are you dreaming, Frederick?

"Still Life at Dusk"
It happens surprisingly fast,
the way your shadow leaves you.
All day you've been linked by
the light, but now that darkness
gathers the world in a great black tide,
your shadow leaves you to join
the sea of all other shadows.
If you stand here long enough,
you, too, will forget your lines
and merge with the tall grass and
old trees, with the crows and the
flooding river—all these pieces
of the world that daylight has broken
into objects of singular loneliness.
It happens surprisingly fast, the loss
of your shadow, and standing
in the field, you become the field,
and standing in the night, you
are gathered by night. Invisible
birds sing to the memory of light
but then even those separate songs fade
into the one big silence that always
seems to be waiting.
--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer


"The Sonnets to Orpheus XIII"
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive.

Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Be--and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.
--Rainer Maria Rilke


"Ha"
A man walks into a bar. You think that's some kind of joke?
Actually he runs in, to get out of the freezing weather.
Who cares, you say. Nobody you know.
You've got your own troubles, could use a drink yourself.
You get your coat, a long scarf. You trudge
to the corner over the scraped sidewalk, slip and fall down hard
on the ice. Actually a banana peel, but who's looking?
Only a priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer you vaguely recognize--
didn't she help with the divorce? Never mind, the marriage
is over, good riddance. You're thinking now
you'd better have a double. You get up, holding your hip,
and limp towards the neon martini glass.
Anyway a man goes into a bar, just like you do.
He's tired of life, tired of being alone. No one
takes him seriously; at work he's the butt of jokes,
the foreman calls him Moron all day long. It's true
he's not too bright. He wants to kill himself,
but doesn't know how to. He orders drink after drink,
cursing the angel who passed out brains.
You take the stool next to him. In half an hour
you're pals--two losers getting shitfaced.
You start to tell each other riddles. What's big and red
and eats rocks; what do you get when you cross a penis
with a potato? Why is there something rather than nothing?
If God is good, how is it that the weed of evil
takes root everywhere, and what is there to keep us
from murdering each other in despair? Why is pleasure always
a prelude to pain? The bartender takes your glasses, tells you
it's time to get out. You stumble through the door,
and there you are in the cold and the wind and a little snow
that's started to fall. Two losers stand on a corner.
One turns to the other and says, Why did our love end?
The other can't answer. Why do they torment me? he says.
The snowstorm begins in earnest but still they stand there,
determined to stay put until they finally get it.
--Kim Addonizio


"Publication Date"
One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one's book in the hands of a kindhearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can't remember what the others
are right now.
I just noticed that it is my own private

National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever). The forecast calls
for a cold night in Boston all morning

and all afternoon. They say
tomorrow will be just like today,
only different. I'm in the cemetery now
at the edge of town, how did I get here?

A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying
I am Federico García Lorca
risen from the dead--
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.
--Franz Wright


"Prism"
My friend Derrick says love is the only war worth dying for. But every time I say, "please come back," I feel like I'm trying to find a dirty needle in a haystack, and God knows I can't go out like that. I suppose we wear our traumas the way the guillotine wears gravity. Our lovers' necks are so soft. I lost my head so many times. I got sober just hoping my eyes would dry. Still, I drink so much in my sleep, I can't sleepwalk a straight line to the guest room or collapse, hang so heavy inside her lungs.

She speaks and her voice trips across her heartbeat, each word limps into the air. We are gone, she says. And I am no mortician; I have no idea how to put make-up on the dead. I have no idea how to unerase, so I just puddle at the door, my face looking like a deck of falling cards, like everything's been playing me. We tried so hard. But when I said "give me a ring", she thought I meant a call. Now I haven't had her number for two years. We've been saying how many times are we going to keep cutting these red flags into valentines. You know, all those wars we fought have turned our shine into rust, we can't even touch each other's hearts without a tetanus shot.

We can't begin to remember how we forgot there is no shelter in the womb. The heart forms long before the ribcage. My mother swore she could feel me kicking weeks before my feet formed. That's how hard my heart beat -- and it still does. They say the womb is where we learn love is knowing the cord that feeds you could at any moment wrap around your neck. I hold my breath for the entire 56 seconds it takes her to walk to the window to stare at the road to tell me she has nothing left to tell me, we are done, carrying our level heads in our tornado chests.

