January 2012
1 post
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Keith Douglas, "How to Kill"
Under the parabola of a ball, a child turning into a man, I looked into the air too long. The ball fell in my hand, it sang in the closed fist: Open Open Behold a gift designed to kill. Now in my dial of glass appears the soldier who is going to die. He smiles, and moves about in ways his mother knows, habits of his. The wires touch his face: I cry Now. Death, like a familiar, hears ...
December 2011
37 posts
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Billy Collins, "Dancing Toward Bethlehem"
If there is only enough time in the final minutes of the twentieth century for one last dance I would like to be dancing it slowly with you, say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel, my palm would press into the small of your back as the past hundred years collapsed into a pile of mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes just as the floor of the nineteenth century gave way and disappeared in a cloud...
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Charles Bukowski, "8 count"
from my bed I watch 3 birds on a telephone wire.
one flies off. then another.
one is left, then it too is gone.
my typewriter is tombstone still.
and I am reduced to bird watching.
just thought I’d let you know, fucker. (submitted by undecidedname)
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Ruth Fainlight, "Moving"
Sit down among the boxes and write a poem, he told me; obedient, I’m writing. Moving house, he said, is such an ordinary thing to do—a regular activity, especially for you—no obligation to unpack at once or be too dutiful. Find a vacant corner and there among half-empty cartons spilling crumpled paper, piles of sofa cushions and rolled-up carpets, dining chairs like acrobatic couples or swimmers,...
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Emily Dickinson, "XXIV"
A narrow fellow in the grass Occasionally rides; You may have met him, — did you not, His notice sudden is. The grass divides as with a comb, A spotted shaft is seen; And then it closes at your feet And opens further on. He likes a boggy acre, A floor too cool for corn. Yet when a child, and barefoot, I more than once, at morn, Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash Unbraiding in the sun, — When,...
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W. H. Auden, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud"
When there are so many we shall have to mourn, when grief has been made so public, and exposed to the critique of a whole epoch the frailty of our conscience and anguish, of whom shall we speak? For every day they die among us, those who were doing us some good, who knew it was never enough but hoped to improve a little by living. Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished to...
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Ursula Askham Fanthorpe, "BC: AD"
This was the moment when Before Turned into After, and the future’s Uninvented timekeepers presented arms. This was the moment when nothing Happened. Only dull peace Sprawled boringly over the earth. This was the moment when even energetic Romans Could find nothing better to do Than counting heads in remote provinces. And this was the moment When a few farm workers and three Members of an...
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Stephen Dobyns, "Getting Used to It"
He walks his arc from dark to dark and now the time has come to consider his maturity, what others might call his old age, even his declining years.
It rests beside him on a park bench and others might think it’s a gorilla suit with wooden teeth and the fur falling out in clumps. But of course he knows better.
This is wisdom in disguise, he thinks, this is my accumulated credibility. Nice...
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Mark Strand, "Lines for Winter"
Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself— inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be able for once to lie down under...
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Alice Lyons, "Developers"
Greed got in the way. We built a fake estate. Levinas said to see ourselves we need each other yet doorbells, rows of them, glow in the night village a string of lit invitations no elbow has leaned into (both arms embracing messages). Unanswered the doors are rotting from the bottom up. It’s another perplexing pothole in our road, loves. Hard core from the quarry might make it level, hard core and...
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Langston Hughes, "50/50"
I’m all alone in this world, she said, Ain’t got nobody to share my bed, Ain’t got nobody to hold my hand— The truth of the matter’s I ain’t got no man. Big Boy opened his mouth and said, Trouble with you is You ain’t got no head! If you had a head and used your mind You could have me with you All the time. She answered, Babe, what must I do? He said, Share your bed— And your money,...
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Gary Snyder, "For the Children"
The rising hills, the slopes of statistics lie before us. the steep climb of everything, going up, up, as we all go down. In the next century or the one beyond that, they say, are valleys, pastures, we can meet there in peace if we make it. To climb these coming crests one word to you, to you and your children: stay together learn the flowers go light.
