

Leslie Bulion

Monday, September 25, 2006

--The former President lost his temper. Loss of content in our public life. Only forms remain, intonation, affect. Why did you yell in my mom’s house? Radhika asks our neighbor. --She sounded like she does when her hands shake. She does not want to be there. Bryant calls to ask about her things. A tape on osteoperosis. No. Foundations of Economics (from the 1930s). No. The Soviet shelf. No. The Nazi shelf. No. The Greeks, the Moslems. No. The speech and drama shelf. No. Encyclopedias, no. Check reigsters back to 1964. No. Harry Truman, no. Mrs. Ike, no. --Was her reading too intense? --Grief is excess of sound. Anger is excess of form. Sadness can lack, or still exceed. Excess is overtone, the note beyond the note you sound. Without the tone, there is no object. Did I kill Bin Laden? No. But I tried. --My task is to inventory sentences, place them in order, box them up and ship them in a container. They are a sturdy furniture, haphazard art. They are boxes of papers, bills, pieces of a dissertation. A computer shopper magazine (discard). Titles whose aura was a life, or two, or three. The house is now full of light. A girl wanders through the rooms, trying keys at the windows. My mother knows none of this. --My father might be in the garden, or the scarecrow that wears his hat. Let him wander the house this last, inspect the plumbing, lights, air conditioning, the rows of beans, sort through medals, papers, release them as excess. posted by Susan at 12:44 PM 0 comments

Susan M. Schultz

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Wildpeace

Not the peace of a cease-fire,not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,but ratheras in the heart when the excitement is overand you can talk only about a great weariness.I know that I know how to kill,that makes me an adult.And my son plays with a toy gun that knowshow to open and close its eyes and say Mama.A peace without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,without words, withoutthe thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it belight, floating, like lazy white foam.A little rest for the wounds—who speaks of healing?(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generationto the next, as in a relay race:the baton never falls.)Let it come like wildflowers,suddenly, because the fieldmust have it: wildpeace.

Yehuda Amichai

Living,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Jerusalem

“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed. Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.” —Tommy Olofsson, Sweden I’m not interested in who suffered the most. I’m interested in people getting over it. Once when my father was a boy a stone hit him on the head. Hair would never grow there. Our fingers found the tender spot and its riddle: the boy who has fallen stands up. A bucket of pears in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home. The pears are not crying. Later his friend who threw the stone says he was aiming at a bird. And my father starts growing wings. Each carries a tender spot: something our lives forgot to give us. A man builds a house and says, “I am native now.” A woman speaks to a tree in place of her son. And olives come. A child’s poem says, “I don’t like wars, they end up with monuments.” He’s painting a bird with wings wide enough to cover two roofs at once. Why are we so monumentally slow? Soldiers stalk a pharmacy: big guns, little pills. If you tilt your head just slightly it’s ridiculous. There’s a place in my brain where hate won’t grow. I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds. Something pokes us as we sleep. It’s late but everything comes next.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Living,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Erstwhile Harbinger Auspices

Erstwhile means long time gone. A harbinger is sent before to help, and also a sign of things to come. Like this blue stapler I bought at Staples. Did you know in ancient Rome priests called augurs studied the future by carefully watching whether birds were flying together or alone, making what honking or beeping noises in what directions? It was called the auspices. The air was thus a huge announcement. Today it’s completely transparent, a vase. Inside it flowers flower. Thus a little death scent. I have no master but always wonder, what is making my master sad? Maybe I do not know him. This morning I made extra coffee for the beloved and covered the cup with a saucer. Skeleton I thought, and stay very still, whatever it was will soon pass by and be gone.

Matthew Zapruder

Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Schwinn

I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts, and I’d like to quit the committee for naming tornadoes. Do you remember how easy and sad it was to be young and defined by our bicycles? My first was yellow, and though it was no Black Phantom or Sting-Ray but merely a Varsity I loved the afternoon it was suddenly gone, chasing its apian flash through the neighborhoods with my father in vain. Like being a nuclear family in a television show totally unaffected by a distant war. Then we returned to the green living room to watch the No Names hold our Over the Hill Gang under the monotinted chromatic defeated Super Bowl waters. 1973, year of the Black Fly caught in my Jell-O. Year of the Suffrage Building on K Street NW where a few minor law firms mingle proudly with the Union of Butchers and Meat Cutters. A black hand already visits my father in sleep, moving up his spine to touch his amygdala. I will never know a single thing anyone feels, just how they say it, which is why I am standing here exactly, covered in shame and lightning, doing what I’m supposed to do.

