Joseph Brodsky

[from Joseph Brodsky's A Part of Speech, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971]

Six Years Later

So long had life together been that now
the second of January fell again
on Tuesday, making her astonished brow
lift like a windshield in the rain,
        so that her misty sadness cleared, and showed
        a cloudless distance waiting up the road.

So long had life together been that once
the snow began to fall, it seemed unending;
that, lest the flakes should make her eyelids wince,
I'd shield them with my hand, and they, pretending
        not to believe that cherishing of eyes,
        would beat against my palm like butterflies.

So alien had all novelty become
that sleep's entanglements would put to shame
whatever depths the analysts might plumb;
that when my lips blew out the candle flame,
        her lips, fluttering from my shoulder, sought
        to join my own, without another thought.

So long had life together been that all
that tattered brood of papered roses went,
and a whole birch grove grew upon the wall,
and we had money, by some accident,
        and tonguelike on the sea, for thirty days,
        the sunset threatened Turkey with its blaze.

So long had life together been without
books, chairs, utensils -- only that ancient bed --
that the triangle, before it came about,
had been a perpendicular, the head
        of some acquaintance hovering above
        two points which had been coalesced by love.

So long had life together been that she
and I, with our joint shadows, had composed
a double door, a door which, even if we
were lost in work or sleep, was always closed:
        somehow its halves were split and we went right
        through them into the future, into night.

1969 / Translated by Richard Wilbur

A Part of Speech

Terrance Hayes

[from Terrance Hayes's Wind in a Box, Penguin, 2006]

Wind in a Box

Even the dirt dreams of it now.
It is two roads along two rivers,
The sky above a mother's face

The day her husband leaves
For war. No blood and stars
But the blood and stars.

Let's find it and break its fucking neck,
Let's break its fucking jaw.
Let's break its fucking ganged in vessels

And if it pushes back and a tiny blue rises
On its cheek, let's break that too
Until stars dance in the corners

Of its eyes like white seeds
And let's break those too
Until all the words we know are split in two.

No power but the power of need.
Let's get up ready to feel.

God bless the rage in us.
It's how we know each other.
We who keep vigil by the windows,

We who pour ashes from the windows
Into the wind, skin passing over skin,
Let's walk up the hill and along the rows

That do not ask questions.
Near the white and yellow flowers,
Strangers are moored in sighs.

Soon it will rise without kissing
Anyone goodbye.
It says we will not be renewed,

We will not be filled
Like the birdhouse.
It says we will arrive unwashed.

Aren't you tired? Let's lie down.
Let's cry out and rest.

Wind in a Box (Poets, Penguin)

Denise Levertov

[from Denise Levertov's The Sorrow Dance, New Directions, 1967]

As It Happens

Like dogs in Mexico,
furless, sore, misshapen,

arrives from laborious nowhere
Agony. And proves

to have eyes of kindness,
a pitiful tail; wants

love. Give it some, in form of
dry tortilla, it

grabs and runs off
three-leggéd, scared,

but tarries nearby and will
return. A friend.


To Speak

To speak of sorrow
works upon it
                    moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul's hall --

out in the light it
shows clear, whether
shrunken or known as
a giant wrath --
                       discrete
at least, where before

its great shadow joined
the walls and roof and seemed
to uphold the hall like a beam.

The Sorrow Dance

Tyehimba Jess

[from Tyehimba Jess's Leadbelly, Verse, 2005]

mistress stella speaks

you think I'm his property
'cause he paid cash
to grab me by the neck,
swing me 'cross his knee
and stroke the living song from my hips.

you think he is master of all
my twelve tongues, spreading notes
thick as starless night, strangling spine
till my voice is a jungle of chords.

the truth is that i owned him
since the word love first blessed his lips
since hurt and flight and free
carved their way into the cotton
fused bones of his fretting hand,
since he learned how pleading men hunt
for my face in the well of their throats
till their tongues are soaked with want.

yes, each day he comes back
home from the fields,
from chain gang fury,
from the smell of sometime women
who borrow his body. he bends
his weight around me
like a wilting weed
drinking in my kiss
of fretboard across fingertip
'til he can stand up straight again,
aching from what he left behind,
rising sure as dawn.


blind lemon taught me

i remember a useless eyed street busker, twin holes shriveled small behind smoked spectacles, the parables he taught me in the troubled space between each note. sometimes, i would close my eyes, run my fingers through landscape where he'd placed his hands to solve the riddle of my features, his fingertips supple winged blackbirds, fluttering from brow to eyelash to cheek to chin, he found my true face, stretched those knuckle jointed roots from ebony trunk of wrist and ashen palm to grow as one with the wood of his twelve-string. there, he told how a man can trade pieces of himself for a song, an eye here, an ankle there, a ball if he's not careful, and the fret board's friction that turns silken skin to callus. i remember how he bottlenecked blues caught between the teeth of each tin pan alley tune, nailed it in a patent leather stomp, moved streetcorner crowds down another mile of his train tracked voice with every beat. i remember how every song stitched together my story, how he took something away when he discovered my face beneath his palms, gave it back on layaway plan of bent notes, bloodied moons.

leadbelly: poems (National Poetry Series)

Nadeem Aslam

[from Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008]

Benedikt told her to wait as he went forward on his elbows to investigate, raising himself to a crouching position and then disappearing from view. She would never see him again or know what happened to him, what kind of life he walked into, what kind of death. The orchard was vast, and there were many others around it, but he had said he would find her easily because somehow they had ended up within a clump of three trees that were the only ones among the hundreds that were not in flower. She curled herself in the high grass and perhaps fell asleep beside the stolen Kalashnikovs. When next her mind focused, the voices out there had grown in number and dawn had arrived, and now she saw, as though hallucinating, that the branches above her had blossomed with the first rays of the sun, the late buds opening at last, hatching white-pink scraps against the clear blue of the sky.

The Wasted Vigil

Sherod Santos

[from Sherod Santos's Greek Lyric Poetry, Norton, 2005]

Spirits of the Afterworld

     On them alone raw sunlight shines
beyond the darkness that forms our element here.
     The arable plains around them
are tufted with spreading incense trees, or brailled

     with tussocky, water-colored
pools of wildflowers coming into bloom.
     And as we hear, some of them ride
on horseback through the defile of a snow-

     fed falls, others wrestle or test
themselves in footraces down a gravel bar,
     still others gather over table games
or work out verses practiced on a lyre.

     And all day long a storied
gladness fills to overbrim their hearts,
     and a fragrance spooled
from ribboned braids of frankincense

     consecrates their altar fires.
Still, on the far shore of that great divide,
     a black and sluggish river
disgorges an endless, melancholy silt.

                                                                   Pindar

Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation

Louise Gluck

[from Louise Gluck's The Seven Ages, Harper Collins, 2001]

Birthday

Amazingly, I can look back
fifty years. And there, at the end of the gaze,
a human being already entirely recognizable,
the hands clutched in the lap, the eyes
staring into the future with the combined
terror and hopelessness of a soul expecting annihilation.