For the first time, I know she is right. As the dawn, after our first date, we were so young, and I hadn't written an honest love poem yet. I hadn't met anyone I could fall so hard for 'til the night we kissed on our skateboards, she teased me for going so slow. I said I never want to catch up with the letting go. I want the plead in my throat to forever anger my spine and the seams of your slippers, love, even when the dove crashed through the window, even when our friends said, you can call it love, but you know Einstein called himself a pacifist when he built the bomb.

When they ask why we stayed together for so long I say, I don’t know. I just know that we cried at the exact same time in every movie. I know we blushed everyday for the first two years. I know I always stole the covers and she never woke me up.

I know the exact look on her face, the first night she used my toothbrush. The next day, I brushed my teeth like thirtysome times, 'cause I didn't want to let her go. You have to understand when it hurt to love her, it hurt the way the light hurts your eyes in the middle of the night, but I had to see, even through the ruin, if what we were burying were seeds. There were so many plants in our house, you could rake the leaves even through that winter when I was trying to make angels in the snow of her cold shoulder. She was still leaving love notes in my suitcase; I'd always find them.

The day before I left, I remembered a story her mother told me. She said, Andrea, when Heather was a little girl, she couldn't fall asleep without tying a string to her finger all night long, she'd give that string the tiniest tug to make sure I was still there. And I'd tug back. That was love. That was love. As easy as that. Sometimes. Sometimes.
--Andrea Gibson


"This House Is Running Away"
Wriggling, it pulls. The tip of the tail
comes off in my hand. See, there,
pressing itself into the bracken.

Part the leaves; watch it twitch, tiles quivering.
See, it's holding its smoke; its foundations
grope for soil. Pick it up. Upside-down
its rooms are soft and pink: stroke them.

There's a picture of a field, and look, people.
It must be female, a home: one blinking, holding
a newspaper, one shivering beneath the stairs.
--Sian Thomas


"Homage to the Mineral of the Onion (I)"
In the onion, there's
something of fire. That fire known as
Fog. The onion is the way
fog has of entering the earth.

Into the soil. Through the green leaves of the onion.

Look how its leaves extend up into the air.
Look how, once cut,
an onion's leaf has air inside it.

Air is the generosity of fog.
With fog, there is generosity on earth.
These two thoughts are identical.

They are two thoughts that sustain the earth.
In these bellicose days that promise wars,
look how the onion helps fog
to sustain the earth.
--Erin Moure


" 'I was fired for pessimism. Communism had nothing to do with it.'

" 'I got him fired,' said his wife. 'The only piece of real evidence produced against him was a letter I wrote to the New York Times from Pakistan.'

" 'What did it say?'

" 'It said lots of things,' she said, 'because I was very upset about how Americans couldn't imagine what it was like to be something else, to be something else and proud of it.'

" 'I see.'

" 'But there was one sentence they kept coming back to again and again in the loyalty hearing,' sighed Minton. 'Americans,' he said, quoting his wife's letter to the Times, 'are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.'

"...'What was so awful about the letter?' I asked.

" 'The highest possible form of treason,' said Minton, 'is to say that Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love.'

" 'I guess Americans are hated a lot of places.'

" 'People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. But the loyalty board didn't pay any attention to that. All they knew was that Claire and I both felt that Americans were unloved.' "
--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle


" 'My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child.

" 'I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays.

" 'But they are murdered children just the same.

" 'And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.

" 'Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.

" 'I do not mean to be ungrateful for the fine, martial show we are about to see--and a thrilling show it really will be...'

"He looked each of us in the eye, and then he commented very softly, throwing it away, 'And hooray say I for thrilling shows.' "
--Kurt Vonnegut


"Teaching the Holocaust"
They wanted to know,
so I came,
took them by the hand
and led them down
to the shore.

"There is no gear
here to wear," I said.
"Here we walk out
together
til the water is
to our necks,
then we
take deep breaths
and go under.
We keep our eyes open
though what we see
will sting them.
In this abyss of red
we will tread hard
with arms and legs
strong from youth.
We will listen
for the earth's
groaning as we swim,
and feel the waves of
her weariness
as our own lungs
are crushed in the
chambers of history."
--Lois Olena