The New Year

It is winter and the new year.
Nobody knows you.
Away from the stars, from the rain of light,
you lie under the weather of stones.
There is no thread to lead you back.
Your friends doze in the dark
of pleasure and cannot remember.
Nobody knows you. You are the neighbor of nothing.
You do not see the rain falling and the man walking away,
the soiled wind blowing its ashes across the city.
You do not see the sun dragging the moon like an echo.
You do not see the bruised heart go up in flames,
the skulls of the innocent turn into smoke.
You do not see the scars of plenty, the eyes without light.
It is over. It is winter and the new year.
The meek are hauling their skins into heaven.
The hopeless are suffereing the cold with those who have nothing to hide.
It is over and nobody knows you.
There is starlight drifting on the black water.
There are stones in the sea no one has seen.
There is a shore and people are waiting.
And nothing comes back.
Because it is over.
Because there is silence instead of a name.
Because it is winter and the new year.

Mark Strand

from Atlantis

4. ATLANTIS

I thought your illness a kind of solvent
dissolving the future a little at a time;

I didn’t understand what’s to come
was always just a glimmer

up ahead, veiled like the marsh
gone under its tidal sheet

of mildly rippling aluminum.
What these salt distances were

is also where they’re going:
from blankly silvered span

toward specificity: the curve
of certain brave islands of grass,

temporary shoulder-wide rivers
where herons ply their twin trades

of study and desire. I’ve seen
two white emissaries unfold

like heaven’s linen, untouched,
enormous, a fluid exhalation. Early spring,

too cold yet for green, too early
for the tumble and wrack of last season

to be anything but promise,
but there in the air was white tulip,

marvel, triumph of all flowering, the soul
lifted up, if we could still believe

in the soul, after so much diminishment …
Breath, from the unpromising waters,

up, across the pond and the two-lane highway,
pure purpose, over the dune,

gone. Tomorrow’s unreadable
as this shining acreage;

the future’s nothing
but this moment’s gleaming rim.

Now the tide’s begun
its clockwork turn, pouring,

in the day’s hourglass,
toward the other side of the world,

and our dependable marsh reappears
—emptied of that starched and angular grace

that spirited the ether, lessened,
but here. And our ongoingness,

what there’ll be of us? Look,
love, the lost world

rising from the waters again:
our continent, where it always was,

emerging from the half-light, unforgettable,
drenched, unchanged.

Mark Doty

Bow Down

I.

As if he, too, could see the world,
just in front of us,
coming divided: those who step
routinely toward a dark that, mostly,
has seemed avoidable;

those who let them—

                                        World from which,

if for no other reason, then
out of pity, I should
look away.

Out of decency.

I should try, or should seem to have tried, or to be about to.

II.

If I don’t go to him, if I do nothing, if he comes to me first,
and then I follow: does it count as trespass? Should it?
If he bends aside the lower branches—If I pass unmarked

beneath them—If I look away, as if toward something
difficult, bright, and departing always, like the parts of
memory that, very briefly, flare as what is remembered grows

more far; if I look away, and he does—if I could do that—
where does the damage go to, if damage figures here, if
no one sees it—no, if no one looks at it, if my stroking

his hair back also figures, gently, if I shall miss him, if I do already,
broad strokes, consolation, though there is nothing to console
him for, nothing, why cry out, if the mud washes easily, if

the bruise eventually undoes itself, if somewhere a kindness
still counts as anything, let it count as kindness, why ruin it
by saying otherwise, why even speak of it, why speak at all?

III.

Once, to ask
meant a small departure, and then
a larger one, shape of going—far,
away. As where the meadow led.
Red of switchgrass. A calf by the rope
toward slaughter.
Did that happen? Do you
wish it had? Why should the saints stand
apart from me, as if between us, suddenly,
they could see a difference? Questions fell
the way water did, off of—no,
away from your body as, sometimes,
I would still remember it: you
making of your hand now a fist,
now a dove where it finds my chest—has
found it—and after, settling. The descent
was easy. It always is. It always
has been. Think twice, or don’t. Given
the face of God in front of them, some
look away, others look once
and know a blindness
ever after. Will it have been worth it?
Was it? Wasn’t it? Is it only a wind,
Or my own voice, stuttering now
Against me? Bow down, inside
the shadows here, and know a peace that leaves
elsewhere all human understanding of what,
earlier, peace looked like, it seems
to say. No. I say so. Saying it, as if
into a wind. No. As if into the shadow-work
that is all, I think, the body will have
meant—each time keeps meaning: canopy,
leaves above me, something that
almost I can see around, though
not through, the leaves
muttering, where a wind lets them, where a wind
makes them, Come here, clipped bird,
spattered stag whose flank the shaft entered
easily—come here. And forget. And sleep.