Entirely familiar, though still, of course, very young.
Staring blindly ahead, the expression of someone staring into utter darkness.
And thinking -- which meant, I remember, the attempts of the mind
to prevent change.

Familiar, recognizable, but much more deeply alone, more despondent.
She does not, in her view, meet the definition
of a child, a person with everything to look forward to.

This is how the others look; this is, therefore, what they are.
Constantly making friends
with the camera, many of them actually
smiling with real conviction --

I remember that age. Riddled with self-doubt, self-loathing,
and at the same time suffused
with contempt for the communal, the ordinary; forever
consigned to solitude, the bleak solace of perception, to a future
completely dominated by the tragic, with no use for the immense will
but to fend it off --

That is the problem of silence:
one cannot test one's ideas.
Because they are not ideas, they are the truth.

All the defenses, the spiritual rigidity, the insistent
unmasking of the ordinary to reveal the tragic,
were actually innocence of the world.

Meaning the partial, the shifting, the mutable --
all that the absolute excludes. I sat in the dark, in the living room.
The birthday was over. I was thinking, naturally, about time.
I remember how, in almost the same instant,
my heart would leap up exultant and collapse
in desolate anguish. The leaping up -- the half I didn't count --
that was happiness; that was what the word meant.

The Seven Ages

Wanda Coleman

[from Wanda Coleman's Mercurochrome, Black Sparrow, 2001]

Locofo'co

it's a verb drives verb world

where she huddles in his exhaust, tiny & deformed
governed by a flow of wonts

everything that runs on adjectives is stalled

street crimes abound -- the bump & run of fast gab
trunk thefts gagas drive-bys gagas snipings

       warning!
don't lower your windows for well-dressed talk
don't stop in a residential zone to still sudden
       stutters
develop a protective code of tongue when
one's vocabulary is arrested for DUI
act as if being possessed by adverbs is an everyday
       affair. don't
complain that the noun is too tight. keep
the eyes dotted. don't volunteer a syllable.

as for homonym invasion & trope jackings
avoid being a victim, remember: blowouts may
cause permanent syntax damage. stay in the right lanes
should a quick exegesis be mandatory

(pronounce it aloud, once, for yourself, put
a breath at the end of each sentence, thus
sustaining the wordsmith who may wag & wax
anew. speak in even tones, in a language so poor
it wouldn't pay to steal a phonon)

a survivor's whine to sweet soft grammars
coupled with rhetorical purrs -- held
neological hostage to used word dealers

chance driving on the rim of meaning. it's cheaper
to replace than a presumed sanity

full speed, blues ahead

Mercurochrome: New Poems

Jane Kenyon

[from Jane Kenyon's From Room to Room, Alice James, 1978]

The Needle

Grandmother, you are as pale
as Christ's hands on the wall above you.
When you close your eyes you are all
white -- hair, skin, gown. I blink
to find you again in the bed.

I remember once you told me
you weighted a hundred and twenty-three,
the day you married grandfather.
You had handsome legs. He watched you
working at the sink.

The soft ring is loose on your hand.
I hated coming here.
I know you can't understand me.
I'll try again,
like the young nurse with the needle.


Year Day

We are living together on the earth.
The clock's heart
beats in its wooden chest.
The cats follow the sun through the house.
We lie down together at night.

Today, you work in your office,
and I in my study. Sometimes
we are busy and casual.
Sitting here, I can see
the path we have made on the rug.

The hermit gives up
after thirty years of hiding in the jungle.
The last door to the last room
comes unlatched. Here are the gestures
of my hands. Wear them in your hair.

From Room to Room: Poems

C. Dale Young

[from C. Dale Young's The Second Person, Four Way, 2007]

This book contains so many good poems I almost couldn't choose one.

Scales

Maybe it is the pull
          of the violin
                   like the ocean itself

drawing us to its side,
          the sad memory
                   of something lost

and irretrievable
          but worthy of the search.
                   Skirting the dunes

this morning, the ocean
          just a sound drifting over
                   from the other side,

your melody returned
          to me unwarranted.
                   How could you

have known, Samuel Barber,
          that your violin concerto
                   could tell such a story?

But the story is such
          a common one, I suppose.
                   What begins as love

disintegrates after betrayal,
          transforms after grief
                   into something like the end.

Can you tell me, forgotten Master,
          great sandpiper scavenging
                   the shifting shoreline,

why your concerto, abstract
          as only Music can be,
                   should time and time again

offer such minor tragedy?
          Samuel Barber, whose concerto
                   was first deemed impossible,

you wrongly taught us that virtuosity
          was something attainable, something
                   only slightly out of reach.

Send me a sign, old man.
          Teach me how to stop playing
                   these scales of loss.

The Second Person: Poems (Stahlecker Series Selection)

Lola Haskins

[from Lola Haskins's Hunger, Iowa, 1993]

Fishing

The sky has fallen asleep over
Malham Tarn,
over the bare fields strewn with sheep,
over the bitten moors
where long-armed men passed stones up the steep
to set them one by one in walls,
while their hairy daughters crouched,
pounding grain with other stones,
by Malham Tarn where even then
the stars went in the day.
Here is the pay for long patience.
At the end of your thin line, something gleams.


Mercado

The blank sockets of devilfish,
hung drying to the light, watch me
down the aisles of heavy papayas
like full breasts, follow me into
the tight hearts of onions, into
the mouths of ollas, with their damp
clay air. I rub them gone.
My view clears to the stripes
of a serape, braids itself down
the back of an old woman, who squats
behind red pots which nobody buys.
Her eyes, black as rain fallen
in a cenote, meet my eyes. My skin
rises. My brushes lift in their box.
I take her home, carry her, wrinkled
and light, over my threshold.
I buy all the red pots.

Hunger: Poems (The Edwin Ford Piper poetry award)

Rae Armantrout

[from Rae Armantrout's Up to Speed, Wesleyan, 2004]

Flinch

A new season
sweeps across the merchandise.

Paper products suggest harvest,
then fear of the dark.

Rows of palms
in stanchions
abstain,

having little stake
in matter.

They flap their fronds weakly
as we revolve.

*

Is it true we deserve
any blow
we fail to anticipate?

A shadow traveling down a wall

is a maternal hand

while a maternal hand
is lavender-suffusing
dusk

and dusk itself,
a great tissue
of lies,

suffused with blood.

*

Three things are placed
in safety

on a created plane:

twilight
and the stop-gap palms
bellwether palms

advance

with the transparent
cloud-scarves
of the nonexistent

fatalistic nomads
we half-dreamed
                      of being


En Route

We've re-authorized silence
as a bridge
between two notes --

so that we're always
"about to" or
"have just."

*

So that a magic school bus
bounces
through a haunted museum.

*

A small boy
stops his ears with both hands

then spreads his arms wide,

covers his eyes
then flings his hands apart

like a performer concluding a set.

