the art of being :: anne coray
The fern in the rain breathes the silver message.
Stay, lie low. Play your dark reeds
and relearn the beauty of absorption.
There is nothing beyond the rotten log
covered with leaves and needles.
Forget the light emerging with its golden wick.
Raise your face to the water-laden frond.
A thousand blossoms will fall into your arms.
burning of the three fires :: jeanne marie beaumont
(June 30, France)
i
I set the cookbook on fire
by holding it close to the
reading lamp
ii
I began the reading lamp fire
by holding it close
to romance
iii
I lit the romance by
holding it
close to the cookbook
room temperature :: james richardson
That coffee you forgot to drink,
this light, eight minutes from the sun,
words I thought for a second
the hottest ever written.
the caterpillar :: robert graves
Under this loop of honeysuckle,
A creeping, coloured caterpillar,
I gnaw the fresh green hawthorn spray,
I nibble it leaf by leaf away.
Down beneath grow dandelions,
Daisies, old-man’s-looking-glasses;
Rooks flap croaking across the lane.
I eat and swallow and eat again.
Here come raindrops helter-skelter;
I munch and nibble unregarding:
Hawthorn leaves are juicy and firm.
I’ll mind my business: I’m a good worm.
When I’m old, tired, melancholy,
I’ll build a leaf-green mausoleum
Close by, here on this lovely spray,
And die and dream the ages away.
Some say worms win resurrection,
With white wings beating flitter-flutter,
But wings or a sound sleep, why should I care?
Either way I’ll miss my share.
Under this loop of honeysuckle,
A hungry, hairy caterpillar,
I crawl on my high and swinging seat,
And eat, eat, eat—as one ought to eat.
many-roofed building in moonlight :: jane hirshfield
I found myself
suddenly voluminous,
three-dimensioned,
a many-roofed building in moonlight.
Thought traversed
me as simply as moths might.
Feelings traversed me as fish.
I heard myself thinking,
It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears.
Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,
the usual footsteps above me.
Washed my face again with hot water,
as I did when I was a child.
tourists :: yehuda amichai
Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel’s Tomb and Herzl’s Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.
Once I sat on the steps by agate at David’s Tower,
I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists
was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. “You see
that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there’s an arch
from the Roman period. Just right of his head.” “But he’s moving, he’s moving!”
I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them,
“You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it,
left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”
Courtesy of MEM
altars of light :: pierre joris
If the light is the soul
then soul is what’s
all around me.
It is you,
it is around you too,
it is you.
The darkness is inside me,
the opaqueness of organs folded
upon organs–
to make light in the house of
the body–
thus to bring the
outside in,
the impossible job.
And the only place to become
the skin
the border, the inbetween, where
dark meets light, where I meets
you.
In the house of world the
many darknesses are surrounded
by light.
To see the one, we need
the other / it cuts both ways
light on light is blind
dark on dark is blind
light through dark is not
dark through light is movement
dark through light becomes,
is becoming,
to move through
light is becoming,
is all
we can know.
planting a sequoia :: dana gioia
for TH
All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.
In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth—
An olive or a fig tree-a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s
orchard,
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.
But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.
We will give you what we can — our labor and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of
bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.
And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother’s beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.
visitation :: eamon grennan
Last night you called me out to the December dark
to look up and see what neither of us had ever seen
before: a burnished flock of Canada geese, bent
into a flexed bow and heading south across a clear-
starred moonless sky in silence, winging it
to warmer quarters, and all lit up—like mystery,
I thought, a lit thing bearing nothing but the self
we see and savor but know no more the meaning of
than I know what in the cave of its fixed gaze
our cat is thinking. The geese were lit to the shade
of tarnished gold or dead oak leaves hanging still
in sunshine, or the color tall reeds have when
car-lights stream and splash over them in winter.
And they were—these beings moving as one—
a mystery to us: Why, we asked, their color, who
by daylight are simply black-winged shapes
quickening southwards across a sky-blue canvas?
How could they be lit from below like that, from
somewhere near where we stood on the earth
we shared with them, staring up, the earth that
for this inhabited minute or two must have been
giving off a light that made these creatures shine
for us who were there by chance, with no moonshine
to explain it? Then they’re gone, gone dark, gone on,
though in their aftermath the cold dark we stood
our ground in was for a little while neither cold
nor dark but a place of visitation, and we were in it.
