scrapofpaper | Entries tagged with galway kinnell

two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com

"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

Current Mood: cold
Current Music: "Weary Memory," by Iron & Wine

two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com

"Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people."
--Leo Burnett

"I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go."
--Neil Gaiman

"For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn...dream."
--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

"We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
--Henry James

"The Shroud"
Lifted by its tuft
of angel hairs, a milkweed
seed dips and soars
across a meadow, chalking
in outline the rhythm
that waits in air all along,
like the bottom hem of nowhere.
Spinus tristis, which spends
its days turning gold
back into sod, rises and falls
along the wavy line the seed
just waved through the sunlight.
What sheet or shroud large enough
to hold the whole earth
are these seamstresses' chalks
and golden needles
stitching at so restlessly?
When will it ever be finished?
--Galway Kinnell

"Become Becoming"
Wait for evening.
Then you'll be alone.

Wait for the playground to empty.
Then call out those companions from childhood:

The one who closed his eyes
and pretended to be invisible.
The one to whom you told every secret.
The one who made a world of any hiding place.

And don't forget the one who listened in silence
while you wondered out loud:

Is the universe an empty mirror? A flowering tree?
Is the universe the sleep of a woman?

Wait for the sky's last blue
(the color of your homesickness).
Then you'll know the answer.

Wait for the air's first gold (that color of Amen).
Then you'll spy the wind's barefoot steps.

Then you'll recall that story beginning
with a child who strays in the woods.

The search for him goes on in the growing
shadow of the clock.

And the face behind the clock's face
is not his father's face.

And the hands behind the clock's hands
are not his mother's hands.

All of Time began when you first answered
to the names your mother and father gave you.

Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.
Then, you can trade places with the wind.

Then you'll remember your life
as a book of candles,
each page read by the light of its own burning.
--Li-Young Lee

"A Hymn to Childhood"
Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn't last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder to the attic?

The one presided over by armed men
in ill-fitting uniforms
strolling the streets and alleys,
while loudspeakers declared a new era,
and the house around you grew bigger,
the rooms farther apart, with more and more
people missing?

The photographs whispered to each other
from their frames in the hallway.
The cooking pots said your name
each time you walked past the kitchen.

And you pretended to be dead with your sister
in games of rescue and abandonment.
You learned to lie still so long
the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled
safety of a wing. Look! In
run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,
turning over the furniture,
smashing your mother's china.

Don't fall asleep.
Each act opens with your mother
reading a letter that makes her weep.
Each act closes with your father fallen
into the hands of Pharaoh.

Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,
still a child, and slow to grow.
Still talking to God and thinking the snow
falling is the sound of God listening,
and winter is the high-ceilinged house
where God measures with one eye
an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,
and counts on many fingers
all the ways a child learns to say Me.

Which childhood?
The one from which you'll never escape? You,
so slow to know
what you know and don't know.
Still thinking you hear low song
in the wind in the eaves,
story in your breathing,
grief in the heard dove at evening,
and plenitude in the unseen bird
tolling at morning. Still slow to tell
memory from imagination, heaven
from here and now,
hell from here and now,
death from childhood, and both of them
from dreaming.
--Li-Young Lee

"Sweet Peace in Time"
I said, "What if by story you mean the shortcut home,
but I mean wires in a room by the sea
while days go by?"

She said, "Open, The Word is a child of eternity.
Closed, The Word is a child of Time."

I said, "And what if by dream you mean to comb
the knots out of your hair,

to prune the orchard
and correct the fruit,

but I mean to travel
by rain crossing the sea, or apple blossoms
traversing a stone threshold
with a word carved into it: Abyss?"

She said, "Home, speech is the living purchase
of our nights and days.

A traveler, it is a voice in its own lifetime.

A river, it is Time sifted, Time manifest,
laughter that sires the rocks and trees,
that fetches in its ancient skirts
the fateful fruits and seeds."

I said, "And what if when I say, Song,
you hear, A wing

executing boundary by sounding
the range of its hunting,

but I mean Time and the World
measured by a voice's passage?"

She said, "Empty, The Word is a wind in the trees.

Full, it is the voice of a woman
reading out loud from a book of names."

I said, "To speak is to err.
Words name nothing.
There are no words."

She said, "Lure, slaughter, feast, blood
in the throat, words turn, changing."