"What does a cat say?"
his mother asks.

Up to Speed (Wesleyan Poetry)

Djelloul Marbrook

[from Djelloul Marbrook's Far from Algiers, Kent State, 2008]

The Men's Room

Twenty of me in a mirrored room
don't figure to get through the night,
all their Etruscan heads teetering
on mortuarial bodies.
Something's worrying them,
an echo seen from the corner
of a stranger's eye, and stranger
is the iteration of a madness
not seen in the original. In fact,
the original must be posited
in the middle of a psychotic break.
Maybe the lemon-curried shrimp
accounts somehow for the disappearance
of a man so full of himself
at first he thought the world
needed twenty more of him,
but then he realized he's been divided
into twenty saddened parts.

Far from Algiers (Wick Poetry First Book, #14)

Eric Pankey

[from Eric Pankey's Reliquaries, Ausable, 2005]

Passage

What I caught out of the corner of my eye might have been a vision,
       had I been a visionary.
In my idleness, I imagine the universe the size of a thimble, the whole
       condensed, a drop of dew,
A plasma so packed that nothing escapes, no heat, no light. It is cool
       to the touch.
Poured into my palm, it rolls about like mercury, but will not divide.
       Had I been a visionary,
I might have caught out of the corner of my eye the invention of time
       and its backdraft.

*

Nothing is lost, we are asked to believe, not the three horses that
       came to the fence for apples,
The Appaloosa, the sorrel, and the chestnut, that came freely and fed
       from our hands;
Not the delirious flight of the bottle-rocket that set the bramble
       hedge ablaze;
Not the hand drawn back to strike but then held motionless as if by
       an angel, as if by mercy;
Not the half life of the half-life of the half-life of the half-life graphed
       as an involuting spiral.

*

I stepped out of the fabric of time, but only for a moment, for a
       minute or two.
I stepped out of the fabric of time and my foot slipped on the last
       rung of the scala mystica.
On my way down, I forgot the cause, the form, the matter, and at last,
       the sphere of elements.
I had to relearn the names of the nettle, the thistle, the fire thorn and
       the bindweed.
I had to relearn to climb. To put one hand on a rung, then one foot . . .

*

Although it is midwinter, a housefly arisen, it seems, from nowhere,
       settles then dashes,
Ricochets off the window glass, retries, then rests on the sill, only to
       recommence.
In my idleness, I imagine the universe the size of a thimble, the whole
       condensed, a drop of dew.
In my idleness, I imagine the fly might one day discover a way
       through the glass,
And the miracle will not be the other side, but the constancy, the
       liquid simplicity of the passage.

Reliquaries

Brenda Hillman

[from Brenda Hillman's Pieces of Air in the Epic, Wesleyan, 2005]

Doppler Effect in Diagram Three

Waves past the meadow, meu viajante
The summer was almost straight
From cities from countries
It had straight-smelling shirts
Parentheses from the hawk a day sound
Only borders in its mouth
Almost no weather from its travels
The heat sing-ing-ing
A series of syllables not yet delivered
Families just beginning to gather
Or double gather like curtains
So much not enough you said
A hope inflected from the east
Something at rest about the waves not then
Someone swell to be remembered
In the theories of the address
Blue & the palindrome of a wave
Moving against the rest

The Earth's axis has been set aflame
The harlequin picks his teeth with a matchstick
It was called life in those decades
Dragonflies attached one per stalk
Like a music staff turned sideways
Papermill Creek before the death of paper
Incandescence is its own defense you said
Periodicity of a fear moving
Off from the too-bright years
A bike in the car its spokes turning
Click-click past goats & ravens
It's up to sounds like this to descend in size
To express surprise or terror
How does air feel with waves inside it
Does it feel more
With the radio on
How do the airwaves get through all the numbers
& how does the ( ( ( ( ( ( (( do it

In the model an observer stands on
The platform & we grow to love him
He is wild & is thinking of nothing
Let us call all of this observer A
There is a row of bending sounds
As the trouble curves rightward
Mr. Doppler is in heaven by now
A slim hush as the fat springs click
The men in burgundy shorts roll
The luggage carts away
People think they are you but they are not
You are you & no one & everything
The oscillating quality of dusk clashes with
What is universal just as the vowels
In a person's name clash with his handwriting
How lovely we seem as the passenger pulls away
With an identity among the abstracted
Pale diners who eat behind the cellophane

But in fact he is lost to us
As the page turner at a recital is lost
Or one who speaks of the Irish solution
Or names the roses Peace or Sally
When it starts being unbearable
Time won't pierce air with its skinny death feet
In the pulling away life is continuous
The worry hyphens inside the molecule
The sentence or the train passing
As it holds out its skirts of sound
The sentence has started its journey
But has no idea for its mystic demise
It rides in the firebox to the cave
Looking out at pines their raw huts
Bearing its constant falling
Over the laughter in the night pool of those
Who have not stopped & may not, ever

Pieces of Air in the Epic (Wesleyan Poetry)

Michael Collier

[from Michael Collier's The Ledge, Houghton Mifflin, 2000]

Moon Valley Country Club

After he walked through the arcadia door, almost unscathed,
like a saint, like someone materializing out of the fifth
dimension, the wall of glass parting in thousands
of deadly splinters, falling in front and behind him,
he turned to all of us watching from Tim Sawdey's
living room, and straightening himself, extended
his arms in a full benediction, hands upturned
balancing beer cans like a chalice and ciborium,
and then he bowed and curtsied. And when
he straightened again, we could see the blood
drain from his face, cheeks and lips a gravid blue,
and his legs wobbly at the knees, so that when he stepped
back through the jagged maw of the door, as if to make
the glass reassemble, the breakage heal, he collapsed
on the patio and lay in sight of us, as if he'd come
a great distance out of the fairways and traps, skirting
the water hazards, and crossing the greens to perform this trick
and now it was time for him to lie down and sleep.

The Ledge: Poems

A. B. Spellman

[from A. B. Spellman's Things I Must Have Known, Coffee House, 2008]]

Groovin' Low

my swing is more mellow
these days: not the hardbop drive
i used to roll but more of a cool
foxtrot, my eyes still close
when the rhythm locks; i've learned
to boogie with my feet on the floor
i'm still movin', still groovin'
still fallin' in love

i bop to the bass line now, the trap set
paradiddles ratamacues & flams
that used to spin me in place still set me
off, but i bop to the bass line now
i enter the tune from the bottom up
& let trumpet & sax wheel above me

so don't look for me in the treble
don't look for me in the fly
staccato splatter of the hot young horn
no, you'll find me in the nuance
hanging out in inflection & slur
i'm the one executing the half-bent
dip in the slow slowdrag
with the smug little smile
& the really cool shades


9/11/01 [excerpt]

. . .