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Lily Brown, "We're in the Ocean, Or I'm Alone"
Repetition smudges in. The lake sets beneath a bird- turned sky. I balance water, rock, flat- topped dirt, the bone I’ve become. Back home, wind throws a tree on the van out front, air goes glassy and sharp. I point to a building, hit brick. Consistent animal, it’s elemental, how we feel. Do you know you’re a photo graph, mapped to a flash?
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Marianne Moore, "The Icosasphere"
In Buckinghamshire hedgerows the birds nesting in the merged green density, weave little bits of string and moths and feathers and thistledown, in parabolic concentric curves and, working for concavity, leave spherical feats of rare efficiency; whereas through lack of integration, avid for someone’s fortune, three were slain and ten committed perjury, ...
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Wendell Berry, "Sabbaths 1998, VII"
There is a place you can go where you are quiet, a place of water and the light on the water. Trees are there, leaves, and the light on leaves moved by air. Birds, singing, move among leaves, in leaf shadow. After many years you have come to no thought of these, but they are themselves your thoughts. There seems to be little to say, less and less. Here they are. Here you are. Here as though gone....
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Lawrence Sail, "Nativity"
They will not be distracted—kings flipping open jewelled lids, shepherds bent towards the crib, the animals safe in their soft gazing. They seem too blithe, quite unaware of looming night, as if aloof under the gleaming fish-scale roof, as if blind to the world’s cares. Yet they know how we would miss their wise and quiet attentiveness: calm as sleeping doves, they bless the darkness where...
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W. S. Di Piero, "Chicago and December"
Trying to find my roost one lidded, late afternoon, the consolation of color worked up like neediness, like craving chocolate, I’m at Art Institute favorites: Velasquez’s “Servant,” her bashful attention fixed to place things just right, Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait,” whose fishy fingers seem never to do a day’s work, the great stone lions outside monumentally...
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Katie Donovan, "Yearn On"
I want you to feel the unbearable lack of me. I want your skin to yearn for the soft lure of mine; I want those hints of red on your canvas to deepen in passion for me: carmine, burgundy. I want you to keep stubbing your toe on the memory of me; I want your head to be dizzy and your stomach in a spin; I want you to hear my voice in your ear, to touch your face imagining it is my...
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Muriel Rukeyser, "Night Feeding"
Deeper than sleep but not so deep as death I lay there dreaming and my magic head remembered and forgot. On first cry I remembered and forgot and did believe. I knew love and I knew evil: woke to the burning song and the tree burning blind, despair of our days and the calm milk-giver who knows sleep, knows growth, the sex of fire and grass, renewal of all waters and the time of the stars and the...
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Brenda Shaughnessy, "Inappropriate Dreams"
I can’t tell you how often. You in the grocery store embarrassing everyone with the lettuce. Elsewhere, food in the file folders. It’s not supposed to be there, get it? Another time you were rolling down a hill like a blueberry rolling toward me, a bear who will eat anything this time of year but wants just you. Then you are not you but the plum of a pebble that I skipped into the lake and found...
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Eamon Grennan, "Untitled"
Back they sputter like the fires of love, the bees to their broken home Which they’re putting together again for dear life, knowing nothing Of the heart beating under their floorboards, besieged here, seeking A life of its own. All day their brisk shadows zigzag and flicker Along a whitewashed gable, trafficking in and out of a hair-crack Under wooden eaves, where they make a life for themselves...
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Walt Whitman, "Poets to Come"
Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known, Arouse! for you must justify me.
I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along...
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Ina Rousseau, "Eden"
Somewhere in Eden, after all this time, does there still stand, abandoned, like a ruined city, gates sealed with grisly nails, the luckless garden? Is sultry day still followed there by sultry dusk, sultry night, where on the branches sallow and purple the fruit hangs rotting? Is there still, underground, spreading like lace among the rocks a network of unexploited lodes,...