I said, "We should give up
trying to speak or be understood.
It's too late in the world for dialogue.

Death creates a blind spot.
Man is a secret, blind to himself.
And woman...Woman is..."

She said, "Our meeting here manifests
a primordial threshold.

A first and last place, speech
is no place at all, a shelter, ark, and cradle;

salt but not salt, bread but not bread,
a house but no house."

I said, "The garden was ruined long before
we came to make a world of it."
--Li-Young Lee

"3. Tethered"
The dove outside my window sounds hurt
all the time.

No country of origin.
Living in occupied territory

all the time. In the shadow
of an unattainable heaven,

burdened by a memory
of perfect orchards trimmed by unseen hands.

Maybe being winged means being wounded
by infinity, blessed by the ordeal
of freedom. At crossroads

all the time, all the time rocking
chair, rocking horse, rocking train, rocking boat,

a heart born to a station of oars,
an office of wings, born flying, born

falling between heads and tails,
trespass and grace, home and wilderness.

Could be thinking is curved, like the earth,
and feels, therefore, heavy.

Could be wings are an affliction,
a different kind of tyranny,
and flying is no better than walking upright.
--Li-Young Lee, from "The Lives of a Voice"

"Virtues of the Boring Husband"
Whenever I talk, my wife falls asleep.
So, now, when she can't sleep, I talk.
It's like magic.

Say she hasn't had a good night's sleep in a week,
feels exhausted, and lies down early
in the evening,
but begins to toss and turn.

I just lie down beside her,
prop my head up in one hand and say,
"You know, I've been thinking."

Immediately she calms down,
finds a fetal posture,
and tucks her head under my arm.

I know she lies dispersed, though in one body,
claimed by rabble cares and the need to sleep.

"Will you stay?" she asks.

"I'm right here," I answer.

"Now, what were you saying?" she wonders,
and so I talk.

"It isn't that lovers always meet in a garden,"

and already her eyes
get that dizzy look, like she can't focus.

"Go ahead," I tell her, "close your eyes."

"OK," she says, "but keep talking." And so I do.

"It isn't that lovers always speak
together in a house by the sea, or in a room
with shadows of leaves and branches
on the walls and ceiling.

It's that such spaces emerge
out of the listening
their speaking to each other engenders.
I mean, maybe..."

And she sighs. Her breathing begins to slow.
And I remember something I heard somewhere:

Every so many breaths, a sigh.
Every so many sighs, sleep.

Or was it: Every so many sighs, death?

I go on talking, now stroking her head,
pushing her hair back from her forehead,
clearing her bright brow,
and listening for her next sigh.

"Maybe the face-to-face true lovers enact
manifests a prior coincidence
of heaven and earth, say, or body and soul,
equal opposites exchanging
and combining properties in perpetual transformation:

shore and not shore, sea and sky,
room and a world, the gazer and the gazed upon."

Little twitches run the length of her, beginning
with her arms, then her legs, then her feet, as though
tensions were being fired from her body.

She mumbles the beginning of a word.
I go on talking.

"Maybe the union of lovers is an instance
of a primary simultaneity, timeless,
from which arises the various shapes of Time and duration:
arrival, departure, waiting, resuming,
fountain, terrace, path, an eave.

And maybe any world is born, is offspring,
of the liaison between
God and Mind,
Mind and Mind's source."

I count her second sigh, lower, longer.

"Or maybe God says I love you! and the whole
universe, consciousness included, is a shape
of that pronouncement.

Or maybe there's no You in that,
but only I love! ringing,
engendering all of space, every quadrant
an expression of God's first nature: I love!

Or maybe a You
arises as echo, the counter-ringing,
to the sovereign I love!

and we're the You to the Source's I,
the second person to God's first personhood.

Then, to surrender any sense of an I
is to feel our true condition, a You
before God, and to be seen.

Being seen: the crowning experience
and mystery of a You.

Maybe, too often, we mistake
the guest for the host,

confusing the I and the You. And yet, maybe
out of that confusion more worlds arise."

By now, she's barely listening, if at all.
I lower my voice and go on rambling,
afraid she'll wake if I stop too soon.

"Maybe love for God amounts
to the Beloved returning
the Lover's gaze.

And out of that look and looking back,
all of our notions
of space, home, distance,
beginning, end, recurrence,
death, debt, fruition, number, weight
emerge; all are issue

of that meeting between
lover and lover, our souls' intercourse
with what it loves."