                            our america
will refuse to sort the detritus
to find its own sin in it, but it lies there
smoldering, unexpiated by the flames
it's in the plain song of the new-made dead
who will chant it all the years that we live
we tilt the earth so the gold slides down
to us. we dress the starved illiterates
of the earth in the worst
of our culture & feign surprise
when they do not love us for it

Things I Must Have Known

Nick Laird

[from Nick Laird's to a fault, Norton, 2005]

A Portrait of the Artist As a Joke

And yet slaughter may also be a plural of laughter . . .
-- Javier Rodrigues Rodrigues (translated by Joseph Coleman)

I've heard it told by someone else like this:
an Englishman, an Irishman, a Scot,
all down the Union, slaughtered, lairy, and

the rest's a slow ascending followed by a drop.
I smoked and skimmed the smeary glass,

my diving watch, the Guinness sign behind
the gin, and saw three grinning faces mouth:
Your man walks into a bar, an iron bar . . . ouch.

*

Midway there will be wishes, wives, islands
quietly deserted, jungle tribes, firing squads,
last requests and genies bottled in the jacks.

The finish sees the jars tide-marked, abandoned
to prehensile smoke, the ripped-out wiring

of air that hangs like gags told donkeys back
which weren't too great the first time round.
So please, no laughter, and please, no applause.

*

Each time a round unleashes glass into shocking,
solid rain, and the pub airpockets, shudders, roots,
there's an ovation into the bogs. Some fat fuck's

thumped in the gut and bundled away in a Corsa.
The moon, an unexpected exit wound, rises

to flood the carpark. Someone else can
expand about jokes and the unconscious,
and someone else can refer to the luck of the Irish.

*

In the rough to the left of the fairway
the same man who walked into the bar
lies doubled up in laughter.

The clownery of his ungentle, eggshelled face
is about to break into a grin,

the last one seen in sky-blue morning dress
astride his Samsung wide-screen.
Chances are someone else won't be starting with him.

*

The daymoon eases downward like a drop
of condensation, and golf caps advertising
legendary local names are doffed, then someone coughs,

clicks off the dawning chorus of his watch.
The secret of good comedy.

The way the horizon nearly stops
the moon's outstretched communion tongue,
like a punchline momentarily forgotten.

To a Fault: Poems

Robert Creeley

[from Robert Creeley's On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay, University of California, 2006]

Later (Wrightsville Beach)

Crusoe again, confounded, confounding purposes,
cruising, looking around for edges of the familiar,
the places he was in back then,

wherever, all the old sand and water.
How much he thought to be there he can't remember.
Shipwreck wasn't thinkable at least until

after it happened, and then he began at the edge,
the beach, going forward, backward, until he found the place again.
Even years slipped past us in the background.

The water, waves, sand, backdrop of the houses,
all changed now by the locals, the tourists,
whoever got there first and what they could make of it.

But his story is real too, the footprint, the displacement
when for the first time another is there, not just imagined,
and won't necessarily agree with anything, won't go away.

On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay

Peter Gizzi

[from Peter Gizzi's The Outernationale, Wesleyan, 2007]

Stung

A child I became a question
sitting on the grass.
To be told how lucky I am.
An open field.
This corporeal expanse
was a body too
in silver magnetism.
If I became this light
it wasn't luck. It was easy.
Bells falling away
along the divide of night.
Along the divide of night
an old face. A sorry dormer
leaning in askew
below the incoming thunder.
This was true and even if ever
I ran away. I ran
away. Above everything
I held one true thing.
This scene moved through me,
a seesaw. A picture
inside a question inside
the coming night.
These trees rang
round my head, shored
up the sky. I went on
and on like a trial balloon
over the houses. Over
the roofs. Over my head.

*

To remember correctly
the color of pale grass in March,
its salt hay blonde flourish.
To see it as it was,
faded cloth, mute trumpet,
the seam inside a day
the sun climbs.
Simple the life of the mind
standing outside in the grass
in March. Outside memory.
Spring interrupts
one cardinal monody
transmuted by a signal red
developed against
a draining blue horizon.
To want to go there
and to have been there
and to be there now.
This walking right now
by a river, simple and not so clear
when transcribing this
unstable multiplying narrative spring.
It can't be called anything.
We too are sprung and wound
with evolution. I want to say.
That's it: love. Not spring.
I have felt it also
in quilted drowning snow
under the sheets
in a clanking house.
Clank, I love you.
Clank. Not spring.
Glossy grass wigging
in a brightening sky.
The thrill of hair
standing on my limbs.

*

To be and not to understand.
To understand nothing
and be content
to watch light against
leaf-shadowed ground.
To accept the ground.
To go to it as a question.
To open up the day inside the day,
a bubble holding air
bending the vista to it.
To be inside this thing,
outside in the grass place,
out in the day
inside another thing.

The Outernationale (Wesleyan Poetry)

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

[from Benjamin Alire Sáenz's Dreaming the End of War, Copper Canyon, 2006]

The Fifth Dream: Bullets and Deserts and Border (excerpt)

. . .

I am the man.
I see clearly. I am
awake now.
It is me. It has taken me
a long time to know this.
I am a Palestinian.
I am an Israeli.
I am a Mexican.
I am an American.
I am a busboy in a tall building
that is about to collapse.
I am attending a Seder and I am
tasting my last bitter
herb. I am a boy who has learned
all his prayers. I am bowing
toward Mecca in a house
whose roof will soon collapse
on my small frame.
I am a servant. I shine shoes
and wash the feet
of the rich. I am an illegal.
I am a Mexican who hates all Americans.
I am an American who hates all Mexicans.
I am a Palestinian who hates all Israelis.
I am an Israeli who hates all Palestinians.
I am a Palestinian Jew who hates himself.

I am dying of all this knowledge.
I am dying of thirst.
I am a river that will never know water again.
I am becoming dust.

*

I am walking toward my home.
Mexico City? Washington?
Mecca? Jerusalem?
I don't know. I don't know.

*

I am walking in the desert.

I see that I am reaching a border.



A bullet is piercing my heart.

Dreaming the End of War

Michael Dumanis

[from Michael Dumanis's My Soviet Union, University of Massachusetts, 2007]

Cancer Is a Disease of Animals

When she said she would rather cut
what was intimate out of her, out of her skin,
out of the frame she was in, cut it out,

her involvement with him, like a tumor,
when she said she would rather kill,
if not for shame, herself, than stay beside,

through the continuance on one damp sheet
of one more night, with him, that she'd rather die
than lay her shopworn body next to his again,

when she said, it's no use, we're like having a cancer
distend in and through me, he wanted to say,
as he cut, for propriety's sake, himself off

from the saying of it, it's a beautiful thing,
and she, not having heard him, did not ask,
why must you mumble so, which thing, and he,

she not having asked him, could not reply, cancer,
I find cancer beautiful, were I to choose
a terminal illness to be, I would cancer,

not cystic fibrosis, not me, psoriatic arthritis,
would cancer and not beriberi what have you,
had I some say in it. He would have liked

to mean by what he could not find the breath inside
the fog-and-wetness of his lungs enough to say,
the frenzy of it, cancer's sprawl and raw,

the spring of thing from nothing, the tense bloom
of the imperative of give like moss on wall,
forsythia on snow, like wall on ivy.

