are you dreaming, Frederick?

"Limbo: Altered States"

No sooner does the plane angle up
than I cork off to dream a bomb blast:
A fireball roiling through the cabin in slo-mo,
seat blown loose from its bolts,
I hang weightless a nanosecond
     in blue space

then jerk awake to ordered rows.
And there's the silver liquor cart jangling
its thousand bells, the perfect doses
of juniper gin and oak-flavored scotch
     held by a rose-nailed hand.

I don't miss drinking, don't miss
driving into shit with more molecular density
than myself, nor the Mission Impossible
reruns I sat before, nor the dead
space inside only alcohol could fill and then
      not even. But I miss

the aftermath, the pure simplicity:
mouth parched, head hissing static.
How little I asked of myself then--to suck
the next breath, suffer the next heave, live
till cocktail hour when I could mix
       the next sickness.

I locked the bathroom door, sat
on the closed commode, shirtless,
in filmy underpants telling myself that death
could fit my grasp and be staved off
while in the smeary shaving glass,
I practiced the stillness of a soul
      awaiting birth.

For the real that swarmed beyond the door
I was pure scorn, dead center of my stone and starless
universe, orbited by no one. Novitiate obliterate, Saint
Absence, Duchess of Naught...
A stinging ether folded me in mist.

Sometimes landing the head's pressure's enormous.
When my plane tilts down, houses grow large, streets
lose their clear geometry. The leafy earth soon fills my portal,
and in the gray graveyard of cars, a stick figure
becomes my son in royal blue cap flapping his arms
as if to rise. Thank god for our place
in this forest of forms, for the gravitas
that draws me back to him, and for how lightly
      lightly I touch down.

--Mary Karr


"On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous"

i


Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand

to your chest.


i


You, drowning
            between my arms--
stay.

You, pushing your body
             into the river
only to be left
              with yourself--
stay.


i


I'll tell you how we're wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after
backhanding
mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel
in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.
And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing
to surrender.


i


Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.
      Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.
Say autumn despite the green
      in your eyes. Beauty despite
daylight. Say you'd kill for it. Unbreakable dawn
      mounting in your throat.
My thrashing beneath you
     like a sparrow stunned
with falling.


i


Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.


i


I wanted to disappear--so I opened the door to a stranger's car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don't we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother's house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky--to hold every flying & falling at once.


i


Say amen. Say amend.

Say yes. Say yes

anyway.


i


In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed.


i


In the life before this one, you could tell
two people were in love
because when they drove the pickup
over the bridge, their wings
would grow back just in time.

Some days I am still inside the pickup.
Some days I keep waiting.


i


It's not too late. Our heads haloed
       with gnats & summer too early
to leave any marks.
       Your hand under my shirt as static
intensifies on the radio.
       Your other hand pointing
your daddy's revolver
       to the sky. Stars falling one
by one in the cross hairs.
       This means I won't be
afraid if we're already
       here. Already more
than skin can hold. That a body
       beside a body
must make a field
       full of ticking. That your name
is only the sound of clocks
       being set back another hour
& morning
       finds our clothes
on your mother's front porch, shed
       like week-old lilies.

--Ocean Vuong


"Dinosaurs in the Hood"

Let's make a movie called Dinosaurs in the Hood.
Jurassic Park meets Friday meets The Pursuit of Happyness.
There should be a scene where a little black boy is playing
with a toy dinosaur on the bus, then looks out the window
& sees the T. Rex, because there has to be a T. Rex.

Don't let Tarantino direct this. In his version, the boy plays
with a gun, the metaphor: black boys toy with their own lives,
the foreshadow to his end, the spitting image of his father.
Fuck that, the kid has a plastic Brontosaurus or Triceratops
& this is his proof of magic or God or Santa. I want a scene

where a cop car gets pooped on by a pterodactyl, a scene
where the corner store turns into a battle ground. Don't let
the Wayans brothers in this movie. I don't want any racist shit
about Asian people or overused Latino stereotypes.
This movie is about a neighborhood of royal folks--

children of slaves & immigrants & addicts & exiles--saving their town
from real-ass dinosaurs. I don't want some cheesy yet progressive
Hmong sexy hot dude hero with a funny yet strong commanding
black girl buddy-cop film. This is not a vehicle for Will Smith
& Sofia Vergara. I want grandmas on the front porch taking out raptors

with guns they hid in walls & under mattresses. I want those little spitty,
screamy dinosaurs. I want Cicely Tyson to make a speech, maybe two.
I want Viola Davis to save the city in the last scene with a black fist afro pick
through the last dinosaur's long, cold-blood neck. But this can't be
a black movie. This can't be a black movie. This movie can't be dismissed

because of its cast or its audience. This movie can't be a metaphor
for black people & extinction. This movie can't be about race.
This movie can't be about black pain or cause black people pain.
This movie can't be about a long history of having a long history with hurt.
This movie can't be about race. Nobody can say nigga in this movie

who can't say it to my face in public. No chicken jokes in this movie.
No bullets in the heroes. & no one kills the black boy. & no one kills
the black boy. & no one kills the black boy. Besides, the only reason
I want to make this is for that first scene anyway: the little black boy
on the bus with a toy dinosaur, his eyes wide & endless

                            his dreams possible, pulsing, & right there.

--Danez Smith


"Flirtation"
After all, there's no need
to say anything

at first. An orange, peeled
and quartered, flares

like a tulip on a wedgewood plate
Anything can happen.

Outside the sun
has rolled up her rugs

and night strewn salt
across the sky. My heart

is humming a tune
I haven't heard in years!

Quiet's cool flesh--
let's sniff and eat it.