By now her jaw has gone slack, her fingers loose
where earlier they were clenching the edge of the blanket,
and I'm almost whispering.

"Maybe it's true, what sages have said,
I don't know if I'm remembering it right.
Something about moving up a ladder of love.
Maybe we learn

to love a person, say, first as an object,
and then as a presence, and then as essence,
and then as disclosure of the divine,

or maybe all at the same time,
or discovering over time
each deeper aspect to be true.

And maybe our seeing it in another
proves that face inside ourselves.

Oh, I don't know. You sleep now."

And then I stop talking, kiss her forehead,
and wait a minute
before leaving the bed and closing
the door behind me.
--Li-Young Lee

"To Hold"
So we're dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I'm lucky,
she'll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we'll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we'll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn't for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I'll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.
--Li-Young Lee

"Living with Her"
1.
She aches.
And would have me think
it had to do with rivers.

She talks.
Her voice a wheel
and every station on it.

And what she doesn't say
makes the sound of wind in the trees.

She walks,
her path the years sown behind her.

She sleeps.
And her sleep becomes
the river I build
my house beside.

So, on which bank of the river
am I now, waking or dreaming?

She says, Come away from the window. Lie down.
There's no dark out there that isn't first in you.

Close the door. Come lie down.
There's no ocean out there not already in you.

What a narrow residence,
the lifetime of her eyes.

2.
She opens her eyes
and I see.

She counts the birds and I hear
the names of the months and days.

A girl, one of her names
is Change. And my childhood
lasted all of an evening.

Called Light, she breathes, my living share
of every moment emerging.

Called Life, she is a pomegranate
pecked clean by birds to entirely
become a part of their flying.

Do you love me? she asks.
I love you,

she answers, and the world keeps beginning.
--Li-Young Lee

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Music: "Sea Song," by Lisa Hannigan

two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com

"Crying"
Crying only a little bit
is no use. You must cry
until your pillow is soaked!
Then you can get up and laugh.
Then you can jump in the shower
and splash-splash-splash!
Then you can throw open your window
and, "Ha ha! ha ha!"
And if people say, "Hey,
what's going on up there?"
"Ha ha!" sing back, "Happiness
was hiding in the last tear!
I wept it! Ha ha!"
--Galway Kinnell

( cut for child abuse triggers )

"Poetry for Supper"
'Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.'

'Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem's making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life's iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.'
'You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.'

'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don't happen.'
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.
--R. S. Thomas

"Paradise"
What you wanted was simple:
a house with a fence and a kind of gulled
light arching up from it to shake in the poplars
or some other brand of European tree
(or was it American?) you'd plant
just for the birds to nest in and so
the crows who'd settle there
could settle like pilgrims.
Darling, all day I've watched the garden make its way
down the road. It stops at the houses
where the lights are on and the hose reel is tidy
and climbs to the windows to look inside
like a child with its eyes of flared rhododendrons
and sunflowers that shutter the wind like bombs
so buttered and brave the sweet peas gallop
and the undergrowths fizz through the fences
and pause at some to shake into asters and weep.
The garden is a mythical beast and a pilgrim.
And when the houses stroll out it eats up
their papers and screens their evangelical dogs.
Barbeque eater,
yankee doodle,
if the garden should leave
where would we age
and park our poodle?
"This is paradise," you said,
a young expansive American saint.
And widened your arms to take it in,
that suburb, spread, with seas in it.
--Emma Jones

"Parents"
What it must be like to be an angel
or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner.

The last time we go to bed good,
they are there, lying about darkness.

They dandle us once too often,
these friends who become our enemies.

Suddenly one day, their juniors
are as old as we yearn to be.

They get wrinkles where it is better
smooth, odd coughs, and smells.

It is grotesque how they go on
loving us, we go on loving them

The effrontery, barely imaginable,
of having caused us. And of how.

Their lives: surely
we can do better than that.

This goes on for a long time. Everything
they do is wrong, and the worst thing,

they all do it, is to die,
taking with them the last explanation,

how we came out of the wet sea
or wherever they got us from,

taking the last link
of that chain with them.

Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling,
to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren.
--William Meredith

"XLIII"
if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be (deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)
--e. e. cummings

"The New Year"
It is winter and the new year.
Nobody knows you.
Away from the stars, from the rain of light,
you lie under the weather of stones.
There is no thread to lead you back.
Your friends doze in the dark
of pleasure and cannot remember.
Nobody knows you. You are the neighbor of nothing.
You do not see the rain falling and the man walking away,
the soiled wind blowing its ashes across the city.
You do not see the sun dragging the moon like an echo.
You do not see the bruised heart go up in flames,
the skulls of the innocent turn into smoke.
You do not see the scars of plenty, the eyes without light.
It is over. It is winter and the new year.
The meek are hauling their skins into heaven.
The hopeless are suffereing the cold with those who have nothing to hide.
It is over and nobody knows you.
There is starlight drifting on the black water.
There are stones in the sea no one has seen.
There is a shore and people are waiting.
And nothing comes back.
Because it is over.
Because there is silence instead of a name.
Because it is winter and the new year.
--Mark Strand

"Disappear"
1. Three Shadows

What is a shadow? It is the self without a face or a name, all outline and no feature, the self on the verge of being erased. It is the incidental child of matter and light. Look how it spreads itself on the ground, weary but weightless, unable to leave a trace.

Another one of those days when we're standing by the side of a road with our mothers, sweating in our Sunday dresses, waiting for the bus home. You stand in the puddle of your mother's shadow, twisting your body so your own vanishes inside the darkness. I'm invisible, you shout, counting the three shadows left, then blowing me a stiff kiss. It's cooler here too.

Is it possible for this not to be a story of disappearance?

2. After Hours

Your voice from a phone booth on a sidewalk, in the rain, outside a diner with an unreadable sign. Your voice speaking in code, coming to me in bits and pieces, syllable by syllable. Your voice doubled, echoing, bouncing off a stained glass dome, traveling through a dark tunnel where a train is about to pass. The lilt in your voice betrays you as you pretend to sell me potato peelers and non-stick frying pans. Your voice from another time zone, competing with the waves of the sea. In a letter with no return address, your voice cracks jokes and says "my feet hurt" in another language. Your voice in the tired words on my computer screen, hidden somewhere in the identical towns of postcards. Your voice like a shadow on a road.

3. Landscape

When we were children, you didn't care for words, you only filled pages with vertical lines. Beyond the page, the bite marks at the tip of your pencil, bare knees, a scrawny cat sleeping at your feet. We lived in the city and I thought you drew lampposts, telephone lines, the long, rusty rods scattered in construction sites. Your voice insisting, no, no, these are trees.

4. No Rain

I walk one block and pass a series of testaments to failure--the skeleton of a building, a half-built bridge already breaking down. On the dusty metal fence hangs a sign that promises a highway.

You were in love, you wanted out of a city that screamed abandonment.

5. Another Routine

A new mayor, a new name for this road. The man selling sweet corn at the corner makes it a point to recite all the names to every customer in need of directions. I don't listen to him as I make my way to this place, known to me now only as the road where you last stood. I stare at its slender body, following the shape of a tree that has fallen down, beaten endlessly by the weight of buses and trucks.

6. Inside the dark

I fall into a puddle on my way to catch a bus, and unlike a dog, I can't sit around and lick my wounds, I have to walk away like nothing has happened. The face of Jesus looms on a billboard, but where is the comfort that can be bought? Let me watch the blind men by the terminal massage commuters for a fee, let me listen to karaoke music and stare at the stall selling cheap umbrellas, let me stand under the shadow of a lamppost as is my habit, though it is evening, the weather is cool, and you are gone. If I keep still enough inside this shadow, it is as if I am not here. If I keep still enough, there is no proof you are not here with me.
--Conchitina Cruz

"Dead Butterfly"
For months my daughter carried
a dead monarch in a quart mason jar.
To and from school in her backpack,
to her only friend's house. At the dinner table
it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast.
She took it to bed, propped by her pillow.

Was it the year her brother was born?
Was this her own too-fragile baby
that had lived--so briefly--in its glassed world?
Or the year she refused to go to her father's house?
Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there?

This plump child in her rolled-down socks
I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me
and carry safe again. What was her fierce
commitment? I never understood.
We just lived with the dead winged thing
as part of her, as part of us,
weightless in its heavy jar.
--Ellen Bass

"Try to Praise the Mutilated World"
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
-—Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh.