He would have liked give up to lunge at her,
give in to push, onto a pillow, back her face,
to pull give give into his throat her breath,

to rent her body for an endlessness,
to cover her and swell and hold and say,
to whisper hi there under her left breast,

to fog-and-wetness her and say and hold,
to mean by what he could not find the breath inside,
to say and say until all matter ceased.

My Soviet Union: Poems (Juniper Prize for Poetry)

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

[from Allison Adelle Hedge Coke's Blood Run, Salt, 2006]

Sunflower

Multitudes facing Sun,     our
rough, broad extremities near touching.

Simultaneously attending
to receive warm embrace.

To welcome flower, water
swells behind my broad head.

At night bows gently resting;
preparing to greet new morn, to

raise me full glory to greet
strengthening summit -- daily heliotropism.

Motor cells, pulvinus, flex stem
below bud until flower opens

my yellow shawl fringe,
exposes seed, welcomes bee,

forever-facing forward until my passing.

Trade Story from the wouth speaks our
venerated image, Inca Sun.

My seed plenishes.

Blood Run (Earthworks S.)

Ange Mlinko

[from Ange Mlinko's Matinées, Zoland, 1999]

The Difference Between a Ghost and an Angel

Harmless as couples the sense you get from this hiking trail for
natureloving neurologists (their mansions nearby); I touch nothing
as if in one of their living rooms, I've given our fig tree a haircut
for the journey up the street to cheaper digs: ho, there's a desk in the forest!
They say poison ivy trapped under your wedding ring's a common thing but
if I sit at it I'll come out a folksong about couples disappearing in the pines.
The Queen Anne's lace snowy dropped handkerchief of a larger, nameless
    winter;
staghorn sumac's dirty red; if loving you means I'll have to marry you I'll do it
and suddenly the past is reassured it led to the future
the difference between a ghost and an angel a wilderness
of cat and cat litter, leave dropping, mugs chipping, bottles, cans,
dirty dishes, laundry, garbage pails and dustballs.

You go to bed before me; I am too afraid
to touch things in the woods; but the new light after moving
stimulates blossoms in a flowering houseplant
the mania from the steroid in combination with
red wine, vivarin, tylenol and restoril the sleeping pill
I confess so much sap like the whites of eyes
where I lopped off whole branches made me think
that the tree was hurting, as an ancestor would've.
But since, dark green leaves have revived much and thrived.

In between it was maki, wakame, and red bean ice cream
across from the shark tank, should an evening dress
be make of shark the remora would come with an attachment
patterned like a brake pad to belly up blissfully for a snooze
while the eel looked on, perpendicular to sleep
as passed by the crowd going to the Portuguese saint's day fair; after Mass
and dinner out and Shakespeare didn't blot, so rot, you cop;
we are one under the weather; come eat your sandwich.

Matinees

2008

a 40-second video of 2008 from Eirik Solheim

Linda Gregerson

[from Linda Gregerson's Waterborne, Houghton Mifflin, 2002]

A History Play

Months later — I’d been cleaning
                            my desk —
                these bits of gold foil spilled to the ground

a second time, five-petaled blossoms of public
                            gaud
                unloosed from the folded playbill as in

August from the heavens at the Swan, Act
                            Five,
                to mark the child Elizabeth’s birth.

The old queen has been put aside (I am not
                            such a truant as not
                to know), the new one’s doomed (the language

I have lived in), the girlchild is herself
                            a sign of grace
                withheld. But look at these sumptuous

velvets with their branchwork and encrusted
                            pearl,
                you’d think the hand of death would be afraid

to strike. That’s wrong. You’d think
                            that death
                had held the needle and dispensed the worm-

wrought thread. The players will be wanting their late
                            supper soon, while
                we — we two and our two girls —

set out across the footbridge on our way back
                            home.
                The waterfowl will be asleep — they’re sleeping

already — their willow-strewn and fecal
                            island silent
                in the summer night. The past that for a moment

turned, backlit, thick
                            with presence, as though
                leading us somehow, in its very

inadvertence giving way to this
                            slight stench
                beneath a moon-washed bridge, the past

that has a place for us will know us by
                            our scattered
                wake. (A strange tongue makes) And morning

meanwhile yet to come (my cause
                            more strange):
                the girls will have hot chocolate with their toast

and eggs. The play? (which we will talk about) Tenacious
                            in its
                praise and fierce in its elisions. So

father, mother (older than the cast-off queen), two
                            girls: an open book.
                And spilling from the binding, gold.

Waterborne: Poems

Allen Grossman

[from Allen Grossman's Descartes' Loneliness, New Directions, 2007]

Rain on a Still Pond

She's come. -- Suddenly the room where I sit
feels emptier than before. If I look up now,
I will see her standing in the open door
gazing in toward me with her question.
And I am less because she's here, not more.

It is as when, on a summer afternoon,
raindrops begin to fall in utter silence
on a still pond. And a canoeist out there
lifts up his eyes and sees, looking at
the water, how water is falling into water.

A new solitude, until that moment
not known -- it is the empty universe
of her voice -- passes into my heart,
like vanishing into water. She says,
"When you return to the shore, canoeist,

and are rested from your journey, remember me.
Among the histories of rain I linger to hear,
I linger to hear your answer to my question:
How do you merit to live so long?"
Then I say to her: "Dilectissima, it is as when

the sky darkens imperceptibly and a wind
moves slowly, as great things do, high up in
trees at the shore, not yet touching the surface
of the still pond. And then one raindrop falls
on the still water, without sound, and makes a circle.

First one drop falls and makes a circle. Then
another, at a distance. The first circle is
larger than the second at the moment of
the appearance of the second, and lingers.
Then the pond is stricken by a third raindrop.

The second circle grows large. But the first
raindrop of the shower has disappeared.
A big wind descends upon the pond.
Time is told telling of our lives, each of us
appearing and disappearing." Once more

I hear her question. Or is it the wind.
"But how do you merit to live so long?"
And then she vanishes, water into water.
Turning from the door I sit alone
once more. But this time taught, as by a daughter.

Descartes' Loneliness

Visit Reginald Shepherd's blog for thoughtful remarks on Grossman and Shepherd's favorite Grossman poems.