There are ways
to make of the moment

a topiary
so the pleasure's in

walking through.
--Rita Dove

"Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chains not so that man may bear chains without any imagination or comfort, but so that he may throw away the chains and pluck living flowers."
--Karl Marx, "Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction"


"November Philosophers"
Nothing is nothing, although
he would call me that, she was nothing.
Those were his words, but his hand was lifting
cigarettes in chains and bridges
of ash-light. He said he didn't want his body to last.
It wasn't a year I could argue
against that kind of talk, so I cut the fowl
killed on the farm a mile out--brown and silvery, wild--
and put it over butter lettuce, lettuce then lime.
I heated brandy in the saucepan, poured a strip of molasses
slowly through the cold, slow as I'd seen
a shaman pour pine tincture over the floor
of my beaten house.
She seemed to see my whole life
by ordinance of some god
who wanted me alive again.
Burnt sage, blue smoke. Then sea salt shaken
into the corners of violent sadness.
She wrote my address
across her chest
to let everything listening know
where my life was made.
We waited, either forgetting what we were
or becoming more brightly human in that pine,
in her trance, in the lavender I set on the chipped sills,
not a trance at all but my deliberate hand cutting
from the yard part of what she required.
Now wait longer, she said, and I did as I would
when the molasses warmed over the pot enough
to come into the brandy,
to come into the night
begun by small confessions--
that this was just a rental, and mine just a floor,
that the woman he loved was with another man,
his mother mad, his apartment haunted in the crawl space.
Then I told of the assault at daybreak between
the houses. Heat, asphalt, all of it and my face toward
the brick school where the apostolate studied first-century script
and song. There must have been chanting,
as it was on the hour.
What we said was liturgy meant only for us
and for that night. Not for anyone else
to repeat, live by, believe. Never that.
Our only theories were inside of our hands,
flesh and land, body and prairie.
I reached to smoke down his next-to-last,
which he lit and made ready.
The poultry like a war ration
we ate all the way through.
What we wished, we said.
What we said, we found that night
by these, and no other,
means.
--Katie Ford


"Empty Chairs"
Empty empty empty
so many empty chairs
everywhere. They look
charming in van Gogh's paintings.

I quietly sit on them
and try to rock
but they don't move--
they are frozen
by what's breathing inside them.

Van Gogh waves his paintbrush--
leave leave leave
there's no funeral tonight.

He looks straight through me,
and I sit down
in the flames of his sunflower
like a piece of clay to be fired.
--Liu Xia, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern


"The Song of the Happy Shepherd"
The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head:
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
Where are now the warring kings,
Word be-mockers?--By the Rood
Where are now the warring kings?
An idle word is now their glory,
By the stammering schoolboy said,
Reading some entangled story:
The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.

Then nowise worship dusty deeds,
Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth,
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth
Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass--
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs--the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth.
Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be,
Rewarding in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood;
For words alone are certain good:
Sing, then, for this is also sooth.

I must be gone: there is a grave
Where daffodil and lily wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,
With mirthful songs before the dawn.
His shouting days with mirth were crowned;
And still I dream he treads the lawn,
Walking ghostly in the dew,
Pierced by my glad singing through,
My songs of old earth's dreamy youth:
But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!
For fair are poppies on the brow:
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
--W. B. Yeats


"I Was Reading a Scientific Article"
They have photographed the brain
and here is the picture, it is full of
branches as I always suspected,

each time you arrive the electricity
of seeing you is a huge
tree lumbering through my skull, the roots waving.

It is an earth, its fibres wrap
things buried, your forgotten words
are graved in my head, an intricate

red blue and pink prehensile chemistry
veined like a leaf
network, or is it a seascape
with corals and shining tentacles.

I touch you, I am created in you
somewhere as a complex
filament of light

You rest on me and my shoulder holds

your heavy unbelievable
skull, crowded with radiant
suns, a new planet, the people
submerged in you, a lost civilization
I can never excavate:

my hands trace the contours of a total
universe, its different
colors, flowers, its undiscovered
animals, violent or serene

its other air
its claws

its paradise rivers
--Margaret Atwood

THE SONG OF THE NEEDLES

Needles have the sudden beauty
of a first line.
They're always new and surprising
as they burst from their paper covering.
They sing as they hit the air.

You catch sight of them
out of the corner of your eye,
glinting softly to themselves
as they contemplate their next move.

What they're suggesting is inspired,
but a certain sadness
attends their description
of what is going on.
You don't know whether to look away,
or accept what they're saying.

If you're lucky you'll feel a pop
as one of them enters your fistula
and a cool feeling of recognition
spreads up through your arm.
--Hugo Williams, "Notes from Dialysis"


"Cymothoa Exigua"
( trigger warning: racism, lynching, bodily mutilation )
--Roger Reeves

"under a soprano sky"

    1.

once i lived on pillars in a green house
boarded by lilacs that rocked voices into weeds.
i bled an owl's blood
shredding the grass until i
rocked in a choir of worms.
obscene with hands, i wooed the world
with thumbs
                        while yo-yos hummed.
was it an unborn lacquer i peeled?
the woods, tall as waves, sang in mixed
tongues that loosened the scalp
and my bones wrapped in white dust
returned to echo in my thighs.

i hear a pulse wandering somewhere
on vague embankments.
O are my hands breathing?    I cannot smell the nerves.
i saw the sun
ripening green stones for fields.
O have my eyes run down?    i cannot taste my birth.

         2.

now as i move, mouth quivering with silks
my skin runs soft with eyes.
descending into my legs, i follow obscure birds
purchasing orthopedic wings.
the air is late this summer.

i peel the spine and flood
the earth with adolescence.
O who will pump these breasts?    I cannot waltz my tongue.

under a soprano sky, a woman sings,
lovely as chandeliers. 