Matthew Zapruder

Living,Coming of Age,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

As I Cross the Heliopause at Midnight, I Think of My Mission

Drunker than Voyager I but not as Voyager 2 I rode my blue bike back through the darkness to my lonely geode cave of light awaiting nothing under the punctured dome. I had achieved escape velocity drinking clear liquid starlight at the Thunderbird with a fingerless Russian hedge fund inspector and one who called himself The Champ. All night I felt fine crystals cutting my lips like rising up through a hailstorm. And the great vacuum cleaner that cannot be filled moved through my chest, gathering conversation dust and discharging it through my borehole. During one of many silences The Champ took off his face and thus were many gears to much metallic laughter revealed. Long ago I forgot the word which used to mean in truth but now expresses disbelief. So quickly did my future come. You who are floating past me on your inward way, please inform those glowing faces who first gave me this shove I have managed to rotate my brilliant golden array despite their instructions.

Matthew Zapruder

Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens

April Snow

Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred waitress who wears typewriter keys as a necklace. They jingle when she brings them drinks. Outside the giant plate glass windows the planes are completely covered in snow, it piles up on the wings. I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. Each of the various faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don’t want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings. I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.

Matthew Zapruder

Living,The Mind,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Spring,Weather,Social Commentaries

Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower

In his life he neither wrote nor read. In his life he didn’t cut down a single tree, didn’t slit the throat of a single calf. In his life he did not speak of the New York Times behind its back, didn’t raise his voice to a soul except in his saying: “Come in, please, by God, you can’t refuse.” — Nevertheless— his case is hopeless, his situation desperate. His God-given rights are a grain of salt tossed into the sea. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: about his enemies my client knows not a thing. And I can assure you, were he to encounter the entire crew of the aircraft carrier Enterprise, he’d serve them eggs sunny-side up, and labneh fresh from the bag.

Taha Muhammad Ali

Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,History & Politics

Exodus

The street is empty as a monk’s memory, and faces explode in the flames like acorns— and the dead crowd the horizon and doorways. No vein can bleed more than it already has, no scream will rise higher than it’s already risen. We will not leave! Everyone outside is waiting for the trucks and the cars loaded with honey and hostages. We will not leave! The shields of light are breaking apart before the rout and the siege; outside, everyone wants us to leave. But we will not leave! Ivory white brides behind their veils slowly walk in captivity’s glare, waiting, and everyone outside wants us to leave, but we will not leave! The big guns pound the jujube groves, destroying the dreams of the violets, extinguishing bread, killing the salt, unleashing thirst and parching lips and souls. And everyone outside is saying: “What are we waiting for? Warmth we’re denied, the air itself has been seized! Why aren’t we leaving?” Masks fill the pulpits and brothels, the places of ablution. Masks cross-eyed with utter amazement; they do not believe what is now so clear, and fall, astonished, writhing like worms, or tongues. We will not leave! Are we in the inside only to leave? Leaving is just for the masks, for pulpits and conventions. Leaving is just for the siege-that-comes-from-within, the siege that comes from the Bedouin’s loins, the siege of the brethren tarnished by the taste of the blade and the stink of crows. We will not leave! Outside they’re blocking the exits and offering their blessings to the impostor, praying, petitioning Almighty God for our deaths. 5.11.1983

Taha Muhammad Ali

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Religion,God & the Divine,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Meeting at an Airport

You asked me once, on our way back from the midmorning trip to the spring: “What do you hate, and who do you love?” And I answered, from behind the eyelashes of my surprise, my blood rushing like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings: “I hate departure . . . I love the spring and the path to the spring, and I worship the middle hours of morning.” And you laughed . . . and the almond tree blossomed and the thicket grew loud with nightingales. . . . A question now four decades old: I salute that question’s answer; and an answer as old as your departure; I salute that answer’s question . . . And today, it’s preposterous, here we are at a friendly airport by the slimmest of chances, and we meet. Ah, Lord! we meet. And here you are asking—again, it’s absolutely preposterous— I recognized you but you didn’t recognize me. “Is it you?!” But you wouldn’t believe it. And suddenly you burst out and asked: “If you’re really you, What do you hate and who do you love?!” And I answered— my blood fleeing the hall, rushing in me like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings: “I hate departure, and I love the spring, and the path to the spring, and I worship the middle hours of morning.” And you wept, and flowers bowed their heads, and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.