"Choices"
I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don't cut that one.
I don't cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

for Drago Štambuk
--Tess Gallagher

"Nearly a Valediction"
You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.

I don't want to remember you as that
four o'clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You've grown into your skin since then; you've grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.

While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days' routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She'll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn't know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive
you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until
the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled
through one cheek's nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.
You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.
--Marilyn Hacker

"How to Make Love to a Trans Person"
Forget the images you've learned to attach
To words like cock and clit,
Chest and breasts.
Break those words open
Like a paramedic cracking ribs
To pump blood through a failing heart.
Push your hands inside.
Get them messy.
Scratch new definitions on the bones.

Get rid of the old words altogether.
Make up new words.
Call it a click or a ditto.
Call it the sound he makes
When you brush your hand against it through his jeans,
When you can hear his heart knocking on the back of his teeth
And every cell in his body is breathing.
Make the arch of her back a language
Name the hollows of each of her vertebrae
When they catch pools of sweat
Like rainwater in a row of paper cups
Align your teeth with this alphabet of her spine
So every word is weighted with the salt of her.

When you peel layers of clothing from his skin
Do not act as though you are changing dressings on a trauma patient
Even though it's highly likely that you are.
Do not ask if she's "had the surgery."
Do not tell him that the needlepoint bruises on his thighs look like they hurt
If you are being offered a body
That has already been laid upon an altar of surgical steel
A sacrifice to whatever gods govern bodies
That come with some assembly required
Whatever you do,
Do not say that the carefully sculpted landscape
Bordered by rocky ridges of scar tissue
Looks almost natural.

If she offers you breastbone
Aching to carve soft fruit from its branches
Though there may be more tissue in the lining of her bra
Than the flesh that rises to meet it
Let her ripen in your hands.
Imagine if she'd lost those swells to cancer,
Diabetes,
A car accident instead of an accident of genetics
Would you think of her as less a woman then?
Then think of her as no less one now.

If he offers you a thumb-sized sprout of muscle
Reaching toward you when you kiss him
Like it wants to go deep enough inside you
To scratch his name on the bottom of your heart
Hold it as if it can-
In your hand, in your mouth
Inside the nest of your pelvic bones.
Though his skin may hardly do more than brush yours,
You will feel him deeper than you think.

Realize that bodies are only a fraction of who we are
They're just oddly-shaped vessels for hearts
And honestly, they can barely contain us
We strain at their seams with every breath we take
We are all pulse and sweat,
Tissue and nerve ending
We are programmed to grope and fumble until we get it right.
Bodies have been learning each other forever.
It's what bodies do.
They are grab bags of parts
And half the fun is figuring out
All the different ways we can fit them together;
All the different uses for hipbones and hands,
Tongues and teeth;
All the ways to car-crash our bodies beautiful.
But we could never forget how to use our hearts
Even if we tried.
That's the important part.
Don't worry about the bodies.
They've got this.
--Gabe Moses

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: "Rainy Day Man," by James Taylor

two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com

"The General paid no attention to the masterful reply, because he was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness.

" 'Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!'

"He examined the room with the clairvoyance of his last days, and for the first time he saw the truth: the final borrowed bed, the pitiful dressing table whose clouded, patient mirror would not reflect his image again, the chipped porcelain washbasin with the water and towel and soap meant for other hands, the heartless speed of the octagonal clock racing toward the ineluctable appointment at seven minutes past one on his final afternoon of December 17. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and began to listen to the radiant voices of the slaves singing the six o'clock Salve in the mills, and through the window he saw the diamond of Venus in the sky that was dying forever, the eternal snows, the new vine whose yellow bellflowers he would not see bloom on the following Saturday in the house closed in mourning, the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity, be repeated again."
--Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth

"Books"
You're standing on the high school steps,
the double doors swung closed behind you
for the last time, not the last time you'll ever

be damned or praised by your peers, spoken of
in whispers, but the last time you'll lock your locker,
zip up your gym bag, put on your out-of-style jacket,

your too-tight shoes. You're about to be
done with it: the gum, the gossip, the worship
of a boy in the back row, histories of wheat and war,

cheat sheets, tardies, the science of water,
negative numbers and compound fractions.
You don't know it yet but what you'll miss

is the books, heavy and fragrant and frayed,
the pages greasy, almost transparent, thinned
at the edges by hundreds of licked thumbs.