--Sonia Sanchez


"Self-Portrait as a Chimera"
I am what I have done--

A sweeping gesture to the thorn of mast jutting from my mother's spine--spine a series of narrow steps leading to the temple of her neck where the things we worship demand we hurl her heart from that height, still warm, still humming with the holy music of an organ--

We do. We do. We do and do and do.

The last wild horse leaping off a cliff at Dana Point. A hurtling God carved from red clay. Wings of wind. Two satellite eyes spiraling like coals from a long-cold fire. Dreaming of Cortés, his dirty-beard and the burns it left when we kissed. Yet we kissed for years and my savage hair wove around him like braids of smoke.

Skeletons of apples rot the gardens of Thalheim. First snow wept at the windows while I held a man's wife in my arms. I palmed her heavy breasts like loot bags. Her teeth at my throat like a pearl necklace I could break to pieces. I would break to pieces. Dieb.

A bandit born with masked eyes. El Maragato's thigh wound glittering like red lace. My love hidden away in a cave as I face the gallows each morning, her scent the bandana around my face, her picture folded in the cuff of my boot.

The gravediggers and their beautiful shoulder blades smooth as shovel heads. I build and build my brother a funeral, eating the dirt along the way--queen of pica, pilferer of misery feasts--hoarding my brother like a wrecked Spanish galleon. I am more cerulean than the sea I swallow each day on the way to reaching out for him, to sing his name, to wear him like a dress made of debris.

These dark rosettes name me Jaguar. These stripes are my slave dress. Black soot. Red hematite. I am filled with ink. A codice, splayed, opened, ready to be burnt in the square--

I am. I am and am and am. What have I done?
--Natalie Diaz

" 'What do you want to change in the world?' she continued her recitation, looking away. 'What do you want to preserve? What is the thing you're searching for? What are you running from?'

" 'Nothing,' he said. 'And nothing. And nothing. And...nothing, at least that I know.'

" 'You have no purpose?'

" 'I want to get to Bellona and--' He chuckled. 'Mine's the same as everybody else's; in real life, anyway: to get through the next second, consciousness intact.' "
--Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren


"But the real mind is invisible: you're less aware of it, while you think, than you are of your eye while you see...until something goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning, the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it."
--Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren


" 'I've never wanted to kill myself,' he said. 'Never in my life. Sometimes I thought I was going to--because I'd gotten some crazy compulsion, to jump off a building or throw myself under a train, just to see what dying was like. But I never thought that life wasn't worth living, or that there was any situation so bad where just sitting it out wouldn't fix it up--that's if I couldn't get up and go somewhere else. But not wanting to kill myself doesn't stop me thinking about death. Say, has this ever happened to you? You're walking along a street, or sitting in a room, or lying down on the leaves, or even talking to people, and suddenly the thought comes--and when it comes, it comes all through you like a stop-action film of a crystal forming or an opening bud: 'I am going to die.' Someday, somewhere, I will be dying, and five seconds after that, I will be dead. And when it comes it comes like--' he smashed cupped palms together in the air so sharply she jumped--'that! And you know it, know your own death, for a whole second, three seconds, maybe five or ten...before the thought goes and you only remember the words you were mumbling, like 'Someday I will die,' which isn't the thought at all, just its ashes.' "
--Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren


"But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in a rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experiences becomes just a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all."
--Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren


" 'You meet a new person, you go with him,' Kid mused, 'and suddenly you get a whole new city.' "
--Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren


"Swinging up into the cab of a truck, miles north of Florida, and the driver asking how long you've been hitching, and the sunlight fills his lime-splattered lap and your rank jeans and he lets the radio play pop music for a while, for a while country; then twists the dial; your forearm burns on the outer edge of the door, your hair snaps and your cheek freezes, and the motion is spindled on the rush of music. So you sit, just breathing, to hear and to move through the red and green country, with the sun in the tree-tops a stutter of bright explosions.

"The City suffers from the lack of it.

"But most of us /have/ come here by way of it."
--Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

"I'm free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can't really understand what it means. All I know is I'm totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who's lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free?"
--Haruki Marukami, Kafka on the Shore



"The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."
--Henri Bergson, qtd. by Haruki Murakami in Kafka on the Shore



"The Weather in Space"
Is God being or pure force? The wind

Or what commands it? When our lives slow

And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls

In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm

Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing

After all we're certain to lose, so alive--

Faces radiant with panic.
--Tracy K. Smith



"My God, It's Full of Stars"
1.
We like to think of it as a parallel to what we know,
Only bigger. One man against the authorities.
Or one man against a city of zombies. One man

Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand
The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants
Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.

Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,
This message going out to all of space.... Though
Maybe it's more like life below the sea: silent,

Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics
Of a outmoded design. Some like to imagine
A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,

Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,
Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing
To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best

While the father storms through adjacent rooms
Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,
Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.

Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.

The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,

A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.


2.
Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once politely.
A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time,
He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white.

Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in,
Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture,
Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires

Charcoals out below. He'll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don't.
I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back.
That was the future once, he says. Before the world went upside down.

Hero, survivor. God's right hand man, I know he sees the blank
Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone.
He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,

Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth. And:
May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back.
Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.

A fountain in the neighbor's yard babbles to itself, and the night air
Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again.
We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth

Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone
One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.
Our eyes adjust to the dark.


3.
Perhaps the great error is believing we're alone,

That the others have come and gone--a momentary blip--

When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,

Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel

Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,

Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,

Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones

At whatever are their moons. They live wondering

If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,

And the great black distance they--we--flicker in.


Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,

Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on

At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns

Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want it to be

One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.

Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.

So that I might be sitting now beside my father

As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe

For the first time in the winter of 1959.


4.
In those last scenes of Kubrick's 2001
When Dave is whisked into the center of space,
Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light
Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid
For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,
Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off,
Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent
And vague, swirls in, and on and on....

