are you dreaming, Frederick?

"The Earth"
God loafs around heaven,
without a shape
but He would like to smoke His cigar
or bite His fingernails
and so forth.

God owns heaven
but He craves the earth,
the earth with its little sleepy caves,
its bird resting at the kitchen window,
even its murders lined up like broken chairs,
even its writers digging into their souls
with jackhammers,
even its hucksters selling their animals
for gold,
even its babies sniffing for their music,
the farm house, white as a bone,
sitting in the lap of its corn,
even the statue holding up its widowed life,
but most of all He envies the bodies,
He who has no body.

The eyes, opening and shutting like keyholes
and never forgetting, recording by thousands,
the skull with its brains like eels--
the tablet of the world--
the bones and their joints
that build and break for any trick,
the genitals,
the ballast of the eternal,
and the heart, of course,
that swallows the tides
and spits them out cleansed.

He does not envy the soul so much.
He is all soul
but He would like to house it in a body
and come down
and give it a bath
now and then.
--Anne Sexton


"Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror"
We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within,
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.
--John Ashbery


"Forgetfulness"
Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless,--
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest,--or a child.
Forgetfulness is white,--white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.
--Hart Crane


"Wintering"
I am no longer ashamed
how for weeks, after, I wanted
to be dead--not to die,

mind you, or do
myself in--but to be there
already, walking amongst

all those I'd lost, to join
the throng singing,
if that's what there is--

or the nothing, the gnawing--
So be it. I wished
to be warm--& worn--

like the quilt my grandmother
must have made, one side
a patchwork of color--

blues, green like the underside
of a leaf--the other
an old pattern of the dolls

of the world, never cut out
but sewn whole--if the world
were Scotsmen & sailors

in traditional uniforms.
Mourning, I've learned, is just
a moment, many,

grief the long betrothal
beyond. Grief what
we wed, ringing us--

heirloom brought
from my father's hot house--
the quilt heavy tonight

at the foot of my marriage bed,
its weight months of needling
& thread. Each straightish,

pale, uneven stitch
like the white hairs I earned
all that hollowed year--pull one

& ten more will come,
wearing white, to its funeral--
each a mourner, a winter,


gathering ash at my temple.
--Kevin Young


"Saint Francis and the Sow"
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
--Galway Kinnell

"Conversation"
For Maud

--How old?

--It was completely inadvertent. 
  It was more or less late afternoon
  and I came over a hilltop
  and smack in front of me was the sunset.

--Couldn't you have turned around and gone back?

--Wherever you turn, a window
  in a childhood house fills with fire.

--Remember the pennies we put on the track,
  how the train left behind only the bright splashes?

--Everything startles with its beauty
  when assigned value has been eradicated,
  especially if the value assigned is one cent.

--Does the past ever get too heavy to lug around?

--If your rucksack is too full it could
  wrestle you down backwards.

--Does it ever get lighter?

--It might if so-called obsolete words
  falling off the back end of the language.

--Is it easier to figure things out when you're old?

--I once thought so. Once I said to myself,
  "If I could sit in one place on earth
  and try to understand, it would be here."

--Nice thought.

--Yes, but where was I when I thought it?

--Where do you think you might have
  ended up had you turned around?

--Where the swaying feet of a hanged man
  would take him, if he were set walking, nobody knows.

--Maybe only half of you is a hanged man.

--Each individual consciousness would be much
  more dangerous if it had more than one body.

--Do you feel a draft?

--It could be a lost moment, unconnected
  with earth, just passing through.

--Or did I forget to shut the front door?

--Maybe a window exploded.

--Have you noticed the light bulb in the cellar
  blows out about every two months?

--When ordinary things feel odd
  and odd things normal, be careful.

--I like life best when everything's
  doing what it's supposed to do.

--Kissers kiss, roofers roof, matter matters.

--Don't forget to call your friend in Des Moines.

--I called him. He said he's feeling good.
  He said he had just finished eating an orange.

--Where would you like to be right now?

--I'd like to be at McCoy Stadium
  watching a good game of baseball. And you?

--Me, too. I like it when there's a runner on third.
  At every pitch he starts for home
  and then immediately scurries back.

--If it's a wild pitch, he hovers
  a moment to be sure it's really wild
  and then is quick--like a tear,
  with a tiny bit of sunlight inside it.

--Why the bit of sunlight?

--It would be his allotment of hope.
--Galway Kinnell

"And Then It Was Less Bleak Because We Said So"
Today there has been so much talk of things exploding
into other things, so much that we all become curious, that we
all run outside into the hot streets
and hug. Romance is a grotto of eager stones
anticipating light, or a girl whose teeth
you can always see. With more sparkle and pop
is the only way to live. Your confetti tongue explodes
into acid jazz. Small typewriters
that other people keep in their eyes
click away at all our farewell parties. It is hard
to pack for the rest of your life. Someone is always
eating cold cucumber noodles. Someone will drop by later
to help dismantle some furniture. A lot can go wrong
if you sleep or think, but the trees go on waving
their broken little hands.
--Wendy Xu


"Mushrooms"
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
--Sylvia Plath


"Conversation"
for Robert Lowell

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of silk dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that's where I'm floating,
and that's what it's like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?
--Ai


"Centrifugal"
The spider living in the bike seat has finally spun
its own spokes through the wheels.
I have seen it crawl upside down, armored
black and jigging back to the hollow frame,
have felt the stickiness break
as the tire pulls free the stitches of last night's sewing.
We've ridden this bike together for a week now,
two legs in gyre by daylight, and at night,
the eight converting gears into looms, handle bars
into sails. This is how it is to be part of a cycle--
to be always in motion, and to be always
woven to something else.
--Douglas S. Jones


"Genealogy"
I carry you, a fleck, to Jamaica At the Chinese temple in Kingston
I am sick daily Victor leads me upstairs, says this floor was once
Nights, I hold the bed's edges full of beds where men off the boat
a raft on the rolling sea slept, ate, washed sea salt from their skin,
You inside me, all this hope prayed at the jade altar with two lions
Sweet speck, what will you be? that too, had shipped from China.
Too new to be anything We drive to the old cemetery, not before
I say nothing Victor pays the wild-eyed boy who "guards" the car.
the way I stay silent He might hurt us, the vodka bottle he holds is
about my grandfather made of blue glass. His lips are red and sore.
who beat all his children I stand on my grandfather's small grave,
with a strap pen in hand. I am allowed to write his name on since
The sun burns the cemetery floor the marker has been chipped off,
I am woozy marble sold. Wow crazy day huh, Victor says. An honor
I don't know why I'm here to pay your filial duty to your grandfather?
--Hannah Lowe