Taha Muhammad Ali

Love,Relationships,Nature,Trees & Flowers

The New Intelligence

After knowledge extinguished the last of the beautiful fires our worship had failed to prolong, we walked back home through pedestrian daylight, to a residence humbler than the one left behind. A door without mystery, a room without theme. For the hour that we spend complacent at the window overlooking the garden, we observe an arrangement in rust and gray-green, a vagueness at the center whose slow, persistent movements some sentence might explain if we had time or strength for sentences. To admit that what falls falls solitarily, lost in the permanent dusk of the particular. That the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten comes to boss the world around it, morbid as the damp- fingered guest who rearranges the cheeses the minute the host turns to fix her a cocktail. A disease of the will, the way false birch branches arch and interlace from which hands dangle last leaf-parchments and a very large array of primitive bird-shapes. Their pasted feathers shake in the aftermath of the nothing we will ever be content to leave the way we found it. I love that about you. I love that when I call you on the long drab days practicality keeps one of us away from the other that I am calling a person so beautiful to me that she has seen my awkwardness on the actual sidewalk but she still answers anyway. I say that when I fell you fell beside me and the concrete refused to apologize. That a sparrow sat for a spell on the windowsill today to communicate the new intelligence. That the goal of objectivity depends upon one’s faith in the accuracy of one’s perceptions, which is to say a confidence in the purity of the perceiving instrument. I won’t be dying after all, not now, but will go on living dizzily hereafter in reality, half-deaf to reality, in the room perfumed by the fire that our inextinguishable will begins.

Timothy Donnelly

Living,Relationships

The Cloud Corporation

1 The clouds part revealing a mythology of clouds assembled in light of earliest birds, an originary text over water over time, and that without which the clouds part revealing an apology for clouds implicit in the air where the clouds had been recently witnessed rehearsing departure, a heartfelt phrase in the push of the airborne drops and crystals over water over time—how being made to think oneself an obstruction between the observer and the object or objects under surveillance or even desired—or if I am felt to be beside the point then I have wanted that, but to block a path is like not being immaterial enough, or being too much when all they want from you now is your station cleared of its personal effects please and vanish— not that they’d ever just come out and say it when all that darting around of the eyes, all that shaky camouflage of paper could only portend the beginning of the end of your tenure at this organization, and remember a capacity to draw meaning out of such seeming accidence landed one here to begin with, didn’t it. 2 The clouds part revealing an anatomy of clouds viewed from the midst of human speculation, a business project undertaken in a bid to acquire and retain control of the formation and movement of clouds. As late afternoons I have witnessed the distant towers borrow luster from a bourbon sun, in-box empty, surround sound on, all my money made in lieu of conversation—where conversation indicates the presence of desire in the parties to embark on exchange of spirit, hours forzando with heartfelt phrase— made metaphor for it, the face on the clock tower bright as a meteor, as if a torch were held against likelihood to illuminate the time so I could watch the calm silent progress of its hands from the luxury appointments of my office suite, the tumult below or behind me out of mind, had not my whole attention been riveted by the human figure stood upon the tower’s topmost pinnacle, himself surveying the clouds of the future parting in antiquity, a figure not to be mistaken, tranquilly pacing a platform with authority: the chief executive officer of clouds. 3 The clouds part revealing blueprints of the clouds built in glass-front factories carved into cliff-faces which, prior to the factories’ recent construction, provided dorms for clans of hamadryas baboons, a species revered in ancient Egypt as attendants of Thoth, god of wisdom, science, and measurement. Fans conveying clouds through aluminum ducts can be heard from up to a mile away, depending on air temperature, humidity, the absence or presence of any competing sound, its origin and its character. It is no more impossible to grasp the baboon’s full significance in Egyptian religious symbolism than it is to determine why clouds we manufacture provoke in an audience more positive, lasting response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature. Even those who consider natural clouds products of conscious manufacture seem to prefer that a merely human mind lie behind the products they admire. This development may be a form of self-exalting or else another adaptation in order that we find the hum of machinery comforting through darkness. 4 The clouds part revealing there’s no place left to sit myself down except for a single wingback chair backed into a corner to face the window in which the clouds part revealing the insouciance of clouds cavorting over the backs of the people in the field who cut the ripened barley, who gather it in sheaves, who beat grain from the sheaves with wooden flails, who shake it loose from the scaly husk around it, who throw the now threshed grain up into the gently palm-fanned air whose steady current carries off the chaff as the grain falls to the floor, who collect the grain from the floor painstakingly to grind it into flour, who bake the flour into loaves the priest will offer in the sanctuary, its walls washed white like milk. To perform it repeatedly, to perform it each time as if the first, to walk the dim corridor believing that the conference it leads to might change everything, to adhere to a possibility of reward, of betterment, of moving above, with effort, the condition into which one has been born, to whom do I owe the pleasure of the hum to which I have been listening too long. 5 The clouds part revealing the advocates of clouds, believers in people, ideas and things, the workers of the united fields of clouds, supporters of the wars to keep clouds safe, the devotees of heartfelt phrase and belief you can change with water over time. It is the habit of a settled population to give ear to whatever is desirable will come to pass, a caressing confidence—but one unfortunately not borne out by human experience, for most things people desire have been desired ardently for thousands of years and observe—they are no closer to realization today than in Ramses’ time. Nor is there cause to believe they will lose their coyness on some near tomorrow. Attempts to speed them on have been undertaken from the beginning; plans to force them overnight are in copious, antagonistic operation today, and yet they have thoroughly eluded us, and chances are they will continue to elude us until the clouds part in a flash of autonomous, ardent, local brainwork— but when the clouds start to knit back together again, we’ll dismiss the event as a glitch in transmission. 6 The clouds part revealing a congregation of bodies united into one immaterial body, a fictive person around whom the air is blurred with money, force from which much harm will come, to whom my welfare matters nothing. I sense without turning the light from their wings, their eyes; they preen themselves on the fire escape, the windowsill, their pink feet vulnerable—a mistake to think of them that way. If I turn around, the room might not be full of wings capable of acting, in many respects, as a single being, which is to say that I myself may be the source of what I sense, but am no less powerless to change it. Always around me, on my body, in my mouth, I fear them and their love of money, everything I do without thinking to help them make it. And if I am felt to be beside the point, I have wanted that, to live apart from what depends on killing me a little bit to keep itself alive, and yet not happily, with all its needs and comforts met, but fattened so far past that point I am engrossed, and if I picture myself outside of it it isn’t me anymore, but a parasite cast out, inviable. 7 The clouds part revealing the distinction between words without meaning and meaning without words, a phenomenon of nature, the westbound field of low air pressure developing over water over time and warm, saturated air on the sea surface rising steadily replaced by cold air from above, the cycle repeating, the warm moving upward into massive thunderclouds, the cold descending into the eye around which bands of thunderclouds spiral, counter- clockwise, often in the hundreds, the atmospheric pressure dropping even further, making winds accelerate, the clouds revolve, a confusion of energy, an incomprehensible volume of rain—I remember the trick of thinking through infinity, a crowd of eyes against an asphalt wall, my vision of it scrolling left as the crowd thinned out to a spatter and then just black until I fall asleep and then just black again, past marketing, past focus groups, past human resources, past management, past personal effects, their insignificance evident in the eye of the dream and through much of the debriefing I wake into next.