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Joelee Dekker, "Deertracking"
If not to split this armor through and through, if not to fletch this quiver of arrows with tendons and capillaries, stake claim on ratchet knees and sweeps of bone— then to roam this November forest with the heft of them, bristle through the quiet hours having knitted these skeins entrelac, having gathered the cold away from the body. Out here we dress our forgettings in...
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Robert Frost, "Reluctance"
Out through the fields and the woods And over the walls I have wended; I have climbed the hills of view And looked at the world, and descended; I have come by the highway home, And lo, it is ended. The leaves are all dead on the ground, Save those that the oak is keeping To ravel them one by one And let them go scraping and creeping Out over the crusted snow, When others are sleeping. And the dead...
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Dylan Thomas, "Altarwise by Owl Light"
Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house The gentleman lay graveward with his furies; Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam, And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies, The atlas-eater with a jaw for news, Bit out the mandrake with to-morrows scream. Then, penny-eyed, that gentlemen of wounds, Old cock from nowheres and the heaven’s egg, With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,...
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Jacques Réda, "The Letter Scale"
One of the objects I’ve treasured most in my life Is this letter scale which, long ago, you gave me. I was an active correspondent at the time, Even sending lots of letters overseas. While still enjoying the pleasure of going to the post, I now had another: assessing exactly, in advance, At my counter, the cost of packets and envelopes, To which, price list in hand, I stuck my stamps. I use it...
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A. E. Stallings, "Containment"
So long I have been carrying myself Carefully, carefully, like a small child With too much water in a real glass Clasped in two hands, across a space as vast As living rooms, while gazes watch the waves That start to rile the little inland sea And slap against its cliffs’ transparency, Revise and meet, double their amplitude, Harmonizing doubt from many ifs. Distant frowns like clouds begin...
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Sharon Olds, "The One Girl at the Boys' Party"
When I take my girl to the swimming party I set her down among the boys. They tower and bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek, her math scores unfolding in the air around her. They will strip to their suits, her body hard and indivisible as a prime number, they’ll plunge in the deep end, she’ll subtract her height from ten feet, divide it into hundreds of gallons of water, the numbers...
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Michael Ondaatje, "The Cinnamon Peeler"
If I were a cinnamon peeler I would ride your bed and leave the yellow bark dust on your pillow. Your breasts and shoulders would reek you could never walk through markets without the profession of my fingers floating over you. The blind would stumble certain of whom they approached though you might bathe under rain gutters, monsoon. Here on the upper thigh at this smooth pasture neighbor to your...
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Siegfried Sassoon, "Grandeur of Ghosts"
When I have heard small talk about great men I climb to bed; light my two candles; then Consider what was said; and put aside What Such-a-one remarked and Someone-else replied. They have spoken lightly of my deathless friends, (Lamps for my gloom, hands guiding where I stumble,) Quoting, for shallow conversational ends, What Shelley shrilled, what Blake once wildly muttered …. How can...
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Olav H. Hauge, "Today I Saw"
Today I saw two moons, one new and one old. I have a lot of faith in the new moon. But it’s probably just the old.
(source; via yama-bato)
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Rainer Maria Rilke, "Sunset"
Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colours which it passes to a row of ancient trees. You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you, one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth, leaving you, not really belonging to either, not so helplessly dark as that house that is silent, not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing that turns to a star each night and climbs —-...
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Paul Goldman, "For This Morning"
I am present, everything I could ever ask for, I already have. All that I need do now is recite my favorite mantra: thank you, thank you, thank you… I am present.
(via rabbit-light)
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Alison Stone, "Sea Song"
Each night she lies patiently in fire, Blood thick, body dissolving. Dissatisfaction is religion. She plants it and prays. She cuts His meat and licks blood from the knife.
Some nights he stumbles Into her grief, which tries To drown him like an invisible well. He is a wolf with no teeth, He is a blind soldier Shooting everything, he is An ear of corn beneath the beaks of crows. If only sorrow...
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Mark Doty, "A Green Crab's Shell"
Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like— though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws’ gesture of menace and power. A gull’s gobbled the center, leaving this chamber —size of a...
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Maya Angelou, "Still I Rise"
You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I’ll rise. Did you want...