In those last scenes, as he floats
Above Jupiter's vast canyons and seas,
Over the lava strewn plains and mountains
Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn't blink.
In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked
Across the wide-screen of unparcelled time,
Who knows what blazes through his mind?
Is it still his life he moves through, or does
That end at the end of what he can name?

On set, it's shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,
Then the costumes go back on their racks
And the great gleaming set goes black.


5.
When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, and bright wide.

He'd read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is--

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
--Tracy K. Smith



"The Museum of Obsolescence"
So much we once coveted. So much
That would have saved us, but lived,

Instead, its own quick span, returning
To uselessness with the mute acquiescence

Of shed skin. It watches us watch it:
Our faulty eyes, our telltale heat, hearts

Ticking through our shirts. We're here
To titter at the gimcracks, the naïve tools,

The replicas of replicas stacked like bricks.
There's green money, and oil in drums.

Pots of honey pilfered from a tomb. Books
Recounting the wars, maps of fizzled stars.

In the south wing, there's a small room
Where a living man sits on display. Ask,

And he'll describe the old beliefs. If you
Laugh, he'll lower his head to his hands

And sigh. When he dies, they'll replace him
With a video looping on ad infinitum.

Special installations come and go. "Love"
Was up for a season, followed by "Illness,"

Concepts difficult to grasp. The last thing you see
(After a mirror--someone's idea of a joke?)

Is an image of the old planet taken from space.
Outside, vendors hawk t-shirts, three for eight.
--Tracy K. Smith



"Cathedral Kitsch"
Does God love gold?
Does He shine back
At Himself from walls
Like these, leafed
In the earth's softest wealth?

Women light candles,
Pray into their fistful of beads.
Cameras spit human light
Into the vast holy dark,

And what glistens back
Is high up and cold. I feel
Man here. The same wish
That named the planets.

Man with his shoes and tools,
His insistence to prove we exist
Just like God, in the large
And the small, the great

And the frayed. In the chords
That rise from the tall brass pipes,
And the chorus of crushed cans
Someone drags over cobbles
In the secular street.
--Tracy K. Smith



"The Largeness We Can't See"

When our laughter skids across the floor
Like beads yanked from some girl's throat,
What waits where the laughter gathers?

And later, when our saw-toothed breaths
Lay us down on a bed of leaves, what feeds
With ceaseless focus on the leaves?

It's solid, yet permeable, like a mood.
Like God, it has no face. Like lust,
it flickers on without a prick of guilt.

We move in and out of rooms, leaving
Our dust, our voices pooled on sills.
We hurry from door to door in a downpour

Of days. Old trees inch up, their trunks thick
With new rings. All that we see grows
Into the ground. And all we live blind to

Leans its deathless heft to our ears
                                    and sings.

--Tracy K. Smith



"Old Food"
A woman stands in a dreamed cemetery where her daughter lies.
It was Marie; one of them was. A woman stands near a rectangular
plot marked off in pencil. Now the color deepens to turquoise.
Surrounded by dusty gold calligraphy gone past its meaning.

Marie lived in a gully at the dump on the outskirts of town, in a palm-
frond shack, with her dogs. She walks to the Buy-Rite: past a real cemetery,
towards the tracks, but turns; she enters the Buy-Rite. Leroy, the liar,
sells her food, then tells lies to everyone about her; years later
no one remembers the lies. Wasn't Leroy counterfeit like all kings.

Marie isn't counterfeit: nor is where you are now, in this thicket
of polished ribbony ink spelling near-certainty. Okay, Marie is dead.
She inhabits the texture of everything, even manuscripts. An angel

flowers whitely before you. You've got to make a life, you can't die,
nothing dies. One lie, that she cooked lizards and ate them.
She got everything at the Buy-Rite; she didn't have money, did she?
Something must have come in the mail. Or he gave her old food.
--Alice Notley



"I'm Watching"

I'm watching the show on a rotten TV, catching the story
through red and blue specks--images double often, and
the sound's dubbed, they're made to speak a foreign language.
This is one of my favorite kinds of art. What's going on?

Eve Love is Marie's reprobate daughter, or is she? Is Leroy
vicious, even bad? Should I keep calling him by his real name?
Who am I?
         Momma didn't like the name Ruby--
it sounded cheap--though she liked a particular woman
with that name: I'm avoiding telling you some things about

really real people, realer than I am. Leroy told her Ruby'd
died, and Momma was shocked--I told you she was sick, he said;
but Momma hadn't known that she should believe him that time.

Me, I'm not very real. I've worked at that: I can't stand
the fiction of living. I'd just as soon be like Marie, my one
remaining hero. Real. She died out there at the dump
and wasn't anything like I'm saying. Once, a woman from town
gave her a ride and asked her if she was happy. She said she
was doing what she wanted to do. She wasn't crazy you see.

Eve is not Marie's daughter, though maybe someone is.
Is there Mercy? An image of Tara once arose from my chest to help me out...
But I'm not crazy, though sometimes women I dream about
imply that I am. I'm intact. Really intact. Are you?

--Alice Notley



"Hell"
Hell was dripping with the blood from the sores on my thighs--

The girl said let me tell you you are a monster. I refused to
put on her monster mask; I have my own culture. But she put the mask
in her eyes. Then I entered hell.

Your face is made of rotten wood and your eyeholes are gouged out;
you have sores on your thighs because you're ugly; you
will never look like poetry because they aren't healed. You're too old.

There's too much food in hell; a man's in charge of sharks for our food,
some of which are still alive. He says he'll poison those. I have to get out of
your hell; I suppose the sharks bit my thighs; I have nothing against them.