John Hollander

[from John Hollander's Movie Going, and Other Poems, Atheneum, 1962]

Off Marblehead

A woeful silence, following in our wash,
fills the thick, fearful roominess, blanketing
      bird noise and ocean splash; thus always
           soundlessly, rounding the point we go

gliding by dippy, quizzical cormorants.
One black maneuver moving them all at once,
      they turn their beaks to windward then, and,
           snubbing the gulls on the rocks behind them,

point, black, a gang of needles against the gray
dial sky, as if some knowledge, some certainty
      could now be read therefrom. And if we
           feel that the meter may melt, those thin necks

droop, numbers vanish from the horizon when
we turn our heads to scribble the reading down
      on salty, curled, dried pages, it is
            merely our wearied belief, our strained and

ruining grasp of what we assume, that blurs
our eyes and blears the scene that surrounds us: tears
      of spray, the long luff's reflex flapping,
            crazy with pain, and the clenching sheet,

and, looming up, Great Misery (Named for whose?
When?) Island. Groaning, jangling in irons, crews
      of gulls still man a rolling buoy not
           marked on our charts. Overhead, the light

(impartial, general, urging of no new course)
spares no approving brightening for the sparse
      and sorry gains of one we hold to
           now, ever doubting our memory. But

no matter -- whether running before the wind
away for home, or beating against the end
      of patience, towards its coastline, still the
           movement is foolishly close to one of

flight, the thick, oily clouds undissolving, crowds
of sea birds, senseless, shrill, unappeased, no boats
      about, and, out to sea, a sickening,
           desperate stretch of unending dark.

Movie-Going, and Other Poems

Barbara Guest

[from Barbara Guest's The Red Gaze, Wesleyan, 2005]

Freed Color

The branches are placed in a wet cloth,
clover reaches out.

They cannot locate a blue vine.
Purple fills the agenda. Red is on the plant,
the setting of a hibiscus tree.
They are warned not to linger in the purple shade.

Are these bitter colors? Are they accompanied
by rhyme to cheer them when they cross
into that land where color is rare?

They hasten to make use of freed color
who bends to no one,
who dwells in a tent like rhythm
continuously rolled.

To stop the riot of color, to hasten the quiet paucity of rhythm,
to sleep when it is time.

And doors open into a narrow surprise.
The jingle of crystal follows you everywhere,
even into the whistling corridor.

The Red Gaze (Wesleyan Poetry)

Mark Haddon

[from The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea, Mark Haddon, Vintage, 2006]

Green

Horace Odes I:4

Spring and warm winds unlock the fist of winter.
Winches haul dry hulls down the beach.
The ploughman and his animals
no longer love the stable and the fire.
The frost no longer paints the fields white.

The moon is overhead. Cytherean Venus
dances with her girls. The Graces
and the spirits of the trees and rivers
stamp the earth while flaming Vulcan
tours the massive thunder-forges of the Cyclops.

It's time to decorate your oiled hair
with green myrtle or with flowers growing
from the soft earth. It's time to find a shady spot
and sacrifice a young goat to the woodland god.
Or kill a lamb if that is what he wants.

Death's sickly face appears at the doors
of shacks and palaces. Rich Sestius,
this short life makes a joke of long hopes.
Pluto's shadow hall, those ghosts
you read about in stories, and that final night

will soon be snapping at your heels.
And then you won't be throwing knuckle-bones
to win the job of drinking-master,
or ogling pretty Lycidas, who'll drive men wild
until he's big enough for girls.

The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea: Poems

Sandra McPherson

[from Sandra McPherson's A Visit to Civilization, Wesleyan, 2002]

Toy Soldier
          circa 1930

With the ethereal radio man,
his spinning wheel of fine wire,
and with the disheveled wounded,
who are legion, child, you play,
but your favorite is the warrior
whose hand is raised to smite
this gong with whatever
that musical utensil is called,
that weapon against gongs
that makes metal suffer
great shudders of urgent tone.
They swamp the jittery lull.
And see: As it would not be
in the symphony, the instrument
is shingled "Gas Alarm."

And when, child, you make
believe, the small gong swinging
in the current of your breath,
you imagine the performance,
whole round quavers ebbing,
and you know you should
envision the strangling mist.
But why, when you're safe?
The soldier hasn't struck it yet.
His mask's filtering eyes
match battered tin camp cups,
let him search the mud-green
blasted battle map, sigh in
no toxin. Toxin, tocsin,
you play with the names.

He is no toy Tchaikovsky,
but a child cannot know that yet.
The instant the alarmist's
duty becomes music,
it re-composes the world.
Except it save someone,
a whole symphony's
worth of men,
it sings without the slightest
resonance of the sublime.
Is there no sorrow with a toy?
Eventually there is,
but it may take year upon year
to reach that threshold
when the child amused
into manhood will volunteer.

A Visit to Civilization (Wesleyan Poetry)

Mark Strand

[from Mark Strand's Blizzard of One, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998]

A Suite of Appearances
(part III)

How it comes forward, and deposits itself like wind
In the ear which hears only the humming at first, the first
Suggestion of what is to come, how it grows out of itself,

Out of the humming because if it didn't it would die
In the graveyard of sound without being known, and then
Nothing would happen for days or weeks until something like it

Came back, a sound announcing itself as your own, a voice
That is yours, bending under the weight of desire,
Suddenly turning your language into a field unfolding

And all the while the humming can still be detected, the original
Humming before it was yours, and you lie back and hear it,
Surprised that what you are saying was something you meant,

And you think that perhaps you are not who you thought, that henceforth
Any idea of yourself must include a body surrounding a song.

Blizzard of One: Poems

Miguel Angel Asturias

[from Miguel Angel Asturias's Strong Wind, tr. Gregory Rabassa, Delacorte, 1968]

They became desperate as they faced the sea. Their quadrilateral lives were broken against the infinite curve of the horizon. They felt uncomfortable outside the quadrilateral of their daily lives, living in houses which were long dovecotes raised on stilts. Up above they slept, their rooms and their extended comforts. Below, basins to wash the sweat from their clothes, because what most passed through those washbasins was the sweat of a man, of a working beast. Below too, the kitchens, and the hammocks where they spent most of their lives. And the houses matched the shape of the farms where they worked, quadrilaterals which stretched out one after the other. Their horizon was formed by those green parallelograms covered with banana trees in geometric rows set at equal distances, and the houses in the so-called yards were wooden oblongs, dovecotes that were longer than they were wide. Outside and inside their houses they lived within the same geometric figure, harmless at first, but hostile and disturbing afterward. The sea, therefore, made them desperate. Their eyes followed a line that was different from that of the quadrilaterals in which they spent their monotonous lives, a geometric monotony that was nullifying them, always between boards, sometimes between the boards of a coffin, a quadrilateral that was also longer than it was wide, and boards too with the bills they owed the storekeeper, with nothing ever left over from what they earned with their work.

. . .

The Shaman dissolved him, picked him up with the tips of his fingers, as the trembling of his breathing blended with the small moans of a little old man and took him to the cave of bats, of bats made desperate by lice and the heat, unable to fly because they were asleep. Those wind bats who keep the wind rolled up in cobwebs in the web of their wings, and which they release once every hundred years, if the Shaman does not let it be released before. The hungry lice grew fat-bellied with blood as he passed through there, buzzing like a malaria mosquito, and from their eyes there emerged circles of sliced onion, circles and circles and circles, as if a stone had been thrown into each eye. His forehead was like a toasted leather headband. The hand of the Medicine Man drew the sticky sweat off his hair so that it would not fall into his senses, which he had daubed with a compost made of mint leaves.

