April 2012
3 posts
1 tag
The Strange People
The antelope are strange people … they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads.
—Pretty...
1 tag
from What can I hold you with?
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
Jorge Luis Borges
1 tag
Making a Fist
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange...
March 2012
4 posts
1 tag
from March
Don’t leave now.
We have almost
survived
our lives.
Linda Pastan
1 tag
from Her my body
I have one way
to be happy
and she is that way.
I would like to fly with her to Brussels.
We would not be put off by the drool.
This is what happens when people sleep.
We would buy postcards of the little boy
who saved Brussels when he peed on a fire.
We would be romantic in public places.
For the moment
these desires can best be furthered
by petting a dog.
I’m also working on this...
1 tag
To the Couple Lingering on the Doorstep
Quit kissing beneath my window.
The day turns shady
as you lean
feeding, feeding.
Night arrives, red-gold
and windless
and still you persist.
I’ve had enough
slobber and gush.
And let me say this:
the problem with passion
isn’t that it doesn’t last
but that it does,
and you’ll find yourself alone in a room,
blistered and husky-voiced, watching
the side of your building turn...
1 tag
from On the Old Way
and the sleepless
night travels along through the day as it
once did over and over for this was the way
almost home almost certain that it was
there almost believing that it could be
everything in spite of everything
W.S. Merwin
February 2012
3 posts
1 tag
Meditation from 14A
And what if the passage out of this life
is like a flight from Seattle to St. Louis—
the long taxi out of the body, the brief
and terrible acceleration, the improbable
buoyancy, and then the moment when,
godlike, you see the way things fit
together: the grave and earnest roads
with their little cars, stitching their desires
with invisible thread; the tiny pushpin houses
and backyard...
1 tag
The Kiss
When he finally put
his mouth on me—on
my shoulder—the world
shifted a little on the tilted
axis of itself. The minutes
since my brother died
stopped marching ahead like
dumb soldiers and
the stars rested.
His mouth on my shoulder and
then on my throat
and the world started up again
for me,
some machine deep inside it
recalibrating,
all the little wheels
slowly...
1 tag
The Dark Sooner
Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
We were farther and further.
More was the word we used for harder.
Lost was our standard-bearer.
Our gods were fallen faster,
and fallen larger.
The day was duller, duller
was disaster. Our charge was error.
Instead of leader we had louder,
instead of lover,...
January 2012
2 posts
1 tag
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....
1 tag
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...
December 2011
4 posts
1 tag
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.
...
1 tag
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...
1 tag
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,...
1 tag
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)
October 2011
2 posts
1 tag
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...
1 tag
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...
September 2011
3 posts
1 tag
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
1 tag
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...
1 tag
from Annunciation with a Garland of Self-Heal
though standing in the gap
between the world we’re born to and the world
we almost but don’t quite invent
what we know in our bones
is how much mystery we need to make a world
moment by moment
escaping
and bound to return...
August 2011
3 posts
1 tag
Absence
I speak to you across cities
I speak to you across plains
My mouth is upon your pillow
Both faces of the walls come meeting
My voice discovering you
I speak to you of eternity
O cities memories of cities
Cities wrapped in our desires
Cities come early cities come lately
Cities strong and cities secret
Plundered of their master’s builders
All their thinkers all their ghosts
...
1 tag
from The Silence
A conversation is overhead on a train, on an airplane,
and even Love cannot know the whole.
It sits in the row behind,
listening quietly to what it is able.
Then the green and red wing-lights blink out;
the train rounds the track’s curve and is lost.
Love, also disappearing,
would like to tap the two murmuring ones on the shoulder.
Love would like to say to them,
“Speak more...
1 tag
The Lovers
She is about to come. This time,
they are sitting up, joined below the belly,
feet cupped like sleek hands praying
at the base of each other’s spines.
And when something lifts within her
toward a light she’s sure, once again,
she can’t bear, she opens her eyes
and sees his face is turned away,
one arm behind him, hands splayed
palm...
July 2011
3 posts
1 tag
Failure of Communion
What is the space between,
enclosing us in one
united person, yet
dividing each alone.
Frail bridges cross from eye
to eye, from flesh to flesh,
from word to word: the net
is gapped at every mesh,
and this each human knows:
however close our touch
or intimate our speech,
silences, spaces reach
most deep, and will not close.
Judith Wright
1 tag
Untitled
What is it, it does not
move like love, it does
not want to know, it
does not want to stroke, unfold
it does not even want to
touch, it is more like
an animal (not
loving) a
thing trapped, you move
wounded, you are hurt, you hurt,
you want to get out, you want
to tear yourself out, I am
the outside, I am snow and
space, pathways, you gather
yourself, your muscles
clutch, you move...
June 2011
4 posts
1 tag
from Oedipus on Mother’s Day
The only curse we have is love.
Donald Illich
1 tag
Godzilla In Mexico
Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You’d just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged....
1 tag
from Awake
Nothing perilous
had come to find us. What was ours was ours.
Michael Heffernan
1 tag
Morning
I’ve got to tell you
how I love you always
I think of it on grey
mornings with death
in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then and the cigarette
dry the maroon robe
chills me I need you
and look out the window
at the noiseless snow
At night on the dock
the buses glow like
clouds and I am lonely
...
1 tag
from Pericardium
your arms, where you’d been, before me, waiting
For me, the way the body has always been waiting for the heart to sense
It is housed, it is needed, it will not be harmed.