Timothy Donnelly

Living,The Body,The Mind,Activities,Jobs & Working,Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens,Weather,Religion,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Popular Culture

To His Own Device

That figure in the cellarage you hear upsetting boxes is an antic of the mind, a baroque imp cobbled up under bulbs whose flickering perplexes night’s impecunious craftsman, making what he makes turn out irregular, awry, every effort botched in its own wrong way. You belong, I said, laid out chalk- white between a layer of tautened cotton gauze and another of the selfsame rubbish that you are wreaking havoc on tonight—and it didn’t disagree. What’s more, I said, you are amiss in this ad hoc quest for origin and purpose. Whatever destiny it is you are meant to aspire to before you retire to that soup-bowl of oblivion such figments as we expect to find final rest in couldn’t possibly be contained in these boxes. And again—no contest. And when I was in need, I said, you raveled off in the long-winded ploys of a winless October, unfaithful to the one whose instincts had devised you . . . —At this, the figure dropped the box from its hands, turned down a dock I remembered and wept. I followed it down there, sat beside it and wept. Looking out on the water in time we came to see being itself had made things fall apart this way. We envied the simplicity implicit in sea-sponges and similar marine life, their resistance to changes across millennia we took to be deliberate, an art practiced untheatrically beneath the water’s surface. We admired the example the whole sea set, actually. Maritime pauses flew like gulls in our exchanges. We wondered that much longer before we had left.