The problem with the girls: they're afraid of this. Though they cast me into it. It's just hell. I give up
on being afraid and on sequential time. Everything's happening all around me,
not in a line. Anyone but me

Anyone but me gets to be the human. Well then I won't be. Join a different
company. Room of luminous visionary beings: why not?
--Alice Notley



"Nothing Like the Earth"

If it is winter in the book
spring surprises me    when I look up    and though I know
there is nothing like the earth    though I know
the lilies in the yard    throw open the doors of the heart
with wondrous force    and I am a buck-merino    a dandy little
buck-merino    jumping with felicity over the fence
and I shall not want    He maketh me lie down on the bed
to read    so I do not know which is the ephemera
the lilies    or the boy in winter whose fate is at a toss
Can anything save the appalling youth brightened with
intense pulse or that deep & wailing cry allotted to his crow?
Yea, though I walk through the valley of these things
there is a rich fever    that never foams
a swatch of fastidious root fastened to a rock
like a hand gripping a doorknob    unable to move
a tentacle of intent that may yet restore
the song of the lute to the lily    or the glory of the crow
to the boy

--Mary Ruefle



"Zettel"
A piece of paper fell out of the book
and drifted to the floor.
It was the first time I had witnessed
a birth, and I was shocked.
What a magnificent cause.
My entire brain plunged into thoughts
connected with the tiny object.
Do people become people for different reasons?
Ever yours. Evermore the imperial tether of
adult tenderness, the full radius of listening
at night, paired with horses grazing on ice:
the way a snow flea jumps on snow, following
one hoof, one print, one word, one minute
to the next. You need never know.
It was very quiet then for a long time,
after I bent down and picked it up.
--Mary Ruefle



"Concerning Essential Existence"
The horse mounted the mare slowly and precisely
and then stopped.

He was profoundly disturbed by a piece of straw.

He was profoundly distracted by the sad toy
upside down in the tree.

He was profoundly disengaged by half a cloud
in the corner of his wet eye.

And then he continued.

Nothing is forgot by lovers
except who they are.
--Mary Ruefle

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."
--Louise Erdrich


"We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women. We do not finish breakfast without being dependent on more than half of the world. When we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge which is provided for us by a Pacific Islander. We reach for soap that is created for us by a Frenchman. The towel is provided by a Turk. Then at the table we drink coffee which is provided for us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for our jobs we are beholden to more than half the world.

"In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality."
--Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Man Who Was a Fool"

"This is the deepest magic of stories, and its most important: the conjuration of an empathy so pure, it all but tumbles us out of our skins and into someone else's."
--Foz Meadows, reviewing The Goblin Emperor


"Directive"
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry--
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
--Robert Frost


"Matins"
You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I'm looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?
--Louise Glück


"Field Flowers"
What are you saying? That you want
eternal life? Are your thoughts really
as compelling as all that? Certainly
you don't look at us, don't listen to us,
on your skin
stain of sun, dust
of yellow buttercups: I'm talking
to you, you staring through
bars of high grass shaking
your little rattle-- O
the soul! the soul! Is it enough
only to look inward? Contempt
for humanity is one thing, but why
disdain the expansive
field, your gaze rising over the clear heads
of the wild buttercups into what? Your poor
idea of heaven: absence
of change. Better than earth? How
would you know, who are neither
here nor there, standing in our midst?
--Louise Glück


"Retreating Light"
You were like very young children,
always waiting for a story.
And I'd been through it all too many times;
I was tired of telling stories.
So I gave you the pencil and paper.
I gaze you pens made of reeds.
I had gathered myself, afternoons in the dense meadows.
I told you, write your own story.

After all those years of listening
I thought you'd know
what a story was.

All you could do was weep.
You wanted everything told to you
and nothing thought through yourselves.

Then I realized you couldn't think
with any real boldness or passion;
you hadn't had your own lives yet,
your own tragedies.
So I gave you lives, I gave you tragedies,
because apparently tools alone weren't enough.

You will never know how deeply
it pleases me to see you sitting there
like independent beings,
to see you dreaming by the open window,
holding the pencils I gave you
until the summer morning disappears into writing.

Creation has brought you
great excitement, as I knew it would,
as it does in the beginning.
And I am free to do as I please now,
to attend to other things, in confidence
you have no need of me anymore.
--Louise Glück


( trigger warning: 9/11 )
--Shelley Stenhouse, "Circling," Poetry after 9/11: an Anthology of New York Poets


"What I Said"
( trigger warning: 9/11 )
--Norman Stock


"Religious Art"
Certain precautions, obstacles
set against vandals--the stretch
of highway, for example, outside Nichols, New Mexico,
loneliness like a family art,
a man's idea of himself
pinned down in the Holy Land, strings of peppers
drying on a porch.

I press hard with my feet
against the earth and
call this fighting back. All yesterday
I walked around counting birds.
Trees, a spray of pebbles in the forecourt,
a dip the wind took about six

maintain the posts assigned, repel boarders.

The peculiar emptiness
in the mown hayfield this afternoon
we stood staring into--as a precaution--
the clefts and shadowy declines containing
our deepest interests, the grass shining and then going dull against
the fading light, these were protection enough.
--Charlie Smith


"Before I Was Born"

There is a moment of separation
between two things, & one of them is living.
A moth is living, is still alive.
And all this is happening on the other side
        of the river.

Life is multiple, I have multiple selves, a past.
And different languages are spoken in office
        buildings & tents.
Equipment is arranged along a shoreline.
The lights in the buildings go out, one at a time.

The man on the subway platform is playing the accordion.
I make a fist, then relax, my fingers are trembling.
Bulbs burn out on an exit sign, the color of beef
        at a lunch counter.
A woman on the subway reading War and Peace

asks me to follow her but I get lost in the crowd.
To obey with your eyes closed is the beginning of panic.
Nothing I do can impede the flow.
My oldest friend bursts into tears on the street.