I am! :: john clare
I am! yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest—that I loved the best—
Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil’d or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
graves we filled before the fire :: gabrielle calvocoressi
in memory of TH
Some lose children in lonelier ways:
tetanus, hard falls, stubborn fevers
that soak the bedclothes five nights running.
Our two boys went out to skate, broke
through the ice like battleships, came back
to us in canvas bags: curled
fossils held fast in ancient stone,
four hands reaching. Then two
sad beds wide enough for planting
wheat or summer-squash but filled
with boys, a barren crop. Our lives
stripped clean as oxen bones.
while writing :: noelle kocot
Someone inside says, “Get busy.”
But I’ve got appointments to keep,
I have an abstemious love of equations calculated quickly
While the tepid day melts into design.
And the high cheekbones of the beautiful life
Bear the loose look of a calendar by lamplight.
I search for patterns in everything.
I am tied in knots of comprehension.
I think, how useful it might be
To pierce all the hands of the earth
With an oath of pins encircling snarling planets
But talent and shallowness sewn together
Is nothing but a kerchief tied around a survivalist’s head,
And it helps to know the feet wriggling through a hole
In the universe will land for an instant
Upon the cushions of the dark,
And that after marching one doozy of a kilometer after another,
We each come upon the same poem scribbled in invisible ink
Taped to the door of a room
In which an austere justice is burning for us.
fork with two tines pushed together :: nick lantz
It’s fast and cool as running water, the way we forget
the names of friends with whom we talked and talked
the long drives up and down the coast.
I say I love and I love and I love. However, the window
will not close. However, the hawk searches
for its nest after a storm. However, the discarded
nail longs to hide its nakedness inside the tire.
Somewhere in Cleveland or Tempe, a pillow
still smells like M_____’s hair.
In a bus station, a child is staring
at L____’s rabbit tattoo. I’ve bartered everything
to keep from doing my soul’s paperwork.
Here is a partial list of artifacts:
mirror, belt, half-finished 1040 form (married, filing jointly), mateless walkie-talkie, two blonde eyelashes, set of acrylic paints with all the red and yellow used up, buck knife, dog collar, camping tent (sleeps two), slivers of cut-up credit cards, ashtray in the shape of a naked woman, pen with teeth marks, bottom half of two-piece bathing suit, pill bottles containing unfinished courses of antibiotics, bank statements with the account number blacked out, maps of London, maps of Dubuque, sweatshirts with the mascots of colleges I didn’t attend, flash cards for Spanish verbs (querer, perder, olvidar), Canadian pocket change, fork with two tines pushed together.
Forgetfulness means to be full
of forgetting, like a glass
overflowing with cool water, though I’d always
thought of it as the empty pocket
where the hand finds
nothing: no keys, no ticket, no change.
One night, riding the train home from the city,
will I see a familiar face across from me? How many times
will I ask Is it you? before I realize
it’s my own reflection in the window?
(Via SM, via poets.org)
you are not a statue :: mark yakich
And I am not a pedestal.
We are not a handful of harmless
scratches on pale pink canvas.
Today is not the day to stop
looking for the woman
to save you. What was once
ivory is wood. What was once
whalebone is cotton.
My coif and corset are duly
fastened, and your shirttail is
tied in a diamond knot.
You may be the giver
of unappreciated nicknames
and the devoted artist
who has given my still life
life. But we can never reach
each other’s standards.
You want to condemn me
to eternity. I want to make you
no more perfect than you
used to be. We are not
together, we are not alone.
the meaning of zero: a love poem :: amy uyematsu
—Is where space ends called death or infinity?
Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions
A mere eyelid’s distance between you and me.
It took us a long time to discover the number zero.
John’s brother is afraid to go outside.
He claims he knows
the meaning of zero.
I want to kiss you.
A mathematician once told me you can add infinity
to infinity.
There is a zero vector, which starts and ends
at the same place, its force
and movement impossible
to record with
rays or maps or words.
It intersects yet runs parallel
with all others.
A young man I know
wants me to prove
the zero vector exists.
I tell him I can’t,
but nothing in my world
makes sense without it.
air envelope :: catherine wagner
A skylight stippled
Wet, scatted
With translucent brown maple seedwings
I’m under that
I wrote it as if it were a poem
And my handy margin
Would profit me.