STRONG WIND

Martha Ronk

[from Martha Ronk's Vertigo, Coffee House Press, 2007]

"I keep looking in the windows when I walk by"

When she crosses under the Gulf sign with her folded umbrella
        in the bright sun.
When she sees the limp hair of the swimmer.
When she holds her limp umbrella next to the limp dress.
Others have their morning routines, cayenne pepper in green tea,
a walk from hither to yon, repeated rituals of ruin
as if we mourn our own demise daily in the thick of it.
A book with photographs of crumbling columns,
stone facades broken into phantom bits,
an entire day given over to dust and shaking out the rain
from the spines of the umbrella, from the torn parka she put
        in the play.
I keep looking in the windows when I walk by hoping to see how
        to do it.
If I see the body I was looking for it is almost always mine.

Vertigo (National Poetry Series Books)

William Blake

[from William Blake's Milton: Book the First, 1804]

The Mundane Shell, is a vast Concave Earth: an immense
Hardend shadow of all things upon our Vegetated Earth
Enlarg'd into dimension & deform'd into indefinite space,
In Twenty-Seven Heavens and all their Hells; with Chaos
And Ancient Night; & Purgatory. It is a cavernous Earth
Of labyrinthine intricacy, twenty-seven folds of opakeness
And finishes where the lark mounts; here Milton journeyed
In that Region calld Midian, among the Rocks of Horeb
For travellers from Eternity. pass outward to Satans seat,
But travellers to Eternity. pass inward to Golgonooza.

Los the Vehicular terror beheld him, & divine Enitharmon
Call'd all her daughters, Saying. Surely to unloose my bond
Is this Man come! Satan shall be unloosd upon Albion

Los heard in terror Enitharmons words: in fibrous strength
His limbs shot forth like roots of trees against the forward path
Of Milton's journey. Urizen beheld the immortal Man

And Tharmas Demon of the Waters, & Orc, who is Luvah

The Shadowy Female seeing Milton, howl'd in her lamentation
Over the Deeps. outstretching her Twenty seven Heavens over Albion

And thus the Shadowy Female howls in articulate howlings

I will lament over Milton in the lamentations of the afflicted
My Garments shall be woven of sighs & heart broken lamentations
The misery of unhappy Families shall be drawn out into its border
Wrought with the needle of dire sufferings poverty pain & woe
Along the rocky Island & thence throughout the whole Earth
There shall be the sick Father & his starving Family! there
The prisoner in the stone Dungeon & the Slave at the Mill
I will have Writings written all over it in Human Words
That every Infant that is born upon the Earth shall read
And get by rote as a hard task of a life of sixty years
I will have Kings inwoven upon it, & Councellors & Mighty Men
The Famine shall clasp it together with buckles & Clasps
And the Pestilence shall be its fringe & the War its girdle
To divide into Rahab & Tirzah that Milton may come to our tents
For I will put on the Human Form & take the Image of God
Even Pity & Humanity but my Clothing shall be Cruelty
And I will put on Holiness as a breastplate & as a helmet
And all my ornaments shall be of the gold of broken hearts
And the precious stones of anxiety & care & desperation & death
And repentance for sin & sorrow & punishment & fear
To defend me from thy terrors O Orc! my only beloved!

Walter Murch

[from Michael Ondaatje's The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002]

I formulated this idea during The Conversation -- probably because we wound up taking so much away. It went from almost five hours to less than two.

As I began to eliminate things, I would have the feeling that I couldn't remove a certain scene, because it so clearly expressed what we were after. But after hesitating, I'd cut it anyway . . . forced to because of the length of the film. Then I'd have this paradoxical feeling that by taking away something I now had even more of it. It was almost biblical in its idea of abundance. How can you take away something and wind up with more of it?

The analogy I came up with was the image of a room illuminated by a bare blue lightbulb. Let's say the intention is to have "blueness" in this room, so when you walk in you see a bulb casting a blue light. And you think, This is the source of the blue, the source of all blueness. On the other hand, the lightbulb is so intense, so unshaded, that you squint. It's a harsh light. It's blue, but it's so much what it is that you have to shield yourself from it.

There are frequently scenes that are the metaphorical equivalent of that bulb. The scene is making the point so directly that you have to mentally squint. And when you think, What would happen if we got rid of that blue lightbulb, you wonder. But then were will the blue come from? Let's take it out and see. That's always the key: Let's just take it out and find out what happens.

So you unscrew the lightbulb . . . there are other sources of light in the room. And once that glaring source of light is gone, your eyes open up. The wonderful thing about vision is that when something is too intense, your irises close down to protect against it -- as when you look at the sun. But when there is less light, your eye opens up and makes more of the light that is there.

So now that the blue light is gone and the light is more even you begin to see things that are authentically blue on their own account. Whereas before, you attributed their blueness to the bulb. And the blue that remains interacts with other colours in more interesting ways rather than just being an intense blue tonality.

That's probably as far as you can go with the analogy, but it happens often in film. You wind up taking out the very thing that you thought was the sole source of an idea. And when you take it out, you see that not only is the idea still present, it's more organically related to everything else.

In Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the one thing that is never talked about is the reason, the real reason, that Raskolnikov killed the landlady. If Dostoevsky actually explained why he killed her, everything else would be minimized and it would not be as interesting and complex. It reminds me of something my father said when people spoke about his paintings. He related it to a comment Wallace Stevens made: that the poem is not about anything at all, the poem is what it is. It's not there to illustrate a point.

The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

A. E. Stallings

[from Asheville Poetry Review, issue 18 volume 15 no. 1, 2008]

Garden Findings

I found beneath the tangled stems and furls
Of peppermint, a string of seven pearls,

Perfect and translucent, white as milk,
Connected by a strand like spider silk,

Eggs of a kind -- resilient to the touch --
And wondered what had left this gleaming clutch

Here on the brink of warmth, with August done.
I thought of lizards dazzled in the sun

Or brilliantly enameled snakes, and since
The autumn was already dropping hints,

I took them in, and kept them moist and warm,
And peered inside to see the future form

Cloudy in those crystal balls. The catch
Was when I watched the brood begin to hatch --

Two probing horns, then with a sort of shrug
Out silvered the liquescence of a slug,

Devourer I had fought all summer long --
And everything I'd cherished had been wrong.