Joanna Klink
May 2011
4 posts
1 tag
For the Dead
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not...
1 tag
from Travelling
Then recite the list
of what you’ve learned to do without.
It is stronger than prayer.
Stephen Dunn
1 tag
I See a Man
He has just had sex. I can tell by the way, when he
notices his shadow ahead of him, broad, spilling over both
curbs to the road he is walking down slowly, most of him
wants to stop and, as if remembering, stand briefly at a
kind of attention. He has just had sex, it’s unclear with
whom. It was a man, it was a woman… it was the air, whose
inconveniently wide-apart edges can be...
1 tag
Upon Request
That I love you, I want to finally
have that written down, now that
you ask. Because I love you and
not just sometimes, given
the four thousand days and nights.
That it seems as if you hardly
have grown older, that
you sometimes gaze into the distance
as if love struck, that
your hands are still beautiful, further
than this I’d rather not go.
That I sometimes look for your cheek...
April 2011
5 posts
1 tag
from From the Home Place
One does not have to turn to listen.
Airborne at the middle ear,
molecular,
each damped and stronger sound prompts its allied
hair-cell to fire. No more than a
smear at first,
the spell each sound is there for has its
onset and rise,
its temperings whose
play across the membranes no one
other repeats.
Dispersed toward him with the rest from what he
sees of her face,
the silences...
1 tag
Song
You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.
You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
...
1 tag
Why I Did Not Make Love to Your Dead Body
Shouldn’t it be romantic to think to take you in that final, leaden state —slowed mercury? Yet, coming upon your corpse excited me not to love—but to something akin to autism. I was a rock that dream, swaying. No lie—I’ll cradle you after death if I am able, babble and coo into your neck as if you were my ...
1 tag
Modern Declaration
I, having loved ever since I was a child a few things, never having wavered
In these affections; never through shyness in the houses of the rich or in the presence of clergymen having denied these loves;
Never when worked upon by cynics like chiropractors having grunted or clicked a vertebra to the discredit of those loves;
Never when anxious to land a job having diminished them by a conniving...
1 tag
Sonnet XI
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring...
March 2011
2 posts
1 tag
from Muchness
That’s how my heart is, I thought—
it lies coiled up inside me, asleep,
then springs out and shocks me
with all its muchness.
Tony Hoagland
1 tag
For Jane
225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.
when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.
what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.
Charles...
February 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Parable
There was a saint once,
he had but to ring across
water a small bell, all
manner of fish
rose, as answer, he was
that holy, persuasive,
both, or the fish
perhaps merely
hungry, their bodies
a-shimmer with
that hope especially that
hunger brings, whatever
the reason, the fish
coming unassigned, in
schools coming
into the saint’s hand and,
instead of getting,
becoming...
1 tag
Six Apologies, Lord
I Have Loved My Horrible Self, Lord.
I Rose, Lord, and I Rose, Lord, And I
Dropt. Your Requirements, Lord. ‘Spite Your Requirements, Lord,
I Have Loved The Low Voltage Of The Moon, Lord,
Until There Was No Moon Intensity Left, Lord, No Moon Intensity Left
For You, Lord. I Have Loved The Frivolous, The Fleeting, The Frightful
Clouds. Lord, I Have Loved Clouds! Do Not Forgive Me, Do Not...
January 2011
7 posts
1 tag
From the Devotions
1.
As if somewhere, away, a door had slammed shut.
—But not metal; not wood.
Or as when something is later remembered only
as something dark in the dream:
torn, bruised, dream-slow
descending, it could be anything—
tiling, clouds,
you again, beautifully consistent, in no
usual or masterable way leaves, a woman’s
shaken-loose throat, shattered
eyes...
1 tag
Four Evasions
Sitting in the car, houses & wind outside,
three in the morning, windows
obliterated by snow
coats & arms around each other, hands
cold, no place we can go
unable to say how much I want you
unable even to say
I am unable
*
Not that there is nothing to be
said but that there is
too much: this cripples me,
I watch with envy & desire,
you speak so freely.
*
Tell me...
1 tag
Muse
When I kiss you in all the folding places
of your body, you make that noise like a dog
dreaming, dreaming of the long run he makes
in answer to some jolt to his hormones,
running across landfills, running, running
by tips and shorelines from the scent of too much,
but still going with head up and snout
in the air because he loves it all
and has to get away. I have to kiss deeper
and more...
1 tag
The White Road
I walked with you through the exact afternoon
you gave me your hand, life seemed
hard to establish
above the high wall
leaves trembled
under the stronger invisible weight
I could die for just one of those things
we share and have no words for saying:
stars cross paths at a frightful speed
unmovable glaciers at long last shift
and in the only way it can accompany you
my heart beats and...
1 tag
In The Kitchen
It’s right before you drive away:
our limbs still warm with sleep,
coffee sputtering out, the north
wind, your hips pressing me
hard against the table. I like it hard
because I need to remember this.
I want to say harder. How we must
look to the road that’s gone,
to the splayed morning of cold
butter and inveterate greed.
Light comes and goes in the field.
Oranges in a bowl, garlic,...
1 tag
Untitled
I’ve been a shit and I hate fucking you now
because I love fucking you too much;
what good’s the head of my cock inside you
when my other head, the one with the brains,
keeps thinking how fucked up everything is,
how fucked I am to be fucking you and thinking
these things which take me away from you
when all I want is to be close to you
but fuck you for letting me fuck you now...