are you dreaming, Frederick?

"These Poems, She Said"
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket's
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said....
You are, he said,
beautiful.
That is not love, she said rightly.
--Robert Bringhurst


"Pain has an element of blank"
Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there was
A time when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
--Emily Dickinson


"The Mud-Spattered Recollections of a Woman Who Lived Her Life Backwards"
I'll tell you a tale: one morning one morning I lay
in my uncomfortable six-foot small grave,
I lay sulking about a somewhat too short-lit
life both fruitful and dutiful.

It was death it was death like an inbreath fully inhaled
in the grief of the world when at last
there began to emerge a way out, alas
the in-snowing silence made any description difficult.

No eyes no matches and yet mathematically speaking
I could still reach at a stretch a waspish whiteish
last seen outline any way up, which could well be my own
were it only a matter of re-folding.

So I creased I uncreased and the next thing I knew
I was pulled from the ground at the appointed hour
and rushed to the nearest morgue to set out yet again
from the bed to the floor to the door to the air.

And there was the car still there in its last known place
under the rain where I'd left it, my husband etc.
even myself, in retrospect I was still there
still driving back with the past all spread out already in front of me.

What a refreshing whiff with the windows open!
there were the dead leaves twitching and tacking back
to their roosts in the trees and all it required
was a certain minimum level of inattention.

I tell you, for many years from doorway to doorway
and in through a series of rooms I barely noticed
I was humming the same tune twice, I was seeing the same
three children racing towards me getting smaller and smaller.

This tale's like a rose, once opened it
cannot reclose, it continues: one morning
one terrible morning for maybe the hundredth time
they came to insert my third child back inside me.

It was death it was death: from head to foot
I heard myself crack with the effort, I leaned and cried
and a feeling fell on me with a dull clang
that I'd never see my darling daughter again.

Then both my sons, slowly at first
then faster and faster, their limbs retracted inwards
smaller and smaller till all that remained
was a little mound where I didn't quite meet in the middle.

Well either I was or was not either living or dead
in a windowless cubicle of the past, a mere
8.3 light minutes from the present moment when at last
my husband walked oh dear he walked me to church.

All in one brief winter's day, both
braced for confusion with much shy joy,
reversed our vows, unringed our hands
and slid them back in our pockets God knows why.

What then what then I'll tell you what then: one evening
there I stood in the matchbox world of childhood
and saw the stars fall straight through Jimmy's binoculars,
they looked so weird skewered to a fleeting instant.

Then again and again for maybe the hundredth time
they came to insert me feet first back into nothing
complete with all my missing hopes—next morning
there was that same old humming thrum still there.

That same old humming thrumming sound that is either
my tape re-winding again or maybe it's stars
passing through stars coming back to their last known places,
for as far as I know in the end both sounds are the same.
--Alice Oswald


( possible triggers for domestic abuse (i'm not certain that's what this poem is actually about but didn't want to take any chances) )


"First Lesson"
Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.
--Philip Booth


"Hold"
I have a sorrowing the size of a lump of coal.
One day I will tender it. I mean tinder it.
I mean light it up in my hands, holding on
even as it burns me. My palms will blister,
water, bleed, heal, scar over. I will take another
lump and light it again. Eventually, palms
will be foot soles that have journeyed across
the backs of river rocks. For now, let me learn
to hold on to something. I mean sorrowing.
My sorrowings. Your sorrowings.
--Ivy Alvarez


"Fairy Tale Logic"
Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it's impossible what someone asks--

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.
--A.E. Stallings


"Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf"
At various times I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.
Used up by the years my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.
Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul
has some secret sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast encompassing
circle can take in all, accomplish all.
Beyond my anxiety and beyond this writing
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.
--Jorge Luis Borges, translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid


"The Student"
She never spoke, which made her obvious,
the way death makes the air obvious
in an empty chair, the way sky compressed

between bare branches is more gray or blue,
the way a window is more apparent than a wall.
She held her silences that came and went,
that other students stood up and filled in.

I leaned near the window in my office. She sat
on the edge of a chair. Hips rigid, fidgeting
while I made my little speech. February

light pressed its cold back against the glass,
sealing us in. She focused on my lips
as I spoke, as if to study how it's done,
the sheer mechanics of it: orchestration
of jaw and tongue, teeth shifting in tandem,
shaping the air. So I stopped, let her silence

drift over us, let it sift in like smoke or snow,
let its petals settle on my shoulders.
I looked outside to the branches

of a stripped tree, winter starlings
folded in their speckled wings, chilled flames
shuddering at the tips. Students wandered
across campus as if under water, hands and hair
unfurling, their soundless mouths churning--
irate or ecstatic, I couldn't tell--ready to burn

it all down or break into song. When I looked back
her eyes had found the window: tree, students,
birds swimming by, mute in their element.

It was painful to hear the papery rasp
of her folding and unfolding hands, to watch
color smudging her neck and temple, branching
to mist the delicate rim of one ear. I listened
to the air sunder between us, the feverish hush
collapse. I could hear her breath--smoke

rising from ice. I could see what it cost her
to make that leap. What heat it takes
for the body to blossom into speech.
--Dorianne Laux