Timothy Donnelly

Relationships,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics

Globus Hystericus

1 A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect massive factories of its own, their virulent pollutants havocking loved waterways, frothing all the reed- fringed margins acid pink and gathering in the shell and soft tissues of the snails unknowingly in danger as they inch up stems. Through the bulkhead door I can hear their spirals plunk into the sluggish south- bound current and dissolve therein with such brutal regularity their dying has given rise to the custom of measuring time here in a unit known as the snailsdeath. The snailsdeath refers to the average length of time, about 43 seconds, elapsing between the loss of the first snail to toxic waters and the loss of the next, roughly equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human throat, while the adverb here refers to my person and all its outskirts, beginning on the so-called cellular level extending more of less undaunted all the way down to the vale at the foot of the bed. I often fear I’ll wake to find you waiting there and won’t know how to speak on the subject of my production, or rather my woeful lack thereof, but in your absence, once again, I will begin drafting apologies in a language ineffectual as doves. 2 Daybreak on my marshland: a single egret, blotched, trudges through the froth. I take its photograph from the rooftop observation deck from which I watch day’s delivery trucks advance. I take advantage of the quiet before their arrival to organize my thoughts on the paranormal thusly: (1) If the human psyche has proven spirited enough to produce such a range of material effects upon what we’ll call the closed system of its custodial body, indeed if it’s expected to, and (2) If such effects might be thought to constitute the physical expression of that psyche, an emanation willed into matter in a manner not unlike a brand- new car or cream-filled cake or disposable camera, and (3) If the system of the body can be swapped out for another, maybe an abandoned factory or a vale, then might it not also prove possible for the psyche by aptitude or lather or sheer circumstance to impress its thumbprint on some other system, a production in the basement, or in a video store, as when I find you inching up steps or down a shady aisle or pathway, dragging your long chains behind you most morosely if you ask me, the question is: Did you choose this, or was it imposed on you, but even as I ask your hands move wildly about your throat to indicate you cannot speak. 3 After the memory of the trucks withdrawing heavy with their cargo fans out and fades into late-morning hunger, I relocate in time to the lit bank of vending machines still humming in the staff-room corner for a light meal of cheese curls, orange soda, and what history will come to mourn as the last two cream-filled cakes. Eating in silence, a breeze in the half-light, absently thinking of trying not to think, I imagine the Bethlehem steel smokestacks above me piping nonstop, the sky wide open without any question, steam and dioxides of carbon and sulfur, hands pressed to the wall as I walk down the corridor to stop myself from falling awake again on the floor in embarrassment. If there’s any use of imagination more productive or time less painful it hasn’t tried hard enough to push through to find me wandering the wings of a ghost-run factory as Earth approaches the dark vale cut in the heart of the galaxy. Taking shots of the sunbaked fields of putrefaction visible from the observation deck. Hoping to capture what I can point to as the way it feels. Sensing my hand in what I push away. Watching it dissolve into plumes rising like aerosols, or like ghosts of indigenous peoples, or the lump in the throat to keep me from saying that surviving almost everything has felt like having killed it. 4 (Plunk) Up from the floor with the sun to the sound of dawn’s first sacrifice to the residues of commerce. On autofog, on disbelief: rejuvenation in a boxer brief crashed three miles wide in the waves off Madagascar, cause of great flooding in the Bible and in Gilgamesh. Massive sphere of rock and ice, of all events in history (Plunk) thought to be the lethalmost. A snailsdeath semiquavers from pang to ghost where the habit of ghosts of inhabiting timepieces, of conniving their phantom tendrils through parlor air and into the escapements of some inoperative heirloom clock on a mantel shows not the dead’s ongoing interest in their old adversary (Plunk) time so much as an urge to return to the hard mechanical kind of being. An erotic lounging to reanimate the long-inert pendulum. As I have felt you banging nights in my machine, jostling the salt from a pretzel. This passion for the material realm after death however refuses to be reconciled with a willingness to destroy (Plunk) it while alive. When the last of the human voices told me what I had to do, they rattled off a shopping list of artifacts they wanted thrown down open throats. That left me feeling in on it, chosen, a real fun-time guy albeit somewhat sleep-deprived; detail-oriented, modern, yes, but also dubious, maudlin, bedridden, speechless. 