What you'll remember is the dumb joy
of stumbling across a passage so perfect
it drums in your head, drowns out

the teacher and the lunch bell's ring. You've stolen
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from the library.
Lingering on the steps, you dig into your bag

to touch its heat: stolen goods, willfully taken,
in full knowledge of right and wrong.
You call yourself a thief. There are worse things,

you think, fingering the cover, tracing
the embossed letters like someone blind.
This is all you need as you take your first step

toward the street, joining characters whose lives
might unfold at your touch. You follow them into
the blur of the world. Into whoever you're going to be.
--Dorianne Laux

"The Cool Web"
Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by,

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the roses' cruel scent,
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.
--Robert Graves

"My Father's Gun"
My mother never guessed I was her witness
the afternoon she emptied out his closet,
saw her unclasp the case, as if embossed

with gold, watched her touch it, heft it in hand,
then place it back, her wedding stone refracting.
Waking at night to find my door outlined

by light, I made a wish: to grow as tall
as my mother, to reach the shelf, to leave
behind a curl of smoke, a thin suggestion,

a jinn escaped from its underground bottle
like those collected after their late dinners,
spiraling out to slither through the crack

of their bedroom door, twisting up into
the refuge of my father's closet, shielded
by rows of reassuring shoes, clean soldiers

called to attention, shoe-trees snug inside.
Invisible in smoke, I'd take the gun
and hurl it out into the quiet lake,

that place where children play their games
safe as houses and, sinking, it would leave
a wake of rings within rings within rings.
--Elise Patchen

"Preludes"
I.

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II.

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III.

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV.

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
--T.S. Eliot

"Wait"
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
--Galway Kinnell

"People Like Us"
There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can't remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and
people
Who love God but can't remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It's
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he's lonely, and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul
And greatness has a defender, and even in death
you're safe.
--Robert Bly

"Prospective Immigrants Please Note"
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.
--Adrienne Rich

"My Papa's Waltz"
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
--Theodore Roethke

"Temporary Tattoo"
Beside the cash register in my favorite used bookstore
I see a glass bowl of what seem to be postage stamps
until I look closer: temporary tattoos of red and green,

with ornate black lettering Bruised Apple Books.
Take one, says Andrew, Take two, as if he directs a film
about the struggle of an independent bookseller

and his aging clientele, some of them tattooed
in the Summer of Love, some of them tattooed
by surgery, or time. I take one

although I know a temporary tattoo
is oxymoronic, maybe just plain moronic,
something else the world does not need,

as no one needs the leather-bound collected Thackeray
or the first-edition Joy of Sex, inscribed Love,
from Guess Who? A tattoo should be permanent,

a commitment, a cross-hatched cobra coiled
around the biceps, inks of deep blue and green
like the veins that pop from the carney's arm

when he makes a fist. A tattoo should not
smear, dissolve with baby-oil-on-tissue,
should be bold as a snake swallowing a mouse

and the mouse-shape traveling the length of it
like a bad idea shaping a life, distorting a life.
The apple is pink-red, like the tip of a cigarette,

its single leaf the green of the 1964 Chevy convertible
on cinder blocks behind the bookstore,
a car that will never run

despite the young man who works
under the hood every night until dark.
Someone should go to him and tell him

the sum is not always greater than its parts.
Sometimes the parts are what is valuable,
what can be parlayed into a life.

Tell him sell the tires, sell the wheels.
Tell him there is not enough light in all of his days
to spend evenings with his back to the stars,

staining his hands with grease and oil.
Someone should give him the tattoo
of the bruised apple, which will last

a week, at best. Tell him the Chevy's time
has come and gone, that nothing lasts forever
except our desire for things to last forever.

But he is too young to know this,
and nothing can convince him this is true.
Nothing written in any of these books

can show him what his strong hands
seem to show as they fold the oily rag
and drop the hood on another day

and in the gravel lot behind the bookstore
the last of the sun shines
pink, and everywhere, and always.
--Suzanne Cleary

"6:59"
I've been told
that people in the army
do more by 7:00 am
than I do
in an entire day

but if I wake
at 6:59 am
and turn to you
to trace the outline of your lips
with mine
I will have done enough
and killed no one
in the process.
--Shane Koyczan

Current Mood: weird
Current Music: "I-95 (Asshole Song)," by Jimmy Buffett