The notebook margin
Lends to me
Its frugal axis, asking
Nothing, determinist
Of route, but blandly so.
“I didn’t know.”
Push forward
The bag of skin
Scaffolded animated
And house at the same time
The hinge we turn on
Wrap around night
Becomes day, same page
We’re on it.
when I have fears :: john keats
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;–then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
Courtesy of KCK
“as we are so wonderfully done with each other” :: kenneth patchen
As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep
On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies
O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one
Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers
My hands are hallowed where they touched over your
soft curving.
It is good to be weary from that brilliant work
It is being God to feel your breathing under me
A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . .
Don’t let anyone in to wake us.
Courtesy of MEM
witness :: liz waldner
I saw that a star had broken its rope
in the stables of heaven—
This homeless one will find her home
in the foothills of a green century.
Who sleeps beside still waters, wakes.
The terrestrial hands of the heaven clock
comb out the comet’s tangled mane
and twelve strands float free.
In the absence of light and gravity,
slowly as dust, or the continents’ drift,
sinuous, they twine a text,
one letter to an eon:
I am the dawn horse.
Ride me.
anecdote of the jar :: wallace stevens
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
at a window :: carl sandburg
Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!
But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.
hawk :: molly fisk
They have ridden in the wagon all this first day, the memory
of last night on the hotel’s white sheets like birdsong in the air
around them. He glances at her face from time to time, half-hidden
under the straw bonnet, trying to understand how a girl he’s known
all his life could have turned into this woman, quiet on the seat
beside him or sometimes humming a little tune, looking so unremarkable
in her gingham dress covered with travel dust, sometimes
asking a question about the house he’s built her, what kind of porch,
how far is the spring and has he planted any trees yet, for fruit
or shade? He answers. He watches her hands folded in her lap
and notices her boot’s brown toe peeking out from under the skirt,
sometimes tapping as she hums. The shadow of her lashes
against her cheek. In his mind, the white waves of her skin
are breaking over him, her hair is loose across his face. He can’t
stop the wagon and take her into his arms. They have too far to go.
Then she turns to watch a hawk soaring above them and leans
into his shoulder, the straw hat grazing his jaw. Without speaking
he reaches his arm around her waist. She doesn’t start; her hand
covers his; the hawk dives into the grass just behind the creaking wagon,
and comes up with a wriggling snake. Her body tenses a little
and softens against him. Glad that snake didn’t spook the mules,
he says. Remember the ones in Potter’s Creek, swimming
with their heads full out of the water? I do, she says, and smiles.
I remember more than that, you boys splashing like drowning
oxen and the mosquitos biting so bad. It is afternoon. They will drive
until the darkness overtakes them and stop for the night.
free time :: catherine tufariello
Their shrieks careening dizzily between
Delight and outrage, the students in the yard
Are playing hard,
Though they have little room and nothing green
In their asphalt pen. Nothing but fences, bricks,
And at regulation height, a pair of hoops
From which gray loops
Vestigially descend. With graceful flicks
And swoops they pass, block, feint and argue fouls,
And all the while the staccato, meaty thwack—
Now quick, now slack—
Thrums on, a backbeat to their cheers and howls.
Three stories up, on her habitual perch,
A black-and-white cat observes the scene,
Brushing the screen
With her whiskers, as intent on scan and search
As though the swirl below were birds or fish.
In the cacophony, it seems she hears
The singing spheres,
Each ear a separately tuning radar dish.
I join her at the window, and together
We watch the game until the tardy bell,
Whose clanging knell
Recalls them, some still wrangling over whether
The last shot counted. In the sudden peace,
A handyman, belt slung with rules and hammers,
Appears and clambers
Onto the gym roof. While a scrawl of geese
Ripples on windy gray in ragged flight,
He gathers up the balls that got away
And spent the day
Aimlessly free—red, orange, purple, white—
And punts them, in bright arcs, back into play.
messiah (christmas portions) :: mark doty
the sun has long been set :: william wordsworth
The sun has long been set,
The stars are out by twos and threes,
The little birds are piping yet
Among the bushes and 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 June
With that beautiful soft half-moon,
And all these innocent blisses?
On such a night as this is!
common measures :: anne coray
If you listen long to the waves
you will learn to measure distance,
broad strum of wind from the valley,
short pluck and pick from the lake’s edge.
Those mornings when a wing of light
glides up above the bay we watch.
We talk: nothing much. Last night was cool.
The lake is calm. We’ve berries still to harvest.
Dinner: potatoes, grouse, and lettuce and dill
from the garden. Preparing it, I ask,
“Is meaning synonymous with worth?” “Some questions,”
says my husband, “sure make a slow salad.”
September twenty-fourth. The swans and geese are leaving.
Which ones fly first? Are they nervous or wiser?
To the north, a joining of snow
to mountains more luminous than a church.
Port Alsworth: one hundred resident Baptists.
We’re thirteen miles away, and staying. In summer,
dust from the airstrip toils upward and stalls;
a pterodactylic signature of souls.
History’s full of false holds, like this lake
dubbed over, named for Clark. He only passed through once,
with a reporter. Qizhjeh Vena,
the Dena’ina called it. “Many peoples gather.”
We live on sacred ground. Brown Carlson, long gone,
buried his first wife on this plot, and up the hill
a circle of stones for my brother Paul.
O curse us spirits, if we so close, not visit.
Mountain cloud, solo drummer. We can’t beat joy out.
It comes sometimes in the form of color:
rose on scarp and peak just west of Copper,
backdrop rhythm of sky, blue-violet.
Soon it will snow, and rosehips outliving the last
glow of summer won’t survive the storms. Memory,
dried stem, works hard to remember them, like breath,
urging the late night coals to a color almost translucent.
turn of a year :: joan houlihan
This is regret: or a ferret. Snuffling,
stunted, a snout full of snow.
As the end of day shuffles down
the repentant scurry and swarm—
an unstable contrition is born.
Bend down. Look into the lair.
Where newborn pieties spark and strike
I will make my peace as a low bulb
burnt into a dent of snow. A cloth to keep me
from seeping. Light crumpled over a hole.
Why does the maker keep me awake?
He must want my oddments, their glow.
the radio animals :: matthea harvey
The radio animals travel in lavender clouds. They are always chattering, they are always cold. Look directly at the buzzing blur and you’ll see twitter, hear flicker—that’s how much they ignore the roadblocks. They’re rabid with doubt. When a strong sunbeam hits the cloud, the heat in their bones lends them a temporary gravity and they sink to the ground. Their little thudding footsteps sound like “Testing, testing, 1 2 3″ from a far-away galaxy. Like pitter and its petite echo, patter. On land, they scatter into gutters and alleyways, pressing their noses into open Coke cans, transmitting their secrets to the silver circle at the bottom of the can. Of course we’ve wired their confessionals and hired a translator. We know that when they call us Walkie Talkies they mean it scornfully, that they disdain our in and outboxes, our tests of true or false.
a retired farmer working as a greeter at wal-mart :: leo dangel
The store went up last year outside of town.
There was a cornfield where I’m standing now,
smiling, saying hello, and handing out ads
for plastic purses, towels, and microwaves.
The job doesn’t pay much, but neither did farming.
Pete, my old neighbor, wearing clean overalls,
comes in. I say, “Hey, you lazy fart, I see
you’re taking a day off to loaf in town.”
And Pete says, “You should talk, getting paid
for standing around in an air-conditioned store.”
While we talk about the rain last night,
the possibility of early frost, the price of hogs,
a dozen customers pass by ungreeted,
and I feel uneasy about not doing my job.
In one way, it’s like farming – spending hours
on the tractor, with lots of time to daydream.
Now, I invent secrets I’d like to tell customers.
“Every third mineral water bottle is filled
with Russian vodka. Snakes have been found
in the cups of the imported brassieres.”
But I only say, “Hello, how are you,”
and send them on their way down the aisles,
which are nothing like rows of corn.
the dandelion :: vachel lindsay
O dandelion, rich and haughty,
King of village flowers!
Each day is coronation time,
You have no humble hours.
I like to see you bring a troop
To beat the blue-grass spears,
To scorn the lawn-mower that would be
Like fate’s triumphant shears.
Your yellow heads are cut away,
It seems your reign is o’er.
By noon you raise a sea of stars
More golden than before.