5 Graffiti on the stonework around the service entrance makes the doorway at night look like the mystagogic mouth of a big beast, amphibious, outfitted with fangs, snout, the suggestion of a tongue, throat, and alimentary canal leading to a complex of caves, tunnels, temples . . . There are rooms I won’t enter, at whose threshold I say this is as far as I go, no farther, almost as if I can sense there’s something in there I don’t want to see, or for which to see means having wanted already to forget, unless stepping into the mouth at last, pressed into its damp, the advantage of not knowing is swapped out for the loss of apartness from what you’d held unknown, meaning you don’t come to know it so much as become it, wholly warping into its absorbent fold. I can’t let that happen if it hasn’t already. What draws me on might be thought canine, keen-sighted, but it’s still incapable of divining why the constant hum around or inside me has to choose among being a nocturne of toxic manufacture, the call of what remains of the jungle, or else just another prank on my gullible anatomy. Am I not beset in the utmost basement of industry? Is that basement itself not beset by the broad, black-green, waxy leaves of Mesoamerica? And haven’t I parted those selfsame leaves, discovering me asleep on my own weapon, threat to no one but myself? 6 Asked again what I miss the most about my former life, I remember to pause this time, look left, a little off-camera an entire snailsdeath, an air of sifting the possibilities, I eliminate certain objects and events from the running right off the bat, such as when their great displeasure brought the gods to turn to darkness all that had been light, submerging mountaintops in stormwater, the gods shocked by their own power, and heartsick to watch their once dear people stippling the surf like little fishes. Or when the flaming peccary of a comet struck the earth with much the same effect, waves as high as ziggurats crashing mathematically against our coastlines, scalding plumes of vapor and aerosols tossed into the atmosphere spawning storms to pummel the far side of the earth, approximately 80 percent of all life vanished in a week. Or when we squandered that very earth and shat on it with much the same effect, and more or less on purpose, emitting nonstop gases in the flow of our production, shoveling it in as ancient icecaps melted, what difference could another make now. And so I clear my throat, look directly into the camera, and even though it will make me come off bovine in their eyes, I say that what I miss the most has to be those cream-filled cakes I used to like, but then they prod me with their volts and lead me back to the barn. 7 After the panic grew more of less customary, the pity dissolved into a mobile fogbank, dense, reducing visibility from the rooftop observation deck. Mobile in the sense that it possessed mobility, not in the sense that it actually moved. Because it didn’t. It just stayed there, reducing visibility but not in the sense that it simply diminished it or diminished it partly. Because it didn’t. It pretty much managed to do away with it altogether, as my photography will come to show: field after field of untouched white. After the possibility of change grew funny, threadbare, too embarrassing to be with, I eased into the knowledge that you’d never appear at the foot of the bed, the vale turned into a lifetime’s heap of laundry, and not the gentle tuffets and streambanks of an afterlife it seems we only imagined remembering, that watercolor done in greens and about which I predicted its monotony of fair weather over time might deaden one all over again, unless being changed with death means not only changing past change but past even the wish for it. I worried to aspire towards that condition might actually dull one’s aptitude for change. That I would grow to protect what I wished to keep from change at the cost of perpetuating much that required it. In this sense I had come to resemble the fogbank, at once given to motion but no less motionless than its photograph. The last time I saw myself alive, I drew the curtain back from the bed, stood by my sleeping body. I felt tenderness towards it. I knew how long it had waited, and how little time remained for it to prepare its bundle of grave-goods. When I tried to speak, rather than my voice, my mouth released the tight, distinctive shriek of an aerophone of clay. I wanted to stop the shock of that from taking away from what I felt. I couldn’t quite manage it. Even at this late hour, even here, the purity of a feeling is ruined by the world. 8 The noises from the basement were not auspicious noises. I wanted to live forever. I wanted to live forever and die right then and there. I had heard the tight, distinctive shriek. Here again and now. I no longer have legs. I am sleeping. Long tendrils of tobacco smoke, composed of carbon dioxide, water vapor, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, hydrogen cyanide, and 4,000 other chemical compounds, penetrate the room through the gap beneath the door and through heating vents with confidence. They are the spectral forms of anaconda. The ruler of the underworld smokes cigars. A certain brand. Hand-rolled. He smiles as if there is much to smile about. And there is. He is hollow-eyed, toothless. His hat, infamous: broad-brimmed, embellished with feathers, a live macaw. His cape is depicted, often, as a length of fabric in distinctive black and white chevrons. Otherwise, as here, the full pelt of a jaguar. On a barge of plywood and empty milk cartons he trudges through the froth. He is the lord of black sorcery and lord of percussion. He is patron of commerce. He parts the leaves of Mesoamerica, traveling with a retinue of drunken ax wielders, collection agents. His scribe is a white rabbit. Daughter of moon and of night. Elsewhere, you are having your teeth taken out. There is no music left, but I still feel held captive by the cinema, and in its custom, I believe myself capable of protecting myself by hiding my face in my hands.

