March 2012
31 posts
5 tags
Billy Collins, "Not Touching"
The valentine of desire is pasted over my heart and still we are not touching, like things in a poorly done still life where the knife appears to be floating over the plate which is itself hovering above the table somehow, the entire arrangement of apple, pear, and wineglass having forgotten the law of gravity, refusing to be still, as if the painter had caught them all in a rare moment of slow...
February 2012
24 posts
5 tags
Gwendolyn Brooks, "Kitchenette Building"
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”
But could a dream send up through onion fumes Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall, Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms
Even if we were willing to let it in, Had...
5 tags
Robert Frost, "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy...
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy...
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William Wordsworth, "The Sun Has Long Been Set"
The sun has long been set, The stars are out by twos and threes, The little birds are piping yet Among the bushes and the trees; There’s a cuckoo, and one or two thrushes, And a far-off wind that rushes, And a sound of water that gushes, And the cuckoo’s sovereign cry Fills all the hollow of the sky. Who would go `parading’ In London, `and masquerading’, On such a night of...
5 tags
Ezra Pound, "The Garden"
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anemia. And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of...
5 tags
Allen Ginsberg, "The Wild Orphan"
Blandly mother takes him strolling by railroad and by river —he’s the son of the absconded hot rod angel— and he imagines cars and rides them in his dreams, so lonely growing up among the imaginary automobiles and dead souls of Tarrytown to create out of his own imagination the beauty of his wild forebears—a mythology he cannot inherit. Will he later hallucinate his gods?...
5 tags
Albert Goldbarth, "The Sciences Sing a Lullabye"
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you’re tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance inside themselves without you. Go to sleep. Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch by inch America is giving itself to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch....
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Sappho, "Blame Aphrodite"
It’s no use Mother dear, I can’t finish my weaving You may blame Aphrodite soft as she is she has almost killed me with love for that boy (submitted by shipwrecker)
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Sharon Olds, "Greed and Aggression"
Someone in Quaker meeting talks about greed and aggression and I think of the way I lay the massive weight of my body down on you like a tiger lying down in gluttony and pleasure on the elegant heavy body of the eland it eats, the spiral horn pointing to the sky like heaven. Ecstasy has been given to the tiger, forced into its nature the way the forcemeat is cranked down the throat of the held...
4 tags
Diane Wakoski, "Inside Out"
I walk the purple carpet into your eye carrying the silver butter server but a truck rumbles by, leaving its black tire prints on my foot and old images the sound of banging screen doors on hot afternoons and a fly buzzing over the Kool-Aid spilled on the sink flicker, as reflections on the metal surface.
Come in, you said, inside your paintings,...
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Derek Walcott, "Love After Love"
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by...
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Margaret Atwood, "Girl Without Hands"
Walking through the ruins on your way to work that do not look like ruins with the sun pouring over the seen world like hail or melted silver, that bright and magnificent, each leaf and stone quickened and specific in it, and you can’t hold it, you can’t hold any of it. Distance surrounds you, marked out by the ends of your arms, when they are stretched to their fullest. ...
5 tags
Daphne Gottlieb, "Why Things Burn"
My fire-eating career came to an end when I could no longer tell when to spit and when to swallow. Last night in Amsterdam, 1,000 tulips burned to death. I have an alibi. When I walked by your garden, your hand grenades were in bloom. You caught me playing loves me, loves me not, metal pins between my teeth. I forget the difference between seduction and arson, ignition and cognition....
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Pablo Neruda, "Absence"
I have scarcely left you When you go in me, crystalline, Or trembling, Or uneasy, wounded by me Or overwhelmed with love, as when your eyes Close upon the gift of life That without cease I give you. My love, We have found each other Thirsty and we have Drunk up all the water and the Blood, We found each other Hungry And we bit each other As fire bites, Leaving wounds in us. But wait for me, Keep...
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Sophie Hannah, "Pessimism For Beginners"
When you’re waiting for someone to e-mail, When you’re waiting for someone to call – Young or old, gay or straight, male or female – Don’t assume that they’re busy, that’s all.
Don’t conclude that their letter went missing Or they must be away for a while; Think instead that they’re cursing and hissing – They’ve decided you’re venal and vile,
That your eyes should be pecked by an eagle. Oh, to...
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Frank O'Hara, "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 thinking of flutes I miss you always when I go to the beach the sand is wet with tears that...
5 tags
Li-Young Lee, "A Story"
Sad is the man who is asked for a story and can’t come up with one.
His five-year-old son waits in his lap. Not the same story, Baba. A new one. The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.
In a room full of books in a world of stories, he can recall not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy will give up on his father.
Already the man lives far ahead, he sees the day this boy will go....
4 tags
Laurie Kutchins, "Prelude"
All day long it has snowed and rained and snowed. I kept a fire going in a stone hut under the green apron of an old pine that has seen so much more than this. When it snowed the mud of the road whitened, and I sensed how something near death grows toward an ancient silence, how like a newborn it begins to shine with the loss of markings. The snow worked hard to cover wheel and animal tracks, to...
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Sylvia Plath, "Event"
How the elements solidify! —- The moonlight, that chalk cliff In whose rift we lie Back to back. I hear an owl cry From its cold indigo. Intolerable vowels enter my heart. The child in the white crib revolves and sighs, Opens its mouth now, demanding. His little face is carved in pained, red wood. Then there are the stars - ineradicable, hard. One touch : it burns and sickens. I cannot...
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C. P. Cavafy, "The City"
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead. How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them...
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Hassan Najmi, "The War"
I seek a safe place For my mother’s scent And I hide the rose in my blood.
Silently My mother came to me in sleep. She kissed my forehead And placed salt under the pillow.
Electrocuted sky. And the ground is sprouting With the martyr’s blood. I see my mother’s face. I saw it on the train that passed today Loaded with the dead.
Translated by Khaled Mattawa
(source; submitted...
4 tags
W. S. Merwin, "Thanks"
Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water thanking it smiling by the windows looking out in our directions back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you...
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Samuel Beckett, "Cascando"
1 why not merely the despaired of occasion of wordshed
is it not better abort than be barren
the hours after you are gone are so leaden they will always start dragging too soon the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want bringing up the bones the old loves sockets filled once with eyes like yours all always is it better too soon than never the black want splashing their faces saying...
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Charles Bukowski, "The Laughing Heart"
your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life...