Carl Phillips

from Body & Isn’t

                                                                      The way maps affect time.
For a second I think I feel the fleeting texture of your skin.

Lumbar & sacral nerves descend to exits beyond the end of the cord.
Keep the blood in at all costs, even when the wind crackles its cells.
The coming of electricity, half next time & half this:
My five. My unending ache at the absence of you.

Bruce Covey

Two Countries

Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers—silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.

Naomi Shihab Nye

from Be Near Me

When whatever you want to do cannot be done,
When nothing is of any use;
—At this hour when night comes down,
When night comes, dragging its long face,
                                                       dressed in mourning,
Be with me,
My tormenter, my love, be near me.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz
(translated by Naomi Lazard)

One Continuous Substance

A small boy and a slant of morning light
both exit the last dark trees of this forest, though
the boy is gone in an instant. Not

the light: it travels its famous 186,000 miles per second
to be this still gold bar
on the floor of the darkness. I suppose

that from the universe’s point of view
we do the same: a small boy and an old man
being one continuous substance.

We were making love when the phone rang
saying my father was dead, and the sun
kept touching you, there, and there, where I’d been.

Albert Goldbarth

from Homage to Cy Twombly

This is how it works in children’s books,
how most of what you know is reconstruction,
something inferred from the shadow you catch in a mirror;

and this is how it works in love and art;
how, sometimes, the shape of the wind on an empty street
is all you know of home: a field of rain

or one last boat returning from the sound,
the blown light on its deck sudden and large,
no less a fact than radio, or ozone –

though later, when you wake beneath the dark,
like someone who would pray, if he had prayers,
another version of that child arrives

from somewhere else, the gravity of love
and kinship in his face, a child who knows
the way your skin is made from touch and thaw

and threads of cold you brought in from the frost
with something he broke in the old days and couldn’t relinquish
knowing his time would come, in this other life,
to gather the pieces and magic them back together.

John Burnside

from Epithalament

                                       Please, don’t lose me
here. I am sorry my clutch is all

tendon and no discipline: the heart is a severed
kind of muscle and alone.

I can hear yours in your room. I hear mine
in another room. In another’s.

Brenda Shaughnessy

Against His Quitting the Torn Field

            Let him put his mouth in the
            dust—there may yet be hope.
                  Lamentations

“How, entering,
inside him, it became more
easy to believe I would not
breathe the same, it would not be
my life, breathing, breathed
—out, again, ever.”

*

There was a bird, once,
like that. Or—

Or, shorn of bird—call only—
a calling-to that seemed
it would never end, be done
raveling.

It starts that way. Likely

*

it goes, somewhere else:

the mouth that says You can do anything, here;

the arm tattooed with—
as obviously as if this were
dream—the one word:
Paradise; all in a row, shut

against a frost that, even here, has
place, nine tulips—
seven; oh

and the peonies, or almost, each one
still a fist, which is to say, fat
with chance, or the hard
waking you will have forgotten bone also

*

can be. Somewhere else:

all house lights down.

Rustle of what no longer is required, being shed.

Sounds connoting struggle,
then—

silence? or
—like silence—resolve?

Lights up, on

the male lead, who has just found the body,
the body is someone’s
he loved, he can see
it is dead; all the same
does he rock it, and rock it, poor

*

—bird?

There was one.
As there will be: yes, another.

Those birds fly well
which have little flesh,
and many feathers.

Though the flesh
is our enemy, we
are commanded to support it.

Of leaves, recall,
were the first garlands woven for
none other than, triumphant, the flesh.

*

        Thus, the shield.

                    She set the clattering bronze down, before him.

Carl Phillips