Timothy Donnelly

Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences

Making a Fist

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. —

Naomi Shihab Nye

Living,Death,The Body,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Philosophy,Funerals

The Thrift Shop Dresses

I slid the white louvers shut so I could stand in your closet a little while among the throng of flowered dresses you hadn’t worn in years, and touch the creases on each of their sleeves that smelled of forgivenessand even though you would still be alive a few more days I knew they were ready to let themselves be packed into liquor store boxes simply because you had asked that of them,and dropped at the door of the Salvation Army without having noticed me wrapping my arms around so many at once that one slipped a big padded shoulder off of its hanger as if to return the embrace.

Frannie Lindsay

Living,Death,Growing Old,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Home Life

The Kingfishers

1 What does not change / is the will to change He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He remembered only one thing, the birds, how when he came in, he had gone around the rooms and got them back in their cage, the green one first, she with the bad leg, and then the blue, the one they had hoped was a male Otherwise? Yes, Fernand, who had talked lispingly of Albers & Angkor Vat. He had left the party without a word. How he got up, got into his coat, I do not know. When I saw him, he was at the door, but it did not matter, he was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing himself in some crack of the ruins. That it should have been he who said, “The kingfishers! who cares for their feathers now?” His last words had been, “The pool is slime.” Suddenly everyone, ceasing their talk, sat in a row around him, watched they did not so much hear, or pay attention, they wondered, looked at each other, smirked, but listened, he repeated and repeated, could not go beyond his thought “The pool the kingfishers’ feathers were wealth why did the export stop?” It was then he left 2 I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said la lumiere” but the kingfisher de l’aurore” but the kingfisher flew west est devant nous! he got the color of his breast from the heat of the setting sun! The features are, the feebleness of the feet (syndactylism of the 3rd & 4th digit) the bill, serrated, sometimes a pronounced beak, the wings where the color is, short and round, the tail inconspicuous. But not these things were the factors. Not the birds. The legends are legends. Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher will not indicate a favoring wind, or avert the thunderbolt. Nor, by its nesting, still the waters, with the new year, for seven days. It is true, it does nest with the opening year, but not on the waters. It nests at the end of a tunnel bored by itself in a bank. There, six or eight white and translucent eggs are laid, on fishbones not on bare clay, on bones thrown up in pellets by the birds. On these rejectamenta (as they accumulate they form a cup-shaped structure) the young are born. And, as they are fed and grow, this nest of excrement and decayed fish becomes a dripping, fetid mass Mao concluded: nous devons nous lever et agir! 3 When the attentions change / the jungle leaps in even the stones are split they rive Or, enter that other conqueror we more naturally recognize he so resembles ourselves But the E cut so rudely on that oldest stone sounded otherwise, was differently heard as, in another time, were treasures used: (and, later, much later, a fine ear thought a scarlet coat) “of green feathers feet, beaks and eyes of gold “animals likewise, resembling snails “a large wheel, gold, with figures of unknown four-foots, and worked with tufts of leaves, weight 3800 ounces “last, two birds, of thread and featherwork, the quills gold, the feet gold, the two birds perched on two reeds gold, the reeds arising from two embroidered mounds, one yellow, the other white. “And from each reed hung seven feathered tassels. In this instance, the priests (in dark cotton robes, and dirty, their disheveled hair matted with blood, and flowing wildly over their shoulders) rush in among the people, calling on them to protect their gods And all now is war where so lately there was peace, and the sweet brotherhood, the use of tilled fields. 4 Not one death but many, not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law Into the same river no man steps twice When fire dies air dies No one remains, nor is, one Around an appearance, one common model, we grow up many. Else how is it, if we remain the same, we take pleasure now in what we did not take pleasure before? love contrary objects? admire and / or find fault? use other words, feel other passions, have nor figure, appearance, disposition, tissue the same? To be in different states without a change is not a possibility We can be precise. The factors are in the animal and / or the machine the factors are communication and / or control, both involve the message. And what is the message? The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time is the birth of the air, is the birth of water, is a state between the origin and the end, between birth and the beginning of another fetid nest is change, presents no more than itself And the too strong grasping of it, when it is pressed together and condensed, loses it This very thing you are II They buried their dead in a sitting posture serpent cane razor ray of the sun And she sprinkled water on the head of my child, crying “Cioa-coatl! Cioa-coatl!” with her face to the west Where the bones are found, in each personal heap with what each enjoyed, there is always the Mongolian louse The light is in the east. Yes. And we must rise, act. Yet in the west, despite the apparent darkness (the whiteness which covers all), if you look, if you can bear, if you can, long enough as long as it was necessary for him, my guide to look into the yellow of that longest-lasting rose so you must, and, in that whiteness, into that face, with what candor, look and, considering the dryness of the place the long absence of an adequate race (of the two who first came, each a conquistador, one healed, the other tore the eastern idols down, toppled the temple walls, which, says the excuser were black from human gore) hear hear, where the dry blood talks where the old appetite walks la piu saporita et migliore che si possa truovar al mondo where it hides, look in the eye how it runs in the flesh / chalk but under these petals in the emptiness regard the light, contemplate the flower whence it arose with what violence benevolence is bought what cost in gesture justice brings what wrongs domestic rights involve what stalks this silence what pudor pejorocracy affronts how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot what breeds where dirtiness is law what crawls below III I am no Greek, hath not th’advantage. And of course, no Roman: he can take no risk that matters, the risk of beauty least of all. But I have my kin, if for no other reason than (as he said, next of kin) I commit myself, and, given my freedom, I’d be a cad if I didn’t. Which is most true. It works out this way, despite the disadvantage. I offer, in explanation, a quote: si j’ai du goût, ce n’est guères que pour la terre et les pierres. Despite the discrepancy (an ocean courage age) this is also true: if I have any taste it is only because I have interested myself in what was slain in the sun I pose you your question: shall you uncover honey / where maggots are? I hunt among stones

Charles Olson

Living,The Mind,Nature,Animals,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