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C. D. Wright

[from C. D. Wright's Rising, Falling, Hovering, Copper Canyon, 2008]

But the son and call-him-Al actually did get back and make it to class on
     Monday
Está comiendo mi coco she phoned the friend
who had picked him up at the station
who had never heard the expression she was so pleased with herself for using
from a dated phrase      This phrase is never used in Mexico her friend assured
                                                                            He is still eating my head

If you give your fears a shape      her friend suggested
you break free of them      This was before the bad diagnosis
After she is assured he is back      from the sea
she concedes      He is going to be OK      He'll make his way
Recalls a woman she met at the women's prison      the literacy teacher
(not an inmate) who had several ex-husbands under her belt
and had one son (not by the federal judge) (that husband didn't hunt)
but by the one who sold indigenous rugs      the son from that marriage
A very fastidious boy      always in the shower always changing
from one white shirt into another      she worried about him
she came in the house one day and smelled squirrel
He swerved he said but still hit it      he thought it would be a pity
to leave in the road      so he brought it home      skinned and rubbed
its still soft body down with oil and rosemary      stuck it in the broiler

He'll be OK      she thought      this fastidious son      He'll make his way

During the time she knew he was on a bus      without a wallet      she knew
     this much
because he left a message on her machine      hurtling as Mexican buses tend
     to go
she could only say      Está comiendo mi coco      He is eating my head
                                                                                             He was gone

Rising, Falling, Hovering

Fady Joudah

[from Fady Joudah's The Earth in the Attic, Yale, 2008]

Morning Ritual

Every morning, after the roosters
Crow back whatever prayers were passed
Down to them that dawn
From the keeper of their order up in heaven,

I drink my coffee
To the sound of squealing pigs
Being bled to death
In the market up the road -- the same market

Where I buy my fresh bread
For my peanut butter and jam. The pigs
Are bled through an armpit wound.
You can see it coming throughout the day before,

Hogs tied sideways to the backs of bicycles,
Tight as a spine, going as far as the border
Where the price is right. You will pass them
On the asphalt to the town I get

The peanut butter and jam from. They know
The bikeways out of nowhere
And suddnely they're alongside your jeep.
I lie: only goats are taken to the border.

The goats are bled differently,
And skinning is harmless after slaughter:
All you do is a vertical skin-slit
Between the shinbone and Achilles tendon,

Stick a thin metal rod
Through it, up the thigh, pull it out
Then blow, mouth to hole, mouth to hole,
Until your breath dehisces

Fascia and dermis, reaching the belly:
Your hands
Should even out the trapped air.
Between blowing and tapping

The animal is tight as a drum.
Now the knife that slit the throat.
Who knows
What you'll need skin for.

The Earth in the Attic (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

White House response

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Scrabble

Scrabble a la JWT, courtesy of Tim Seidell.

Kelly Cherry

Read Kelly Cherry's essay, "Authority," in New Letters.

If you can obtain a copy of this issue, read Mary Jo Bang's splendid new 21st-century translation of the first five cantos of Dante's Inferno.

David Micah Greenberg

[from David Micah Greenberg's Planned Solstice, University of Iowa, 2003]

Schoolyard with Boat

       "The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper
       or teacher but also a windmill and a train."
       -- Walter Bejamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty"

Our horizon thickened, dropped lower like grain.
There was no grain. And it was dawn again.

Waves darted out of the snow, turned to wind.
The snow waved as out a flawed window.

The wind made odd furrows through the field.
There was no time between lines.

Dawn and not, reflected presently.
Culled, the snow overturned and was now.

What when not, repeated the wind. Children
pulled in a blind row against it.

The resilience of children grows
with the instability of progress.

When bright snow sheared and dulled
I believe no matter. No note guards the gate.

* * *

Negation in retrospect, although not prospectively
culls in 'scape' the grating of canvas or progress.

Not words alone pleased me, said the flag
lines will not meet. The white cord chimes on the pole.

Not words alone the flag hangs, knowing
held back, as uncertainty means negation

struck down, the corrective open to learning
is sustainable in ignorance.

A gull a prospective self
billeting in the wind is resistance, in a mind

knowing resistance and measuring in it
progress, self-iterative spanning. The gull sweeps

belief. But what learns? Not what is to be learned. What learns --
when snow folds on threshing snow

when the lesson is valuable
gain will not cull in loss, snow is a thorn of it.

The snow on brick chalks and thins.
Red lines and white are drawn together.

Children brace by succeeding each other
in the wind, eyes shut to glare.

The gull sweeps and its shadow into snow
furls -- a steel share

as snow is in breathing motion like a bird
shaking snow from crest.

Miseducation risks correction within its own
frame. A crop

is a decision of field. Harbinger of space, white winter,
work with me while I live. When I do not, do not work.

Planned Solstice (Kuhl House Poets)

Kay Ryan

[from Kay Ryan's The Niagara River, Grove Press, 2005]

Caps

People should be
open on top like a cup.
A piece of bread
should be able to sop
some of us up.
We should be milk-like
or like wine. We should
not have to be trying
to get our caps off all the time.
The storybook boy
attempts the simple gesture
of baring his head
for his emperor,
but another hat has appeared.
This happens over and over.
Who does not share
his despair of simplicity,
of acting clearly and with dignity?
And what pleasure can we find
in the caps, brightly feathered
and infinitely various,
that pile up so high they bury us?

The Niagara River: Poems (Grove Press Poetry)

Olena Kalytiak Davis

Harriet is a great blog, and the most recent blogging crew, particularly Olena Kalytiak Davis, Forrest Gander, Javier Huerta, and Linh Dinh, have been stupendous. If nothing else, read Olena and Forrest's recent posts:

Olena: "i don't want to craft jewels or even jewel boxes anymore. and i have already tried showing/shown my tools. now i guess i really am again asking: why build?"

Forrest: "If our perceptual experience is mostly palimpsestic or endlessly juxtaposed and fragmented; if events rarely have discreet beginnings or endings but only layers, duration, and transitions; if natural processes are already altered by and responsive to human observation, how does poetry register the complex interdependency that draws us into a dialogue with the world?"

another good reason to publish online

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt halts acquisitions

Robert Adamson

[from Robert Adamson's The Goldfinches of Baghdad, Flood Editions, 2006]

Walking by the River

He walked waist-deep
through his thoughts,
emotions, a tangle of vines
and tree-creepers.

His words were finches,
flying before him
as he swung his arms --
scrambled paragraphs.

A waterfall sounded
ahead of his walk,
chipped words cracked
with each step. He came to

a calm place, opulent phrases
in bloom: purple-fruited
pigface, the blackthorn's
blue-black sloe.


The Serpent

Twenty crows gathered on a branch,
bare in the early summer's heat.
We strung a bow from the willow tree

and used bamboo for arrows.
The afternoon thrummed with locusts.
Clouds at the end of the sky

were alive with thunder that shook
the corrugated iron. We were wet
with sweat -- it was a hundred degrees

that day. Granny said, hot as bloody Hades.
It was Christmas time -- the girls
were up for holidays -- and we were

playing under the verandah. The sun
spread a golden glow in the calm
before the gathering storm

as the first snake of the season
came slithering out of the fowl yard,
leaving us its red-checked skin.

The Goldfinches of Baghdad