If I could only have one thought at a time
& remember that there are others who think
        the same way
& elsewhere--a man is preparing food for his child.
And elsewhere, a woman folds her skirt
        over the back of a chair.

Take a page out of your own book & remember
        the river beneath the bridge.
We pass over the Alps in a train in the middle of the night.
My arms are forgotten in the motion of the train
        moving, word by word.

--Lewis Warsh


"Boerum Hill Tanka"
( trigger warning: 9/11 )
--Kimiko Hahn

"You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn't do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it."
--Maya Angelou


"The garden is closed off by a tall wall, the top of which is studded with shards of glass in different colors, held in place by cement. From my vantage point they look like teeth. This fierce device doesn't prevent boys form occasionally climbing the walls to steal avocados, medlar fruit and papayas. They put a wooden board on top of the wall, and pull themselves over. If you ask me it's far too risky an enterprise for such meager pickings. But perhaps they're not doing it to savor the fruit, but to savor the risk itself...Maybe all risks to them will taste to them of ripe medlar fruit from now on. You can imagine that one of them will end up becoming a sapper. There will always be more than enough work for sappers in this country. Only yesterday I saw something on television, a report on the mine-sweeping operations. The director of an NGO was bemoaning how uncertain they are about numbers. No one knows with any certainty how many mines were buried in Angolan soil. Somewhere between ten and twenty million. More mines than Angolans, probably. So say one of these boys became a sapper. Whenever he drags himself across a minefield he'll always have that faint taste of medlar fruit in his mouth. And one day he'll be faced with the inevitable question, thrown at him by a foreign journalist with mingled curiosity and horror:

" 'So when you're there dismantling a mine, what goes through your head?'

"And the boy he still has within him will reply, with a smile:

" 'Medlar fruit, old man.'

"Old Esperança thinks it's the wall that makes the thieves--I've heard her say as much to Félix. The albino turned to her, amused:

" 'Who'd have thought I had an anarchist in the house?! Any moment now I'm going to discover that you've been reading Bakunin...'

"He said this, then forgot all about her. She'd never read Bakunin, of course; never read a book at all, come to that, barely knows how to read. But I'm always learning things about life in general, or life in this country--which is life in a state of intoxication--from hearing her talk to herself, sometimes in a gentle murmur, almost like a song, sometimes out loud like someone scolding, as she cleans the house. Old Esperança believes that she's never going to die. In 1992 she survived a massacre. She'd gone to the house of one of the opposition leaders to pick up a letter from her youngest son who was on service in Huambo, when bursts of gunfire suddenly erupted from all around. She was determined to leave the place, to go back to her old musseque house, but they wouldn't let her.

" 'It's a crazy idea, old lady. Just pretend that it's raining. It'll pass soon enough.'

"But it didn't pass. Like a storm the gunfire gathered, getting more ferocious and closing in, getting louder and closer to the house. Félix was the one who told me what happened that night:

" 'This brawling band, a mob of rioters, well armed and extremely drunk, forced their way into the house and slapped around all the people there. The commander wanted to know the name of the old woman. Esperança Job Sapalalo, sir, she said, and he laughed. Esperança--Hope, he joked. Always the last to die. The opposition leader and his family were lined up in the yard and shot. When it came to be Old Esperança's turn, the gunmen had no bullets left. You know what saved you, don't you? the commander shouted. It was logistics. We've never been very good with logistics. And he sent her on her way. Since then she's believed herself to be immune to death. And who knows, maybe she is.'

"It doesn't strike me as impossible. Esperança Job Sapalalo has a fine web of wrinkles on her face and completely white hair, but her flesh is still firm, her gestures solid and precise. If you ask me she's the pillar keeping this house up."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn


"Gaspar--that was the teacher's name--was moved by the helplessness of certain words. He saw them as down on their luck, abandoned in some desolate place in the language, and he sought to recover them. He used them ostentatiously, and persistently, which annoyed some people and unsettled others. I think he succeeded. His students started using these words too, to begin with merely in jest, but later like a private dialect, a tribal marking, which set them apart from their peers. Nowadays, Félix Ventura assured me, his students are still quite capable of recognizing one another, even if they've never met before, on hearing just a few words..."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn


"Once, when I was in my old human form, I decided to kill myself. I wanted to die, completely. I hoped that eternal life, Heaven and Hell, God, the Devil, reincarnation, all that stuff, was no more than slowly woven superstition, developed over centuries out of man's greatest terror. There was a gun shop right by my house but I'd never before set foot in it, and the owner didn't know me. There I bought a pistol. Then I bought a crime novel and a bottle of gin. Then I went down to a hotel on the beach, drank the gin in big gulps with considerable distaste (I've always found alcohol repulsive) and lay down on the bed to read the book. I thought that the gin, in combination with the tedium of a pointless plot, would give me the courage to put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. But as it turned out the book wasn't bad at all, and I kept reading right to the last page. By then it had started to rain. It was as though it were raining night--or to explain myself a little more clearly, it was as though falling from the sky were the thick fragments of that sleepy black ocean through which the stars navigate their course. I kept expecting the stars to fall and shatter on impact with the window, with a flash and a crashing. But they didn't fall. I turned out the light. I put the pistol to my head,

"and I fell asleep."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn


"In olden days stories for children always used to end with the words, and they lived happily ever after, this being after the Prince has married the Princess and they've had lots of children. In life there's never a plot that works out like that, of course. Princesses marry bodyguards, they marry trapeze artists and life goes on, and they live unhappily until they separate. And years later, just like the rest of us, they die. We're only happy--truly happy--when it's forever after, but only children live in a world where things can last forever."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn


"Imagine a young man racing along on his motorcycle, on a minor road. The wind is beating at his face. The young man closes his eyes, and opens his arms wide, just like they do in films, feeling himself completely alive and in communion with the universe. He doesn't see the lorry lunging out from the crossing. He dies happy. Happiness is almost always irresponsible. We're happy for those brief moments when we close our eyes."
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn


"In the book the minister conversed with real people (sometimes with royal people) and it would be most convenient if these people should tomorrow believe that they had indeed traded confidences and opinions with him. Our memory feeds itself to a large extent on what other people remember of us. We remember other people's memories as though they were our own--even fictional ones.