As the Dead Prey Upon Us

As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being! I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together as were the dead souls in the living room, gathered about my mother, some of them taking care to pass beneath the beam of the movie projector, some record playing on the victrola, and all of them desperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell I turned to the young man on my right and asked, “How is it, there?” And he begged me protestingly don’t ask, we are poor poor. And the whole room was suddenly posters and presentations of brake linings and other automotive accessories, cardboard displays, the dead roaming from one to another as bored back in life as they are in hell, poor and doomed to mere equipments my mother, as alive as ever she was, asleep when I entered the house as I often found her in a rocker under the lamp, and awaking, as I came up to her, as she ever had I found out she returns to the house once a week, and with her the throng of the unknown young who center on her as much in death as other like suited and dressed people did in life O the dead! and the Indian woman and I enabled the blue deer to walk and the blue deer talked, in the next room, a Negro talk it was like walking a jackass, and its talk was the pressing gabber of gammers of old women and we helped walk it around the room because it was seeking socks or shoes for its hooves now that it was acquiring human possibilities In the five hindrances men and angels stay caught in the net, in the immense nets which spread out across each plane of being, the multiple nets which hamper at each step of the ladders as the angels and the demons and men go up and down Walk the jackass Hear the victrola Let the automobile be tucked into a corner of the white fence when it is a white chair. Purity is only an instant of being, the trammels recur In the five hindrances, perfection is hidden I shall get to the place 10 minutes late. It will be 20 minutes of 9. And I don’t know, without the car, how I shall get there O peace, my mother, I do not know how differently I could have done what I did or did not do. That you are back each week that you fall asleep with your face to the right that you are present there when I come in as you were when you were alive that you are as solid, and your flesh is as I knew it, that you have the company I am used to your having but o, that you all find it such a cheapness! o peace, mother, for the mammothness of the comings and goings of the ladders of life The nets we are entangled in. Awake, my soul, let the power into the last wrinkle of being, let none of the threads and rubber of the tires be left upon the earth. Let even your mother go. Let there be only paradise The desperateness is, that the instant which is also paradise (paradise is happiness) dissolves into the next instant, and power flows to meet the next occurrence Is it any wonder my mother comes back? Do not that throng rightly seek the room where they might expect happiness? They did not complain of life, they obviously wanted the movie, each other, merely to pass among each other there, where the real is, even to the display cards, to be out of hell The poverty of hell O souls, in life and in death, make, even as you sleep, even in sleep know what wind even under the crankcase of the ugly automobile lifts it away, clears the sodden weights of goods, equipment, entertainment, the foods the Indian woman, the filthy blue deer, the 4 by 3 foot ‘Viewbook,’ the heaviness of the old house, the stuffed inner room lifts the sodden nets and they disappear as ghosts do, as spider webs, nothing before the hand of man The vent! You must have the vent, or you shall die. Which means never to die, the ghastliness of going, and forever coming back, returning to the instants which were not lived O mother, this I could not have done, I could not have lived what you didn’t, I am myself netted in my own being I want to die. I want to make that instant, too, perfect O my soul, slip the cog II The death in life (death itself) is endless, eternity is the false cause The knot is other wise, each topological corner presents itself, and no sword cuts it, each knot is itself its fire each knot of which the net is made is for the hands to untake the knot’s making. And touch alone can turn the knot into its own flame (o mother, if you had once touched me o mother, if I had once touched you) The car did not burn. Its underside was not presented to me a grotesque corpse. The old man merely removed it as I looked up at it, and put it in a corner of the picket fence like was it my mother’s white dog? or a child’s chair The woman, playing on the grass, with her son (the woman next door) was angry with me whatever it was slipped across the playpen or whatever she had out there on the grass And I was quite flip in reply that anyone who used plastic had to expect things to skid and break, that I couldn’t worry that her son might have been hurt by whatever it was I sent skidding down on them. It was just then I went into my house and to my utter astonishment found my mother sitting there as she always had sat, as must she always forever sit there her head lolling into sleep? Awake, awake my mother what wind will lift you too forever from the tawdriness, make you rich as all those souls crave crave crave to be rich? They are right. We must have what we want. We cannot afford not to. We have only one course: the nets which entangle us are flames O souls, burn alive, burn now that you may forever have peace, have what you crave O souls, go into everything, let not one knot pass through your fingers let not any they tell you you must sleep as the net comes through your authentic hands What passes is what is, what shall be, what has been, what hell and heaven is is earth to be rent, to shoot you through the screen of flame which each knot hides as all knots are a wall ready to be shot open by you the nets of being are only eternal if you sleep as your hands ought to be busy. Method, method I too call on you to come to the aid of all men, to women most who know most, to woman to tell men to awake. Awake, men, awake I ask my mother to sleep. I ask her to stay in the chair. My chair is in the corner of the fence. She sits by the fireplace made of paving stones. The blue deer need not trouble either of us. And if she sits in happiness the souls who trouble her and me will also rest. The automobile has been hauled away.

Charles Olson

Living,Death,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Religion,The Spiritual,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict