One Art (Elizabeth Bishop)

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something everyday. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing further, losing faster:
places and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The Tyger (William Blake)

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail (Anonymous)

I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
I saw a blazing comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud with ivy circled round
I saw a sturdy oak creep on the ground
I saw a pismire swallow up the whale
I saw a raging sea brim full of ale
I saw a Venice glass sixteen foot deep
I saw a well full of men’s tears that weep
I saw their eyes all in a flame of fire
I saw a house as big as the moon and higher
I saw the sun even in the midst of night
I saw the man that saw this wondrous sight.


Anonymous

The Material (Kay Ryan)

The ratio between the material Cornell collected and the material that ended up in his boxes was probably a thousdand to one. --Deborah Solomon, Utopia Parkway


Whatever is done
leaves a hole in the
possible, a snip in
the gauze, a marble
and thimble missing
from the immaterial.
The laws are cruel
on this point. The
undone can't be
patched or stretched.
The wounds last.
The bundles of
nothing that are
our gift at birth, the
lavish trains we
trail into our span
like vans of seamless
promise, like fresh
sheets in baskets,
are our stock. We
must extract parts
to do work. As
time passes, the
promise is tattered
like a battle flag
above a war we
hope mattered.

Tanka (Alexis Rotella)

Deep inside
the florist's truck
a swirl of pink blossoms
so long I've hidden
my love for you

The Last Class (Ellen Bryant Voigt)

Put this in your notebooks:
All verse is occasional verse.
In March, trying to get home, distracted
and impatient at Gate 5 in the Greyhound station,
I saw a drunk man bothering a woman.
A poem depends on its detail
but the woman had her back to me
and the man was just another drunk,
black in this case, familiar, dirty.
I moved past them both, got on the bus.

There is no further action to report.
The man is not a symbol. If what he said to her
touches us, we are touched by a narrative
we supply. What he said was, “I’m sorry,
I’m sorry,” over and over, “I’m sorry,”
but you must understand he frightened the woman,
he meant to rob her of those few quiet
solitary moments sitting down,
waiting for the bus, before she headed home
and probably got supper for her family,
perhaps in a room in Framingham,
perhaps her child was sick.

My bus pulled out, made its usual turns
and parted the formal gardens from the Common,
both of them camouflaged by snow.
And it as it threaded its way to open road,
leaving the city, leaving our sullen classroom,
I postponed my satchel of your poems
and wondered who I am to teach the young,
having come so far from honest love of the world;
I tried to recall how it felt
to live without grief; and then I wrote down
a few tentative lines about the drunk,
because of an old compulsion to record,
or sudden resolve not to be self-absorbed
and full of dread—
I wanted to salvage
something from my life, to fix
some truth beyond all change, the way
photographers of war, miles from the front,
lift print after print into the light,
each one further cropped and amplified,
pruning whatever baffles or obscures,
until the small figures are restored
as young men sleeping.

Morning (Billy Collins)

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dipinto evening,

then night with his notious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?

This is the best--
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso--

maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins--
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,

dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,

and, if necessary, the windows--
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.

The Second Coming (William Butler Yeats)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

Haiku 2 (Sonia Sanchez)

my bones migrate in
red noise like pinched wings
they stream white ashes.

Haiku (Sonia Sanchez)

There are things sadder
than you and I. Some people
do not even touch.

Fugue (Joy Manesiotis)

Sometimes I was in the body of the young boy.
Blond. Small. The King and Queen were with us. Cups,
lady slipper cups, our boat, deep red, and the membrane
sliding back, something moving toward me.

*

I saw the young Asian boy in the maroon Toyota. I saw
him push himself back in his seat, arm straight,
hand tightening on the wheel, trying on his future.
I saw the tension in his neck, the angle. I knew
he was going to hit me. I moved away. I saw the window,
its shape cut in the air, slide back: a clear membrane, it slid back
and the form advanced toward me, colorless, dense,
invisible, with volume, edges, a shape drawing steadily
toward me, my future approaching my present. I saw him
shift in his seat: I knew he would hit me. It was raining.
The rain was a choir. I steered my silver car
to another lane but he nosed in behind me.

*

Sometimes I was in the body of the young boy. We were
on the river. We were in the boat of lady slipper cups,
flat red fiberglass pontoons between us. We all faced
forward in our cups, pedalling, below the surface. The King
and the Queen were with us. The other boy was a man, dark,
maybe my brother. The Queen wore red velvet, her bodice tight
in red velvet, her black hair piled high on her head.
Head up, she sat still, facing forward. We moved down the river.
Sometimes
I was in the body of the young boy. Blond. An entourage
of vessels trailed us. The dark boy and I detached.
We pedalled out own cups, we shot through the rapids,
white water churning, and slid against black rocks
that leapt out of receding water. We tried
to knock each other over, vaulting
through the rapids, oars overhead.

*

I saw the red Toyota behind me. It was raining. The rain
was wind in the trees, white water. It was a set
of deep voices, drumming across the vocal chords
of wind and asphalt. It blurred the concrete, the cars
on all sides. I braked. The red Toyota didn’t.
The clear membrane slid open, the shape bore down,
It rocked to a halt, it hulked on my chest.

*

Sometimes I was in the body of the young boy.

Villanelle for D.G.B. (Marilyn Hacker)

Every day our bodies separate,
exploded torn and dazed.
Not understanding what we celebrate

we grope through languages and hesitate
and touch each other, speechless and amazed;
and every day our bodies separate

us farther from our planned, deliberate
ironic lives. I am afraid, disphased,
not understanding what we celebrate

when our fused limbs and lips communicate
the unlettered power we have raised.
Every day our bodies' separate

routines are harder to perpetuate.
In wordless darkness we learn wordless praise,
not understanding what we celebrate;

wake to ourselves, exhausted, in the late
morning as the wind tears off the haze,
not understanding how we celebrate
our bodies. Every day we separate.

Song (Brigit Pegeen Kelly)

Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.
All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it
Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing
The song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then
They lay back down again. In the night wind, the goat’s head
Swayed back and forth, and from far off it shone faintly
The way the moonlight shone on the train track miles away
Beside which the goat’s headless body lay. Some boys
Had hacked its head off. It was harder work than they had imagined.
The goat cried like a man and struggled hard. But they
Finished the job. They hung the bleeding head by the school
And then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything.
The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks.
The head called to the body. The body to the head.
They missed each other. The missing grew large between them,
Until it pulled the heart right out of the body, until
The drawn heart flew toward the head, flew as a bird flies
Back to its cage and the familiar perch from which it trills.
Then the heart sang in the head, softly at first and then louder,
Sang long and low until the morning light came up over
The school and over the tree, and then the singing stopped….
The goat had belonged to a small girl. She named
The goat Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, named it after
The night’s bush of stars, because the goat’s silky hair
Was dark as well water, because it had eyes like wild fruit.
The girl lived near a high railroad track. At night
She heard the trains passing, the sweet sound of the train’s horn
Pouring softly over her bed, and each morning she woke
To give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang
Him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats.
She brushed him with a stiff brush. She dreamed daily
That he grew bigger, and he did. She thought her dreaming
Made it so. But one night the girl didn’t hear the train’s horn,
And the next morning she woke to an empty yard. The goat
Was gone. Everything looked strange. It was as if a storm
Had passed through while she slept, wind and stones, rain
Stripping the branches of fruit. She knew that someone
Had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called
To him. All morning and into the afternoon, she called
And called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling
Like the feeling of the stones gauging the soft undersides
Of her bare feet. Then somebody found the goat’s body
By the high tracks, the flies already filling their soft bottles
At the goat’s torn neck. Then somebody found the head
Hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take
These things away so that the girl would not see them.
They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat.
They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear
Them say it was a joke, a joke, it was nothing but a joke….
But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have
Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they
Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job,
Whistling as they washed their large hands in the dark.
What they didn’t know was that the goat’s head was already
Singing behind them in the tree. What they didn’t know
Was that the goat’s head would go on singing, just for them,
Long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen,
Pail after pail, stroke after patient stroke. They would
Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees
Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There
Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,
The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call.
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

Elegy (Vijay Seshadri)

The ambulance is gone. The squall’s
ragged edge fingers
the fresh green stitchings on the alder trees.
Its belly cracks open and pours

through the timbered swale in back of the house
where, with the lights lit early,
the dangerous hours

of a slowly imploding
spring evening circle
the person left behind to answer the calls.

Friend, you’re in the hands of professionals now—
shaved and scoured,
black life mask strapped to your mouth,

ampules of glycerin, plasma
by the quart, blossoming in the branches
of your temporary yard, your eyes
reflecting the oscillating lines—

and your heart’s plush chambers fibrillate,
in distention darken and swell
three times their size,

swelling in one perpendicular
effort until they
collapse at last.
Friend, it grieves me that you’re breaking

your promise to take me hunting.
This fall, you said, on opening day,
when the alders

are nervous with change,
you’d come to my door and we’d drive
the Upper Bay Road to the blind.

The Uses of Sorrow (Mary Oliver)

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

Butter (by Linda Pastan)

You held the butter-
cup to my chin
and laughed: “get thee
to a buttery,”
chewing on a dandelion stem,
then tasting my
buttery fingers
one by one
and eyeing
my breasts as if
they too could,
bobbing, churn
pure milk to
butter.
Yellow dress and
flowers, yellow
hair, the world
was melting butter
sweet and slick,
your hands all yellow
with the spilling
sun, desire
like the heated
knife through
butter.

Encounter (Czeslaw Milosz)

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House (Billy Collins)

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.
When the record finally ends he is still barking,

sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton
while the other musicians listen in respectful

silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

This is what We Did With Our Lives (David Wyatt)

In the house we waited for rain, for days, to end.
We talked and slept, the yellow of the forsythia
never dimming, the only road to and from the yard
muddy but passable, we didn’t underestimate
our ability to leave at any moment, in the light
of dream or under remarkable circumstances:
the toppling of the door or the evasion of guilt.
Parents were dead, other siblings nowhere within reach
of the rare roses our mother planted before we were born.
A Bible sat on the frosted-glass table by the front window—
“over our heads” for so long, and now I flipped pages
constantly, while who could call me blameless and upright?
Dear sister, young we were not, though you often held my hand
when lightning, at night, near the porch, raised the ground from nothing.

Ever After: A Paradelle (Kim Addonizio)

He lies on his side like a glass knocked over.
He lies on his side like a glass knocked over.
Only a little sweetness left, poor boy.
Only a little sweetness left, poor boy.
Only his little lies, a glass-like sweetness.
Poor he, a left boy knocked over on side.

Now she loves him more, but won't come back.
Now she loves him more, but won't come back.
In dreams she cries and paints his face like a girl's.
In dreams she cries and paints his face like a girl's.
A girl's more in dreams. She won't like him now,
but loves his face. Come back, she paints and cries.

It rains and falls dark on the house they lived in together.
It rains and falls dark on the house they lived in together.
She is alone there, afraid when it falls and breaks over the roof.
She is alone there, afraid when it falls and breaks over the roof.
It is on the roof. Rains and falls. The house afraid
when it lived alone. There she breaks and falls over in dark.

Now, in the dark, he dreams.
She is like a sweetness in his side; she loves him back.
But it paints more lies. Afraid, his face won't come together.
Little boy lived there on and on alone, only a girl's poor roof
knocked over. When it breaks, the house cries like they left.
She rains. And a glass falls and falls.

Stings (Sylvia Plath)

Bare-handed, I hand the combs.
The man in white smiles, bare-handed,
Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,
The throats of our wrists brave lilies.
He and I

Have a thousand clean cells between us,
Eight combs of yellow cups,
And the hive itself a teacup.
White with pink flowers on it,
With excessive love I enameled it

Thinking ‘Sweetness, sweetness.’
Brood cells gray as the fossils of shells
Terrify me, they seem so old.
What am I buying, wormy mahogany?
Is there any queen at all in it?

If there is, she is old.
Her wings torn shawls, her long body
Rubbed of its plush—
Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.
I stand in a column

Of winged, unmiraculous women,
Honey-drudgers.
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.

And seen my strangeness evaporate,
Blue dew from dangerous skin.
Will they hate me,
These women who only scurry,
Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?

It is almost over.
I am in control.
Here is my honey-machine,
It will work without thinking,
Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin

To scour the creaming crests
As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.
A third person is watching.
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.
Now he is gone

In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.
Here is his slipper, here is another,
And here the square of white linen
He wore instead of a hat.
He was sweet,

The sweat of his efforts a rain
Tugging the world to fruit.
The bees found him out, molding onto his lips like lies,
Complicating his features.

They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,
With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?

Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her—
The mausoleum, the wax house.

Ode to Your Back (Gloria Vando)

The days wrap themselves around me
like worn shawls.
I am cold, always
on the point of shivering.

Nights come stunted and maimed,
undernourished children
with no place to go.

This night I dream of happy
endings: the hero, turbaned, rouged,
made up with heart-shaped lips, penciled
brows, married to the ingénue
to keep her safe because he loves
is not in love with her and

wake to find you and me
and the war-orphaned babies in London
who died from lack of touch
and my own chilled body moving,
moving in close to the heat

of your back. Your back.

The Garden (Louise Glück)

I couldn’t do it again,
I can hardly bear to look at it—

in the garden, in light rain
the young couple planting
a row of peas, as though
no one has ever done this before,
the great difficulties have never as yet
been faced and solved—

They cannot see themselves,
in fresh dirt, starting up
without perspective,
the hills behind them pale green,
clouded with flowers—

She wants to stop;
he wants to get to the end,
to stay with the thing—

Look at her, touching his cheek
to make a truce, her fingers
cool with spring rain;
in thin grass, bursts of purple crocus—

even here, even at the beginning of love,
her hand leaving his face makes
an image of departure

and they think
they are free to overlook
this sadness.

The Five Stages of Grief (Linda Pastan)

The night I lost you
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief.
Go that way, they said,
it’s easy, like learning to climb
stairs after the amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two. I passed you the toast—
you sat there. I passed
you the paper—you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed more familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining. What could I exchange
for you? The silence
after storms? My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string. In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
and bottles of sleep. I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in defective neon.
Hope was my uncle’s middle name,
he died of it. After a year I am still climbing,
though my feet slip
on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green in a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards: Acceptance,
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance,
its name in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting.
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I’ve ever known
or dreamed of. Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance. I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.

Origins and History of Consciousness (Adrienne Rich)

I.

Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon
sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,
dissected, their bird-wings severed
like trophies. No one lives in this room
without living through some kind of crisis.

No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.

Thinking of lovers, their bind faith, their
experienced crucifixions,
my envy is not simple. I have dreamed of going to bed
as walking into clear water ringed by a snowy wood
white as cold sheets, thinking, I’ll freeze in there.
My bare feet are numbed already by the snow
but the water
is mild, I sink and float
like a warm amphibious animal
that has broken the net, has run
through fields of snow leaving no print;
this water washes off the scent—
You are clear now
of the hunter, the trapper
the wardens of the mind—

yet the warm animal dreams on
of another animal
swimming under the snow-flecked surface of the pool,
and wakes, and sleeps again.

No one sleeps in this room without
the dream of a common language.

II.

It was simple to meet you, simple to take your eyes
into mine, saying: these are eyes I have known
from the first…. It was simple to touch you
against the hacked background, the grain of what we
had been, the choices, years…. It was even simple
to take each other’s lives in our hands, as bodies.

What is not simple: to wake from drowning
from where the ocean beat inside us like an afterbirth
into this common, acute particularity
these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching—
to wake to something deceptively simple: a glass
sweated with dew, a ring of the telephone, a scream
of someone beaten up far down in the street
causing each of us to listen to her own inward scream

knowing the mind of the mugger and the mugged
as any woman must who stands to survive this city,
this century, this life…
each of us having loved the flesh in its clenched or loosened beauty
better than trees or music (yet loving those too
as if they were flesh—and they are—but the flesh
of beings unfathomed as yet in our roughly literal life).

III.

It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,
dress, go out, drink coffee,
enter a life again. It isn’t simple
to wake from sleep into the neighborhood
of one neither strange nor familiar
whom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,
we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves
downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered
over the unsearched…. We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light.
I want to call this, life.

But I can’t call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall
where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.

The Savant of Sunflowers, The Apprentice of Roses (Diane Ackerman)

Something in a rose
knows to spread its roots
into a stable base,
how to shimmy up a trellis,
graft onto reliable stock,
open rich with scent,
and slowly unfold another
flush of tawny bloom.

While you’re away,
I miss the parts of me
that regrow with you:

the mischief elf, the sensual self,
the sonneteering ghost
who rides the flanks of night,
breathing time, sweating stars,
while memories swim
like constellations overhead.

I miss the serpentine Eve
who rarely doses, the attaché
that sometimes imposes,
all the sprites who sprint
through the high supposes,
the patient saint who aspires
to a heaven which encloses,
and, especially, the touched one
committed to the asylum
and penitentiary of roses.

Two (Martha Zweig)

Often they both could swear
they overhear their
deaths converse. But which is which?
And they can never make out the exact words.

Months seem to go by.
They hang new yellow cups on the
cupboard hooks. The dreaming
dog scrapes in the upstairs hall and they

know what that noise is. But
then the deaths resume their talk, talk,
just aside, benignly, one or the
other voice exactly like the other.

Whenever she thinks that now she will
leave him she must always also
imagine her death leaving his death,
how one will turn out

to be hers, it will get up
loosely and excuse itself from the other
one, which will be his. He
knows this is why she stays.

Obesity (Kathleen Peirce)

Reception is a gesture of the will
opening, one peach rose widening the light, or
rain finally taking the abandoned room,
the walls newly alive with water, and the ceiling
raining. It must have been happening a long time;
the random, jewel-colored bottles on the floor
swallowing the intermittent drops to a point approaching fullness,
then over full, and every surface here is changed, bigger,
touched too much by something wonderful
and ruinous. She would hardly tell you how bakery cakes call to her,
but look; the tiniest prettiest woman, a decoration
for a cake, was saved inside the cupboard by the sink. One arm
is raised. The smallest spider imaginable has linked her as an object
full of things, a strand at each hinge: shoulder,
elbow, wrist, and mouth, obedient to hunger, and the room falling in.

Art as Flirtation and Surrender (Mevlana Jalauddin Rumi)

In your light I learn how to love.

In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,

where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,

and that sight becomes this art.

You Can't Have It All (Barbara Ras)

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.

haiku (Sonia Sanchez)

There are things sadder
than you and me. Some people
do not even touch.

The Possibilities (Beckian Fritz Goldberg)

After a wife’s death a man may talk
to his horse with a great tenderness
as if, just this morning, he had tried on
her pink slipper. And if he has no horse
he may crack his window a little
wider when it lightly rains to confirm
the roofs and trees are made
of paper. If there is no rain
he may make himself a meal at midnight,
sweet artichokes and Danish cheese,
a glass of red wine. If there is
no red, then white. He may suck the knife
clean with his tongue. Later

lying awake he may hear the wild lung
of a motorcycle far off on a far road.
If there is no motorcycle, a dog
trying for any syllable in any known
language. Something falling suddenly in
the closet, according to some law.

Nearness in the dark is a kind of beauty
though it is only a lampshade, a shoulder
of the walnut chair. If there is no chair,
then a shelf. A shelf of books with the devil’s
violet fedora tossed on top. Or something
exotic from the sea, manta ray

like the pulse in the ball of his foot.
A man may walk ten steps behind
his life. It may be sorrow of fear.
He may see her back like two doves rushing
up where a boy has flung a handful
of pebbles. If no pebbles, leaves
where a masked prowler hunches, his belt of
lockpicks, his bag of velvet like the one
from which memory snatches. These are

the possibilities, the immaculate
like miracles which are nothing
in themselves, but in this world a sign
of angels, ghosts, supernatural beings
who watch us. Who listen. Who sometimes
helplessly let us stumble on
their pyramids, their crude observatories
or let us, generation after
generation, speak to the broken horse
of the human heart.

A Child Wakes in the Middle of the Night (Karen Benke)

Standing at my bed he whispers, Mama,
then grips my hand, explaining
You have to come quick—Right now.
It’s important, he says, leading me out the back door,
wind cartwheeling through wet grass
where he says I must go to help him
find the rock his father gave him, the one he dropped
into the make-believe pond he was fishing,
moonlight spilling into the redwoods
where I find myself wrapped in a white robe,
each of my tired uh-huhs confirming his belief
in the invisible world he insists I travel—
his young life overgrown with curiosity, Blackbird’s flight
a shadow I pray will protect him, as he finds his way
through the miles of stories he loves—
Not from a book, from your mouth, he demands,
asking if I’ll tell him how, when I was little
and couldn’t sleep, my mama let me retrace my steps
through a rainy garden, to find what I thought I had lost.

The Pear Tree (H.D.)

Silver dust
lifted from the earth,
higher than my arms reach,
you have mounted,
O silver,
higher than my arms reach
you front us with great mass;
no flower ever opened
so staunch a white leaf,
no flower ever parted silver
from such rare silver;
O white pear,
your flower-tufts
thick on the branch
bring summer and ripe fruits
in their purple hearts.

Just a quick note about the poem below

"The Photograph" was the first poem I ever explicated in a poetry course. I still have all my notes on it. What I love about this poem is its slow, dark quality. Voigt is known for her musicality, partially because she's trained as a pianist and mostly because of her poems. This blog's title comes from this poem, and the black background for the site. This having been my first REALLY thoroughly read and taken-apart poem is probably to blame for my obsession with dark hair in my poems. On the other hand, I once told my favorite poetry teacher that I prefer darkness to daylight (true), and her immediate reduction was, "Of course. It's easier to hide in." Nice.

The Photograph (Ellen Bryant Voigt)

Black as a crow’s wing was what they said
about my mother’s hair. Even now,
back home, someone on the street
will stop me to recall my mother, how beautiful she was,
first among her sisters.
In the photograph, her hair
is a spill of ink below the white beret,
a swell of dark water. And her eyes as dark,
her chin lifted, that brusque defining posture
she had just begun in her defense.
Seventeen, on her own,
still a shadow in my father’s longing—nothing
the camera could record foretold
her restlessness, the years of shrill
unspecified despair, the clear reproach
of my life, just beginning.

The horseshoe hung in the neck of the tree sinks
deeper into heartwood every season.
Sometimes I hear the past
hum in my ear, its cruel perfected music,
as I turn from the stove
or stop to braid my daughter’s thick black hair.

Eating Alone (Li-Young Lee)

I’ve pulled the last of the year’s young onions.
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
brown and old. What is left of the day flames
in the maples at the corner of my
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
By the cellar door, I wash the onions,
then drink from the icy metal spigot.

Once, years back, I walked beside my father
among the windfall pears. I can’t recall
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
I still see him bend that way—left hand braced
on knee, creaky—to lift and hold to my
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.

It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
felt it, in the flickering, deep green shade.

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.

Piccola Elegia (Charles Wright)

L.G.: Requiescat

Nicky, the word has come to the west coast
of how you
shuffled your feet, stammered
and slipped out the back door

when no one was looking.
What did you have in mind?

* * * *

I picture myself back there,
in the kitchen, peering out
through the glass, then through the orchard, your shirt

a small red dot among
the apple trees that run down
the long slope: the water
glitters and flashes in

the cold sunlight; I try
to open the window, to tell you
to wait, to come back, but
it is too late, too
late in the day; already

the boat is adrift; it is
on fire; the flames
splash at the gunwales; and you
are smoke, Nicky, you are smoke.

Demonstration (Martha Zweig)

See, just so: one can pinch
Gently the cat’s paw exactly as
One pinches a snapdragon

For exactly the same intriguing
Spreading and opening, and curious
Yield to the fingers;

So that the toe’s sheath gives out
Smoothly its clear paw (not yet
Fierce, for the cat believes you are playing);

Whereupon the claw itself imagines
Fangs for the snapdragon,
Otherwise why such a congruence in
The great plan of things?

Each being necessary, the cat goes
Forever on paws which are flowers,
And, in the garden, the innocent summer
Dragons become literal.

The Migrations (Kirsten Dierking)

The last of the geese are out on the lake
in a final circle of open water,
wings folded close to the body,
white breasts bared to the cold.

Beautiful how the sharp black
of the birds' necks arches against
the silver light, sways over
the sheer veneer of glinting ice.

The snow begins, a little, softly,
like a slanting veil falling between
your hands and the birds. You try
to keep what you love close, and yet
you love things that can't help leaving.

The geese are slipping farther from land,
receding into the thickening whiteness.
How distant they are already from home.
How far they are going away from you now.

Maybe it's because my little sister's in Brigadoon this summer,

but I think "A Map of Love" sounds really amazing in a Scottish accent. That's right. Scroll down a page and find that poem. Read it out loud in your best, softest brogue. Or track down a hot laddie/lass to murmur it to you. In the earliest part of the morning, if you can stand it, or perhaps after a nap. (Don't you DARE blame this on me to your significant other.) Poetry reading sometimes owes a great deal to context and setting. I find this poem is most useful when memorized...

Airport in Amsterdam (Adam Zagajewski)

--In memory of my mother

December rose, pinched desire
in the dark and empty garden,
rust on the trees and thick smoke
as if someone’s loneliness were burning.

Out walking yesterday I thought again
about the airport in Amsterdam—
the corridors without apartments,
waiting rooms filled with other people’s dreams
stained with misfortune.

Airplanes struck the cement
almost angrily, hawks
without prey, hungry.

Maybe your funeral should have been held
here—hubbub, bustling crowds,
a good place not to be.

One has to look after the dead
beneath the airport’s great tent.
We were nomads again;
you wandered westward in your summer dress,
amazed by war and time,
the moldering ruins, the mirror
reflecting a little, tired life.

In the darkness final things shone;
the horizon, a knife, and every rising sun.
I saw you off at the airport, hectic
valley where tears are for sale.

December rose, sweet orange;
without you there can be
no Christmases.

Mint leaves soothe a migraine…
In restaurants you always
studied the menu longest…
In our ascetic family
you were the mistress of expression,
but you died so quietly…

The old priest will garble your name.
The train will halt in the forest.
At dawn snow will fall
on the airport in Amsterdam.

Where are you?
There where memories lie buried.
There where memory grows.
There where the orange, rose, and snow lie buried.
There where ashes grow.

Citation notes on the first several poems : )

That's right, I said I'd cite properly, so here goes. Stephen Dunn's "Tenderness" was originally in Poetry magazine, but I found it in The Pushcart Book of Poetry (2006). Honestly, Carolyn Forche's "The Memory of Elena" I found online, although I'm sure it's published in one of her books. If I find out which one, I'll alter this post. Donald Justice's "A Map of Love" is from Donald Justice: New and Selected Poems. Today's poem, "Airport in Amsterdam" by Adam Zagajewski, is in his book of new and selected poems, Without End. There--now I feel much better behaved.

A Map of Love (Donald Justice)

Your face more than others' faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to I while I slept—
Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke,
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.

Tenderness (by Stephen Dunn)

Back then when so much was clear
and I hadn’t learned
young men learn from women

what it feels like to feel just right,
I was twenty-three,
she thirty-four, two children, a husband

in prison for breaking someone’s head.
Yelled at, slapped
around, all she knew of tenderness

was how much she wanted it, and all
I knew
were back seats and a night or two

in a sleeping bag in the furtive dark.
We worked
in the same office, banter and loneliness

leading to the shared secret
that to help
National Biscuit sell biscuits

was wildly comic, which led to my body
existing with hers
like rain water that’s found its way

underground to water it naturally joins.
I can’t remember
ever saying the exact word, tenderness,

though she did. It’s a word I see now
you must be older to use,
you must have experienced the absence of it

often enough to know what silk and deep balm
it is
when at last it comes. I think it was terror

at first that drove me to touch her
so softly,
then selfishness, the clear benefit

of doing something that would come back
to me twofold,
and finally, sometime later, it became

reflexive and motiveless in the high
ignorance of love.
Oh abstractions are just abstract

until they have an ache in them. I met
a woman never touched
gently, and when it ended between us,

I had new hands and new sorrow,
everything it meant
to be a man changed, unheroic, floating.

The Memory of Elena (by Carolyn Forche)

We spend our morning
in the flower stalls counting
the dark tongues of bells
that hang from ropes waiting
for the silence of an hour.
We find a table, ask for paella,
cold soup and wine, where a calm
light trembles years behind us.

In Buenos Aires only three
years ago, it was the last time his hand
slipped into her dress, with pearls
cooling her throat and bells like
these, chipping at the night—

As she talks, the hollow
clopping of a horse, the sound
of bones touched together.
The paella comes, a bed of rice
and camarones, fingers and shells,
the lips of those whose lips
have been removed, mussels
the soft blue of a leg socket.

This is not paella, this is what
has become of those who remained
in Buenos Aires. This is the ring
of a rifle report on the stones,
her hand over her mouth,
her husband falling against her.

These are the flowers we bought
this morning, the dahlias tossed
on his grave and bells
waiting with their tongues cut out
for this particular silence.

Stranded in the desert... send water and books....

The truth is, I know nothing about blogs or blogging, but think it's time I learned. Will anyone hear me out there?