" 'It's like the Castle of São Jorge in Lisbon--do you know it? It has battlements, but they're fake. António de Oliveira Salazar ordered that some crenelations be added to the castle to make it more authentic. To him there was something wrong with a castle without crenelations--there was something monstrous about it--like a camel without humps. So the fake part of the Castle of São Jorge is today what makes it realistic. Several octogenarian Lisboans I've spoken to are convinced the castle has always had crenelations. There's something rather amusing about that, isn't there? If it were authentic, no one would believe in it.' "
--José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn


"What is a poem but a means of making sense of all that comes through the senses, a senseless dream decoded? What is a dream but a story broken into fragments and scattered, card-like, before a child as a test of memory? What is memory but a warm welcome from a stranger who knows you by name and perhaps a kiss and invitation to board in a larger room with greater storage space and more natural light? But there are also memories that haunt, past moments that we'd rather think of as belonging to past lives. And then there are those stored in books and records for the sake of collective memory: history."
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop


How could you not
Realize the power of word
After being forced
To serve a sentence?
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop


I am not a writer
I am the plight
Of unfigured equations:
A stick of cinnamon
A grove a cloves
Cayenne and a bowl of honey
Water and money
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop


As an artist
First, I was black.
I wrote with a yearning
To be a leader. I was
Born into a mourning
Race. We mourned
The death of a king.
I awoke to find
My tongue a scepter.
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop


"Penelope's Song"
Little soul, little perpetually undressed one,
do now as I bid you, climb
the shelf-like branches of the spruce tree;
wait at the top, attentive, like
a sentry or look-out. He will be home soon;
it behooves you to be
generous. You have not been completely
perfect either; with your troublesome body
you have done things you shouldn't
discuss in poems. Therefore
call out to him over the open water, over the bright water
with your dark song, with your grasping,
unnatural song--passionate,
like Maria Callas. Who
wouldn't want you? Whose most demonic appetite
could you possibly fail to answer? Soon
he will return from wherever he goes in the meantime,
suntanned from his time away, wanting
his grilled chicken. Ah, you must greet him,
you must shake the boughs of the tree
to get his attention,
but carefully, carefully, lest
his beautiful face be marred by too many falling needles.
--Louise Glück


"Parable of the King"
The great king looking ahead
saw not fate but simply
dawn glittering over
the unknown island: as a king
he thought in the imperative--best
not to reconsider direction, best
to keep going forward
over the radiant water. Anyway,
what is fate but a strategy for ignoring
history, with its moral
dilemmas, a way of regarding
the present, where decisions
are made, as the necessary
link between the past (images of the king
as a young prince) and the glorious future (images
of slave girls). Whatever
it was ahead, why did it have to be
so blinding? Who could have known
that wasn't the usual sun
but flames rising over a world
about to become extinct?
--Louise Glück


"Moonless Night"
A lady weeps at a dark window.
Must we say what it is? Can't we simply say
a personal matter? It's early summer;
next door the Lights are practising klezmer music.
A good night: the clarinet is in tune.

As for the lady--she's going to wait forever;
there's no point in watching longer.
After awhile, the streetlight goes out.

But is waiting forever
always the answer? Nothing
is always the answer; the answer
depends on the story.

Such a mistake to want
clarity above all things. What's
a single night, especially
one like this, now so close to ending?
On the other side, there could be anything,
all the joy in the world, the stars fading,
the streetlight becoming a bus stop.
--Louise Glück

"Stones"
birds not so much the ducks and geese okay not horses cows pigs
she'd lived in the city all her life some cats and dogs okay as part

of someone else's narrative the posted photographs are someone's
pets the figurines less figurative than graceful to behold the same

with carved giraffes and camels no reptiles no amphibians nothing
from the sea although she loved the sea her passion was for stones

I don't know why the parquet floor never buckled and caved collapsed
into the rooms below her rooms all the horizontal surfaces were covered

with stones the bureau the cupboards the closets were full of the precious
stones she wore at her throat her ears her fingers her wrists the inlaid

tables held ceramic bowls of polished stones the antique desk a basket
of stones a bushel of stones on the floor on the windowsills more stones

each one unique each one a narrative the étagère held up to the light stones
hewn from the source and hauled up here still jagged refracting every

shade of amethyst her birthstone like my mother's crystals shimmering
as if alive rescued from the field the cliff the shore the riverbed I found

a single cufflink by her bed a tiny diamond set in silver did her father
sift out at his flour mill the dangerous stones I stretched out beside her

in her bad time thinking to help her sleep I held her hand her fingers wore
a few of her favorite rings the two of us lay entirely still atop the quilt

a stiff sarcophagus she didn't sleep her mind was an etched plate
from which she drew off print after print the framed prints on the walls

were all interiors our talk had always been a stone kicked down a hill
no purpose no destination her father her mother my mother my dogs

she never said she was leaving me in charge she wasn't my mother why
put me in charge I put the jewels on other throats and wrists I threw away

the bushels of cosmetics and perfume her chosen armaments
against the world who loved the world I sold the breakfront

cabinet full of cut-glass bowls and blown-glass figurines but who
will save the living stones she loved I have so many already

in my yard half-in half-out of the earth immovable
she'd seen my yard she'd seen those heavy stones
--Ellen Bryant Voigt


"Oak"

not to board the bus but wait for the last bell
like those who live in town shuffling ahead of her the clumps
drift apart drift back shifting boys in a cluster now a boy and a girl
a dance a recess game as each is subtracted one by one into the houses
she passes the windows half-lidded by half-drawn shades
or framed by curtains and sash she likes
                                        walking alone
along the verge of the lawns no fence no field the leaves
drifting out from under the oaks while in the woods
they would only settle and rot she likes the way a passing car
releases them across the grid of the sidewalk a solid math
for a solitary girl the small steps into the larger
world of strangers wholly indifferent houses cars rust-colored dog
she passes the hardware grocery pharmacy beauty salon every Thursday
you've noticed such a child content to be invisible
scuffing the leaves
                   toward the bungalow the hushed backroom
where someone is propped in the high bed her webbed face
her halo of hair past humankind and all its suffering
past seeing now past death too old for death
and waiting for this girl
                          who thumbs the latch
who lifts the lid of the black box lifts from red felt those silver pieces
fits them together the trick is to breathe across and not
into the small round hole as her arched fingers hover
over the other open holes each finger knows its task she's fixed
to one purpose Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee

dark out in the street the wind ruffling oak leaves the dark
window lit by the silver flute the white ghost hair the brighter
lights is it her mother come to drive her home

--Ellen Bryant Voigt


"Noble Dog"
behind our house down to the brook and the woods
beyond the groomed grass and flower beds what we see
are brook and woods and sometimes mild creatures of the field
we thought when we bathed in the claw-footed tub we could pretend
we stayed inside the natural world no shutters no shades at night

beside the mirror over the sink the windows darkened into mirrors
where my daughter at thirteen admired her tan her new body until she felt
or thought she felt something move outside in the yard and asked quietly
up the backstairs for us to come down here for just a minute please
come down here now we couldn't tell how much was fear

how much was shame we thought she needed us to be calm
we tried to be calm like the trooper we called who said without alarm
to the handsome noble dog where is he buddy where is he buddy
at which as if in a game of fetch the dog went straight around the house
to the one smell that didn't fit to the one smell that crossed the clipped grass

into the ditch beside the dirt road where the dog went too the dog
tracking the smell the trooper tracking the dog the dog
not barking or baying until the scent stopped
inside the culvert bearing the brook west under the road
a large metal pipe that amplified the dog's whimpers and moans
dog of righteousness dog of retribution

we heard it from our house where soon the shutters would go up
we sat in the kitchen the summer air soft as a damp rag we knew
this was a moment of consequence but we couldn't tell
whether the world had grown larger or smaller
--Ellen Bryant Voigt


"Geese"

there is no cure for temperament it's how 
we recognize ourselves but sometimes within it
a narrowing imprisons or is opened such as when my mother
in her last illness snarled and spat and how this lifted my dour father
into a patient tenderness thereby astounding everyone
but mostly it hardens who we always were

if you've been let's say a glass-half-empty kind of girl
you wake to the chorus of geese overhead
forlorn for something has softened their nasal voices
their ugly aggression on the ground they're worse than chickens
but flying one leader falling back another moving up to pierce the wind
no one in charge or every one in charge in flight each limited goose
adjusts its part in the cluster just under the clouds
do they mean together to duplicate the cloud
like the pelicans on the pond rearranging their shadows
to fool the fish another collective that constantly recalibrates but fish
don't need to reinvent themselves the way geese do
when they negotiate the sky
                           on the fixed
unyielding ground there is no end to hierarchy
the flock the pack the family you know it's true if you're
a take-charge kind of girl I recommend
houseplants in the windows facing south
the cacti the cyclamen are blooming on the brink
of winter all it took was a little enforced deprivation
a little premature and structured dark

--Ellen Bryant Voigt


"Sleep"

another heavy frost what doesn't die or fly away
the groundhog for instance the bear is deep in sleep I'm thinking
a lot about sleep translation I'm not sleeping much
who used to be a champion of sleep
ex-champions are pathetic my inner parent says the world
is full of evil death cruelty degradation not sleeping
scores only a 2 out of 10
                         but a moral sense
is exhausting I am exhausted a coma looks good to me
if only I could be sure there'd still be dreams it's what I miss the most
even in terrible dreams at least you feel what you feel not what
you're supposed to feel your house burns down so what
if you survived you rake the ashes sobbing
                                          exhausted
from trying not to smoke I once asked for a simple errand
from my beloved who wanted me not to smoke he forgot unforgivable
I fled the house like an animal wounded enraged I was thinking 
more clearly than I had ever thought my thought was why

prolong this life I flung myself into the car I drove like a fiend
to the nearest store I asked unthinking for unfiltered Luckies oh
brand of my girlhood I paid the price I took my prize to the car I slit
the cellophane I tapped out one perfect white cylinder I brought to my face
the smell of the barns the fires cooking it golden brown smell of my father
my uncles my grandfather's tin of loose tobacco his packet of delicate paper
the deliberate way he rolled and licked and tapped and lit and drew in
and relished it the smell of the wild girls behind the gym the boys
in pickup trucks I sat in my car as the other cars crept by 
I looked like a pervert it was perverse
a Lucky under my nose
                     I drove myself home
I threw away the pack which was unwise the gods
don't notice whining they notice the brief bright flares of human will
they lean from their couches yes more fear and dread for that one
yes let's turn the suffering up a notch let's watch her
strike the match I strike it now when I wake
in the dark I light that little fire

--Ellen Bryant Voigt